The shift to part-time workers means that focusing exclusively on hourly pay can be misleading. Walmart, for example, paid frontline hourly employees an average of $17.50 as of last month and recently announced plans to raise that to more than $18 an hour. Given that just a few years ago, progressives were animated by the Fight for $15 movement, these numbers can seem encouraging. The Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen wrote on social media last year that “Walmart’s probably a better employer at this point than most child care providers and a lot of the jobs in higher ed.”

The problem is that most Walmart employees don’t make $36,400, the annualized equivalent of $17.50 an hour at 40 hours a week. Last year, the median Walmart worker made 25 percent less than that, $27,326 — equivalent to an average of 30 hours a week. And that’s the median; many Walmart workers worked less than that.

Likewise, at Target, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $25,993. The median employee of TJX (owner of such stores as TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods) makes $13,884 a year; the median Kohl’s employee makes $12,819.

Those numbers, though low, are nevertheless higher than median pay at Starbucks, a company known for its generous benefits. To be eligible for those benefits, however, an employee must work at least 20 hours a week. At $15 an hour — the rate Starbucks said it was raising barista pay to in 2022 — 20 hours a week would amount to $15,600 a year. But in 2022 the median Starbucks worker made $12,254 a year, which is lower than the federal poverty level for a single person.

It’s Not Just Wages. Retailers Are Mistreating Workers in a More Insidious Way.
By Adelle Waldman

Today’s political moment feels very similar to the early phases of the Yellow Vest movement in 2018, when a proposed hike in the fuel tax unleashed weeks of demonstrations. Then, too, there was simmering anger from households struggling to make ends meet, widespread support for disruptive protest and a stunning aloofness from the people in charge. As in the early days of that conflict, Mr. Macron went weeks without publicly addressing the pension battle at length, forcing his prime minister to take the heat instead. His first major address on the topic since protests began was panned by critics as tone-deaf and condescending.

“There’s a form of disconnect,” Laurent Berger, the general secretary of the country’s largest labor confederation, the C.F.D.T., which prides itself on its ability to negotiate and compromise, told me. “There needs to be an end to this verticality where only a precious few are right and everybody else is wrong.” That obstinacy has pushed France into a political crisis — one that raises questions over the very architecture of the Fifth Republic and the extensive power it hands the head of state. How is it possible for a president without a parliamentary majority to ram through such an unpopular policy?

France Is Furious
Cole Stangler
Mr. Stangler is a journalist based in France who writes about the country’s politics and culture.

Also following the news at Reddit r/france

Réforme des retraites – les slogans des manifs – Difficile de faire un choix… Au début, ça me faisait sourire. Au final, j’ai juste le seum.
by u/artsnumeriques in france