This was written by Jack Gordon, a local free lance writer and was published in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune. I had to cut a lot out, it's well worth the read.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/4276361.html<snip>
A flea of insight into the executive condition hopped off the unlikely dog of a November Fortune magazine article titled "Costco:
The Only Company Wal-Mart Fears." In what amounted to a throwaway line, the article shed light on the question of why the financial well-being of American corporations seems increasingly irrelevant to the well-being of American workers -- a case in point being our current "jobless recovery" -- and irrelevant also to the well-being of the corporations' customers.
Not that the case is ordinarily phrased this way, but everyone who has been paying attention knows that for the past two decades the United States has pursued a reorganization strategy modeled on the two-caste system popular in banana republics and other Third World oligarchies. The push is toward a society with a handful of extremely rich people, a teeming mass of peasants and very little in between.
Furthermore, Costco's success translates directly into benefits for workers and customers in the very manner that cheerleaders for corporate America have long described. The company offers "the best wages and benefits in retail." Its starting hourly wage is $10. Full-time hourly workers earn annual salaries of $40,000 after four years.
Well then, you say to yourself, Costco CEO James D. Sinegal, the architect of this marvel, must be taking bows as a Hero of the Republic. Wrong. Instead he's defending himself from powerful forces that better understand how a business ought to be run.
In a single paragraph tucked matter-of-factly into Fortune's hymn to Sinegal and his company, as if it were one more piece of incidental data, we learn that "some of the practices that made Costco great have lately come under attack by Wall Street." What the complaint boils down to is that Sinegal is too generous to the peasants. Stock analysts have "pounded on" him to trim workers' health benefits "and to otherwise reduce labor costs." The critics' view is summarized by "Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher, who recently wrote,
'Costco continues to be a company that is better at serving the club member and employee than the shareholder.' "
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