Catherin Ruetschlin: Americans Can Enjoy Low Prices Without Suffering Slave Wages

It's the biggest shopping season on the calendar, and retail companies are expecting hundreds of billions of dollars in sales. To meet this demand, retail pulls in around 600,000 seasonal workers on top of a workforce of 15 million. This massive work force is majority female and fairly diverse, people of color comprise about 30 percent of workers in the sector. It is also low paid. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical cashier makes just $18,500 per year for full time work. The nation's largest employer and largest employer of African Americans, Walmart, is engaged in a struggle to keep it that way. Right as we turn to these workers to provide assistance and advice during the holiday season, many retail employees are striking for basic respect, and they deserve it. A new paper by Demos shows that retail employers can afford to pay decent wages, and the benefits would feed back into the economy as higher GDP, more jobs, less poverty, and even higher retail sales. Women and people of color are disproportionately represented in the low wage, year round retail workforce, where almost 40 percent of workers are people of color, and 63 percent are female. These were also the populations hardest hit by the recession, with unemployment rates still topping 14 percent among African Americans, and at 10 percent for Latinos. Since retail is projected to have some of the greatest employment growth in the country over the coming decade, the quality of retail employment matters to the economy's traditionally vulnerable workers who may be compelled to take any job available, and have little recourse to bargain for fair treatment once that employment is secured. There is also plenty of reason for this to be cause for concern, beyond those households who depend on a retail paycheck. The fact is, low wages in the retail sector are not only holding back workers and their families. The study shows that a wage raise at large retail employers to the equivalent of $25,000 per year for a full time worker would lift 1.5 million workers and the family members they support out of poverty or near poverty.