How America's biggest company began taking better care of its
workers--and why such efforts will never be enough.Fifteen years
ago, Walmart was the most controversial company in America. By
offering incredibly low prices, it had come to dominate the retail
landscape. But with this dominance came a suite of ethical
concerns. Walmart was accused of wiping out of mom-and-pop
businesses across the country; ruthlessly pressuring suppliers to
cut costs, even if it meant closing up U.S. factories and moving
production overseas; and, above all, not taking adequate care of
its own employees, who were paid so little that many wound up on
public assistance. Today, while Walmart remains America's largest
employer, the picture is very different. It has become an
environmental leader among businesses, and has taken many other
steps to use its immense scale to have a positive social impact.
Most notably, its starting wage has risen from $7.25 to $12, and
employee benefits have improved. With internal and external threats
to its business looming, the company began to change directions in
2005-a transformation that accelerated in 2014, with the arrival of
CEO Doug McMillon. By undertaking such large-scale change without a
legal mandate to do so, Walmart has joined a number of major
corporations that say they are dedicated to practicing a new,
socially conscious form of capitalism.In Still Broke, award-winning
author Rick Wartzman goes inside the company's transformation,
showing in novelistic detail how the company has gotten to where it
is. Yet he also asks a critical question: is it enough? With a
still-simmering public debate around the minimum wage and
widespread movements by workers demanding better treatment, how far
will $12 an hour go in today's economy? Or even $15? Or Walmart's
average wage, which now hovers above $16-but, even so, doesn't
pencil out to so much as $35,000 a year for a fulltime worker? In
the richest nation on earth, how did the bar get set so low? How
did America find itself relying on an army of low-wage workers
without ever acknowledging their most basic needs? And if Walmart's
brand of change is the best we have, how can we ever expect to
build a healthy society?With unparalleled access to the key
executives and change-makers at Walmart, Still Broke does more than
document a remarkable business makeover. It interrogates the role
of business in American life, and asks what the future of our
economy and country can be-and whose job it is to make it.
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