[rsheridan6]

Any unskilled job is going to have a low enough pay rate that many of the employees will qualify for public assistance. This goes for Walmart, Target, and the mom and pop shops Walmart replaced. If Walmart went out of business tomorrow, these people would still be on public assistance. That's today's economy.

[drivers99]

This article[1] though on a biased (in that they have a point of view) site, has links to some state data, so it's convenient to link to it. It's also specific to medicaid benefits.

> Of the 50 companies with the most employees on Medicaid in Massachusetts, almost half are retail and restaurant chains. The list includes CVS, Home Depot, May Department Stores, Sears, Kohl’s, Walgreen, Lowe’s, and Best Buy.

> Similar data was recently released by Wisconsin, Missouri, and New Jersey. Topping all three states’ lists are many of the same retailers, including Walmart, Target, Dollar General, and Home Depot, as well as restaurant chains such as Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

It doesn't seem exactly fair to do it based on total number of employees though. What about percentage of employees? Looking at the Missouri (state health care) data, Walmart is at about double the rate as Target, it has:

    Walmart work force: 43,281  
    Walmart MHN Enrolled employees (E): 2403  
    Walmart MHN Enrolled family members (N): 3633  
    Walmart total employees (E+N): 6036  
    Walmart Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 13.95%

    Target work force: 7,580
    Target MHN Enrolled employees (E): 282
    Target MHN Enrolled family members (N): 317
    Target total employees (E+N): 599
    Target Percentage of Missouri Workforce Enrolled(E) or Responsible for Enrollee (N) 7.9%

Actually the rest of the data[2] is interesting (kind of old; 2011), and too much to summarize here, but there are a lot of worse companies than both of those, percentage-wise. For example, Dollar General is at 42.24%.

[1] https://ilsr.org/chains-walmart-foods-free-ride-taxpayers-ex... [2] https://dss.mo.gov/mhd/general/pdf/2011-employer-match-repor...

[rsheridan6]

Walmart recently (this year) changed their pay structure so that nobody will make less than $11/hour, which is good for jobs that don't even require high school or the ability to speak English, so data from 2011 is outdated.

But being paid $11/hour still means that at the workers with dependent children will still be on Medicai and other public programs.

Very few unskilled jobs pay enough that a single mom is not going to qualify for benefits, so these stats probably reflect more than anything who the company hires or retains. If they hire lots of single moms, they will be lots of employees collecting benefits. If they hire more men, older people or younger people, they will not.

[coredog64]

It would be interesting to break out average age of employee as well. In my experience, Target trends towards younger employees.

[yourapostasy]

> Any unskilled job...

That's a moving target with software in the economic picture now.

We know about the "That isn't AI" effect. Each incremental advance coming out of AI research or just software in general is countered with a problem domain the advance doesn't address, and the advance is dismissed as not really ground-breaking. This effect is commonly seen in action with traditional games (checkers, chess, Go, etc.), but I see it with all sorts of automation.

I posit there is a converse rule: every incremental gain (which admittedly are infinitesimal steps towards AGI/strong AI) has the potential to move the goalposts of what constitutes an "unskilled job".

We often fail to recognize this because the incrementalism's effect upon jobs is not nearly as dramatic as what we today imagine the transition from horses to cars to be (when in fact it was quite incremental back then as well). There aren't as many checkout cashiers as before due to software- and infrastructure-enhanced advances (bar codes and their scanners, supply chain management, etc.*), but because checkout cashiers aren't completely gone yet we don't viscerally perceive the economic effects. What used to be a skilled job is now classified as unskilled however, so the economic impact is huge.

I contend we don't need AGI for massive automation-originated social disruption. If someone produces software that roughly approximates the reasoning abilities and kinesthesia of a 7-11th grader, then that is the majority of people in the developed world, not to speak of the developing world. That developmental range is roughly equivalent to what the mainstream media content targets in the developed world. We'll see continuous, smaller disruptions far before that point, though it is an open research question if we will get there in the near future. For example, we still don't have a general software solution to a task as "simple" as folding clothes, sheets and towels grabbed at random from a dryer.