Imagine if every single person in the city of Houston, Texas had to endure a cruddy job with low pay, inadequate benefits and no voice at work.
Now hold that thought in your mind as you consider that this week Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott announced that two million people now work for the company worldwide. That's within striking distance of the most recent (2006) Census Bureau population estimate for the city of Houston -- the fourth largest city in the U.S. (after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago).
When you add in the populations of its suburbs, Houston bumps up past the population of Wal-Martville. But the company is still larger than many American cities, even when you include suburban residents. Two million Wal-Mart workers, for example, is comparable to the populations of metropolitan Portland, Washington; Cincinnati, Ohio; Sacramento, California, and San Antonio, Texas.
And then there are all the cities whose populations (including suburbs) are actually less than Wal-Martville's:
- Las Vegas, NV: has 92% of the population of WalMartville
- Columbus, OH: 88%
- Indianapolis, IN: 85%
- Austin, TX: 80%
- Milwaukee, WI: 77%
- Louisville, KY: 62%
- Buffalo, NY: 56%
- Birmingham, AL: 55%
- New Orleans, LA: 52%
- New Haven, CT: 42%
- Omaha, NE: 41%
- Little Rock, AR: 33%
- Charleston, SC: 32%
- Spokane, WA: 23%
- Mobile, AL: 20%
- Tallahassee, FL: 18%
- Boulder, CO: 15%
- Topeka, KS: 11%
Or, if you prefer, look at it this way: there are actually fifteen states whose entire populations are smaller than WalMartville's: Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, and New Mexico. (Oh, and Washington, D.C. as well, even though it's not a state.)
Just something to keep in mind when you think about the future of the American Dream -- 1.3 million of those 2 million Wal-Mart workers live in the U.S. When the American Dream is inaccessible to those who work for America's largest employer, it's no wonder that people say it's slipping out of reach.
