Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 13, 1993 TAG: 9310130172
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The jobs they offer, mostly at $5 to $9 an hour, would have been unappealing in another era. But in these hard times, the low hourly pay - sweetened with health insurance and profit sharing - is turning out to be one of the best deals that corporate America is offering to the mass of Americans looking for "good" jobs.
Leading this process is Wal-Mart, the nation's second-biggest private employer after General Motors. In the 30 months since the recession ended, no other company has added as many jobs to the national work force as has Wal-Mart: 153,000 of them, a significant contribution to the net increase of 1.9 million jobs created in the United States during the recovery.
The other 165 or so discount retail chains together accounted for an additional 186,000 jobs, according to Chain Store Guide, a trade publication.
As the discounters expand, opening hundreds of barnlike stores to meet the demand for low-priced merchandise from Americans pinched by stagnant incomes, many other industries shrink and lay off workers - including higher-priced retailers hurt in the competition with Wal-Mart and the others.
That gives the discounters a huge pool of idle people to choose from. The stores report that five to 10 people, many of them experienced, compete for each job.
The proliferation of discount store employees is a far cry from the Clinton administration's vision of highly paid technicians proliferating in high-tech industries.
But Robert Hall, a Stanford University economist, hails the expansion of the discounters as "a tremendously important development, because it is providing jobs to the high-school educated who in the past worked in factories and trades."
Visits to various Wal-Mart stores turned up workers who fit Hall's description, and then some. There is Richard Moyer, who once studied architecture and now manages the gardening department at a Wal-Mart in Fayetteville, Ark.
And there is Carolyn Dagit, who once ran a convenience store and is now a customer service manager at the store in Bentonville, Ark., where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. She switched for Wal-Mart's better benefits package.
While Labor Secretary Robert Reich is the administration's point man in the campaign for more high-tech, high-wage industries, he nevertheless blesses the discount store employment trend. "The best retail sales jobs are not like the old sales jobs at all," he said, "and we should not be prejudiced against retail jobs because of old pictures in our heads of workers doing drone work. The proper distinction is not between manufacturing and retail, but between jobs that demand skills and expertise and those that don't."
The discounters are not the only vigorous job creators. Some other industries, among them restaurants, health care and temporary employment, have generated even more jobs than the discounters. These jobs also are low-paying, but most lack the standard benefits package that has emerged among the discounters.
The discounters, in effect, are becoming the "factories" of the '90s, from an employment viewpoint. They are providing a new version of the full-time jobs with benefits that millions of blue-collar workers found in manufacturing - although this emerging "safe harbor" offers just a shadow of the wages, benefits and security that were common in manufacturing.
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