Tom Emerton

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I set the schedules at Walmart.

66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it.

People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay.

I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me.

Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of.

Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall.

Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers.

The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line.

We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares.

We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have.

The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short.

I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door.

You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store.

There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying.

The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour.

Monday through Sunday, we pay our half.

The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program.

It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.

[Tom Emerton @Emerton5Tom]

@QuartziteRMLLC Oh, sorry. I thought you were from Fort Collins.

[Platte Institute @PlatteInstitute]

If NE wants to attract and keep young families, child care matters.

A new study ranks NE #1 for the highest child care cost burden on married-couple families. Our latest blog explores what that means for workforce growth and outmigration.

Read more: https://t.co/Td2NxKdOcN

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

For years, banning congressional stock trading was a rare thing most Americans actually agreed on. We were one vote away from getting it done.

So naturally, Trump and Mike Johnson are setting it on fire.

This week they’re rushing a fake “ban” to the floor. One that lets members keep every stock they already own, keep cashing the dividends, and sell whenever they feel like it with a little heads-up. Oh, and you can still trade on inside info. Just launder it through bonds, crypto, or commodities first.

It doesn’t touch the President, the Vice President, or their families. The exact people with the most market-moving power on Earth.

They carved out a loophole big enough to land a free Qatari jet in.

But gutting the bill wasn’t insulting enough. They’re attaching the SAVE Act, their favorite voter-suppression pet project.

Specifically so no Democrat can possibly vote yes. Poisoning their own bill on purpose, then pointing at us like we’re the problem.

This wasn’t a mistake. They took a real, bipartisan, wildly popular reform and swapped it for a fake ban bolted onto a voter-suppression bill, and they’re betting you won’t read the fine print.

Pass a real ban. All the trades. No exceptions for the powerful, starting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

https://t.co/FZ2QuTAD5o

[Bill Johnson @Bill43111]

Trump stopped 8 wars and 1 soccer team.

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

It’s as if Belgium had motivation to humiliate the U.S. tonight

[God @TheTweetOfGod]

Everything, everything, EVERYTHING he touches dies. #USABEL #USMNT

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

So now millions of football fans around the world view the US as cheaters who used political corruption to influence FIFA and we lose anyway. So much winning. When’s the next war?

[(((DeanObeidallah))) @DeanObeidallah]

US men's World Cup team won every game until Donald Trump got involved!! Just like when Trump went to the NY Knicks playoff Game and they lost!

[Tom Emerton @Emerton5Tom]

@Pharmdca It's not over yet. Trump is calling FIFA. The score may be reversed.

[Suiting Up Varsity🟧 @SuitUpVarsity]

☎️ 📞 FROM THE REQUEST LINE 📞 ☎️

Hildreth and Loup County in front of a packed state tournament crowd, 1990. (GI Indy photo)

[Trump is a PEDO ⚖️ @TrumpPedophile2]

@atrupar

[Jean-Claude Damn Van™ (commentary) @ChaosAgent_42]

BREAKING:

New footage emerged of VANDALS driving their SUVs on the newly finished pond sealant, effectively ruining it!

[Anarc-y princess @SatireAP]

Send this guy back to Nebraska

[Euan MacDonald @Euan_MacDonald]

https://t.co/4gdCArko4X

[CBS News @CBSNews]

Paint was seen peeling from the floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, weeks after a $14 million renovation that included a new color President Trump called “American Flag Blue.”

[Brett Wright @WxMstrr]

Lorenzo, NE a few days ago definitely did not suck. June 7th, 2 years in a row has pumped out epic colors and structure. #newx

[Tom Emerton @Emerton5Tom]

@FootballVault1 @eliash10 Took one inning for me to block you, moron!

[Tom Emerton @Emerton5Tom]

@RealNaughtius @RaymondMarks85 @iowademocrats Where were him?