Slate’s fondness for providing a soapbox for the puckishly contrarian viewpoint (College football pundits overstate the importance of “team speed") can sometimes be valuable.
But just as often, Slate’s contrarians succeed in underscoring that the conventional wisdom is on the money. (Rush Was Right! and Mickey Kaus’ daily liberal-who-hates-all-things-liberal schtick.)
And sometimes, in their rush to go against the grain, Slate’s contrarians wind up dashing off feebly reasoned arguments that also manage to badly mangle the facts.
Like here, where Daniel Gross, Slate’s economics columnist, complains that Wal-Mart is getting a bad rap in the public.
Noticing that even some voices in the business press are criticizing the mammoth retailer for, among other things, driving down wages and weakening America’s health care system, Gross decides that it’s about time somebody sticks up for Wal-Mart.
Shrugging off Wal-Mart’s refusal to offer affordable health benefits to its employees, Gross snickers at the idea that mere cashiers and grocery workers would ever expect decent benefits in the first place. “Bagging groceries and working a checkout line has never been a ticket to a middle-class career complete with comprehensive benefits,” he huffs.
In fact, for the past several decades, many thousands of grocery workers in America have been able to live fairly decent lives, with decent pay, adequate health benefits and modest pensions. Working together in a union, grocery workers in most major metropolitan areas outside of the Southeast have fought to establish some basic standards for wages, health care, and retirement security.
Indeed, grocery workers in Southern California are on the verge of a major strike where the key issue is the future of the very health benefits Gross dismisses as a fantasy.
The reason the grocery employers say they need concessions? Wal-Mart. Other groceries are competing to lower the bar to match the awful benefits Wal-Mart (now the nation’s third largest grocer) offers its workers.
The California grocery workers’ fight is a clear example of how Wal-Mart’s abysmal commitment to providing health care drives down standards for everyone.
But Gross insists that it’s unfair to blame Wal-Mart for helping quicken the collapse of the health care system.
Gross’ culprit? Market forces. This is just the way it is. Get used to it.
Meanwhile, five members of the Walton family now hold spots among the ten richest people in the country. Combined, they are worth a staggering $102.5 billion.
Gross would presumably tell us that the Waltons can’t be held accountable for short-changing their workers, because they’re merely reacting to what the market tells them is right.
Americans hear this so much that it now sounds logical to us. It’s not. In reality, it’s the same kind of reasoning I tried to use when I was a kid when I broke something my dad told me not to touch. I didn’t break anything, I would explain, “It just broke.” I should’ve tried a better message: “Other forces were at work.”
But what’s most repellent in the piece is Gross’ breezy contempt for the people who wait on him, make his copies, and scan his groceries. Gross probably thinks his disdain is really a tough-hearted sympathy, but his disinterest in what kind of future people who work these jobs will have adds up to something much different.
