Since I frequently include my blog in outside discussions, I figure it’s about time to include an outside discussion in my blog. Just because it’s interesting, here’s a bit of conversation from a work discussion about Walmart closing down a store because it threatened to become unionized:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/09/news/international/walmart_canada/
Walmart is the embodiment of every abuse and error associated with the term “corporation.”
Walmart is quickly becoming notorious for its civil rights abuses. The corporation is facing a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1.6 million female workers for its corporate condoned policies of discriminating against women and advancing male workers over more qualified female employees. Forbes points out that “U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins found that attorneys for the six named class representatives, in a case that started three years ago, “present largely uncontested, descriptive statistics which show that women working in Wal-Mart stores are paid less than men in every region, that pay disparities exist in most job categories, that the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time, that women take longer to enter into management positions, and that the higher one looks in the organization, the lower the percentage of women.’”
Additionally, Walmart has come under pressure for hiring illegal immigrants and then refusing to pay them minimum wage due to their non-citizen status (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20041107-9999-8n7jobs.html). Their control over their employees rights is almost unprecedented– no other chain has so thoroughly rebutted attempts at unionization, and it’s doubtful that many have invested more money into countering laws that would require fair and equitable treatment of its employees.
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman provide a compelling example:
In California, in November, the company was able to stave off by a 51-to 49 percent margin a proposition that would have required every large and medium employer in the state to provide decent healthcare coverage for their workers, with the employer contribution set at a minimum of 80 percent of costs.
Wal-Mart dumped a half million dollars into the anti-Proposition 72 campaign just a week before the vote.
“As one of California’s leading employers, we care about the health of our 60,000 employees here,” said Wal-Mart spokesperson Cynthia Lin, in celebrating the defeat of Proposition 72. “That’s why we provide our employees with affordable, quality health care coverage.”
“Prop. 72 was never about Wal-Mart,” she claimed. “It was about allowing businesses to operate without unreasonable government mandates, it was about the survival of small businesses and it was about consumer choice in healthcare benefits.”[/quote]
An earlier portion of the same article notes that [quote=”Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman”]A February 2004 report issued by Representative George Miller, D-California, encapsulated the ways that Wal-Mart squeezes and cheats its employees, among them: blocking union organizing efforts, paying employees an average $8.23 an hour (as compared to more than $10 for an average supermarket worker), allegedly extracting off-the-clock work, and providing inadequate and unaffordable healthcare packages for employees.
[quote=”JadeRobbins”]This further increases the wage gap because the people who are educated are getting paid well, but the people who aren’t think they should get paid more, so they don’t work.[/quote]
Walmart is clears over $218 billion dollars a year in sales, and yet its average employee makes only $11,000, well below the national average.
[quote=”Anthony”]and if you thinnk about the 200 people that are “working poor” at a Wal-Mart, think about the thousadns of people who benefit from having a wal-mart near thir homes. The presence of a wal-mart will raise the standard of living for the comunity as a whole, not the undereducated employees of said wal-mart.[/quote]
Try 1,300,000 people who are employed by Walmart across its nearly 3,000 stores. Additionally, they still pay for it, just in other ways. When you factor Ben’s cited $420,000 per year per 200 employee store across California’s 44,000 Walmart employees, one finds a net cost of almost $10,000,000 of California taxpayer money to provide for public assistance programs for Walmart employees. Granted, the use of public assistance programs isn’t unique to Walmart, but according to an August 2004 report issued by Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs, “the families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated 38 percent more in other (non-health care) public assistance programs (such as food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized school lunches, and subsidized housing) than the average for families of all large retail employees.” The same report notes that “If other large California retailers adopted Wal-Mart’s wage and benefits standards, it would cost taxpayers an additional $410 million a year in public assistance to employees.”
I’d better stop. I’ve already invested WAY too much valuable homework time into this post already…
