I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

You can probably work in some kind of FTE exemption.

It would need careful writing, otherwise it might introduce more precarity by encouraging employers not to offer full time contracts.

I didn't know that Walmart store managers were that well paid. And to be certain, they pay a lot more than 7.25/hr to their lowest paid employees!

> Walmart has 2,867,125,000 shares outstanding * $1.96 per quarter * 4 = $22,478,260,000 per year spent on dividends alone.

Their quarterly dividend is ~$0.53/share:

https://stock.walmart.com/investors/stock-information/divide...

Moreover, let's suppose you take that entire amount and give it to the employees. Then the company has zero ROI and the stock value drops to the level that it's profitable for corporate raiders to buy the company to liquidate its real estate holdings etc., and everyone loses their jobs.

Shareholders get paid because they invested money. You can't avoid paying them market rates unless you can operate without capital. Somebody has to pay for the land the store sits on and the trucks that deliver the goods. They have to get a return if you want to get an investment.

> I haven't even looked at executive salaries or the costs from lawsuits Walmart gets from it's shady tactics.

The numbers for top level executives will be even less valuable than for store managers, because they get paid hundreds of times more money but have ten thousand times more employees under them.

> If Walmart can't pay that then maybe they deserve to fail and Costco, which does pay well and comply with the law, can take their place.

Costco can't replace Walmart because Walmart customers can't afford membership fees and bulk purchases, or they would already buy at Costco. The thing that replaces Walmart is dollar stores. That is not an improvement for anybody.

> Compared to Microsoft or Apple, which can easily afford to pay the contract labor they use in place of union janitors, technicians, drivers, etc. Despite their margins they still use it and those people live in poverty because of it.

Those people live in poverty because the cost of necessities is high compared to the value of unskilled labor. If janitors at other companies make $8/hour, Microsoft isn't going to pay more just because they have more money.

To improve the lives of those people, what you need is either more demand for labor or more supply (i.e. lower prices) for necessities.

> Microsoft, Apple, Wall Street banks, even McDonalds is a better example.

None of these companies are good examples because they're all titans. The large majority of people work for small and medium businesses with low margins. Setting policy based on Apple and McDonalds is exactly how you get policies that only work for Apple and McDonalds. You destroy the small businesses that actually employ people and drive the demand for labor while you increase corporate profits and consumer prices from the lack of competition.

Forget about punishing Walmart and McDonalds. Figure out how to make it easier for the family owned corner store to better compete with them. Figure out how to reduce housing and education costs.

Indeed it might. No matter how careful the writing.

The poor are eligible for Pell Grants, which covers 60% of the tuition of the average public college, and historically covered even more. Nonetheless, college completion rates for the bottom quantile are 1/4 that of the top quintile. There are many other barriers to college attendance for the poor. There is a large opportunity cost—if you are attending college, you can’t work to support your family. To the contrary, your family still has to support you. The social fabric in poor neighborhoods often are frayed, with gangs and drugs and crime distracting kids from school. As a result, children from poor areas often aren’t motivated to apply to college, wouldn’t be accepted even if they applied nor would they be prepared for college coursework if they were admitted. The end result is that most people benefitting from free college would be middle class people who don’t have those other barriers.

If you look at countries that have free college, most have college completion rates similar to or lower than the US: https://www.in.gov/che/files/DMatthews.pdf. The vast majority of the EU population lives in the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. All of those countries have lower college completion rates among people 25-34 than the US, even with tuition being cheap or free in those other countries. While tuition is not a barrier to college attendance in say Germany, college is still primarily something for the middle and upper middle class.

Programs that theoretically offer “equal opportunity to all,” but where the middle class gain the lion’s share of benefits, is not an efficient way to better the lives of the poor.

(The same thing with Medicare for All versus the ACA. In Europe, the middle class pay for their own health care, and also subsidize the poor. In Germany, public health insurance premiums are 15% of income, with folks making above $70,000 being exempt from the public system. The ACA is similar—premiums are capped at 0-10% of income for folks making less than $50,000. That’s even more generous than the German system for folks making low incomes. The folks who feel the pinch are middle class people, for whom a 10% premium is a lot when they’re used to having a much lower tax burden than what they would have in Germany. Consequently, replacing ACA with Medicare for All would primarily benefit middle class people, especially if funded through a progressive tax.)

The plight of the poor (who are worse off in the US than the poor in the big EU countries), is unfortunately being used as a fig leaf. The American middle class (who are better off than the middle class in the big EU countries) wants the safety and security of a European style welfare system, but doesn’t want to pay a 40% tax as they would in Europe, a 20% VAT, etc. Even though you could dramatically improve the lives of the bottom 50% through targeted programs, progress on that front gets held hostage to a broader push to have the rich pay for middle class welfare.