Burning Spinneys at the Stake
An online campaign is trying to shame a giant Lebanese retailer into paying more for its employees. This is a bad idea.
By now, you probably bumped into the online campaign demanding a boycott of Spinneys, one of Lebanon’s large low-price retailers. The main point of the campaign is that Spinneys refused to increase the wages of its employees as mandated by a government’s decree in February. The campaign is gathering a fair amount of traction, and I can imagine a lot of people “liking” it because of our natural tendency to sympathise with the weak.
The infographic, like the message, is catchy. But there are many things that I don’t like about the campaign. Still, I’m not here to talk about its xenophobic overtones or its sanctimonious grandstanding. All I want to do here is explain why it’s a bad and wrong-headed idea.
Spinneys’ contribution
Spinneys, as a business, exists for one purpose only: To sell cheap groceries to Lebanese households. This is its main contribution to society. By using its large scale, efficient logistics and purchasing power, it makes it possible for people to buy 1 kg of minced meat for less than 10,000 L.L (~$6.7). To put it differently, the cheaper the goods are at Spinneys, the larger its contribution to society.
Spinneys is not resisting the wage increases because it’s an evil corporation that eats poor people for breakfast. It is resisting them because raising the wages of thousands of employees will immediately be reflected in the prices of their goods. By marginally increasing the livelihood of some of its employees, it is effectively making tens of thousands of its customers, and by extension society at large, worse off.
One of the things that bug me most about that campaign is that this is a story in which the Lebanese government is the hero and Spinneys is the bad guy. The same Lebanese government which can’t secure electricity and forces Spinneys to pay extra for generators to keep the freezers humming at night and your chicken fresh. The same government which can’t guarantee whether or not roads are blocked or whether neighborhoods are firing missiles at each other, wants to lecture the businesses that are losing their livelihoods as a result.
I’m not even going to talk about the fact that the club of unionized workers is the one demanding the wage increases, while it’s ok for those who are less fortunate and can’t join unions (the foreign workers and those with menial jobs) to stew in minimum wage hell.
What about that Government decree?
By now, some of you must be thinking: Ok, your logic is fine and dandy, but it is beside the point: There’s a law out there and Spinneys is breaking it. To that I respond: This is the kind of law that must be enforced collectively. It is grossly unfair to single out one company (Spinneys) and leave the other, perhaps better connected, companies untouched. If Spinneys is forced to pay more wages and its competitors are left alone, Spinneys won’t be able to compete and will eventually be forced to shut down. This is a witch-hunt masqueraded as a pro-labor campaign.
But the wages are still low, what can we do about this?
Facebook “likes” are cheap, but the people who will end up paying for that wage increase are Spinneys customers. Perhaps we should prepare a new infographic for them that asks the question: “Do you support increasing the wages of Spinneys unionized workers if that means you’ll have to pay an extra 20% on everything you buy at the store?”. I’d love to see the result of that poll..