I had a fun conversation with my friend Barb over spring break concerning the labor abuses that Walmart is guilty of. It’s hard to dispute that Walmart has been caught in some abusive labor practices. Refusing to give employees more than 38 hours of work per week (to avoid paying full-time benefits), paying female employees less than the average, and abusing child labor are all hings that Walmart has been accused of. That’s bad.

 But that got me thinking. Would these people be better off if they didn’t have a job with Walmart at all? I’m not sure. Dr. McDaniel was talking about RFID today in class (CSE 497c, Computer Security). Mostly, he was talking about the security implications of using RFID pervasively in society, in applications such as RFID passports and RFID inventory access. But the primary reason to use RFID in a setting such as Walmart is to decrease labor cost by using RFID scanners instead of humans scanning barcodes. RFID will be an extremely inexpensive way to drastically decrease the amount of employees needed to run the store. Walmart could decrease their costs, increase employee wage, and decrease the number of headcount. So there will be less labor abuses, but there will be less employees needed in general.

 Is this a good thing or not? I’m still not sure. From an economic perspective, we’ve increased economic efficiency by reducing costs. Are people better off? The lower class certainly isn’t, since we’ve replaced low-paying, unskilled work with a technology replacement. In theory, however, if this method can increase GDP, we can compensate the lowest paid workers and still be better off in the long run. Will this happen in practice? I don’t know.