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States Tired of Wal-Mart’s Shenanigans
By Mike Blair
As many as three dozen state legislatures are lining up to introduce legislation aimed at forcing Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retail store
chain, to treat its employees better.
State legislators are pressing the multinational corporate giant to provide health insurance for full-time workers. Wal-Mart, not known for paying its
employees well, refuses to indicate how much it spends on its payroll for employee health care insurance.
However, it is believed to be about 7 percent, less than most big corporations. It is known that Wal-Mart pays less than half of its employees in America health care benefits.
Putting further pressure on the corporate giant, a Pennsylvania court has granted class-action status to a lawsuit claiming Wal-Mart forced as many as 150,000 employees at its stores in the state to work through their breaks and after hours.
Wal-Mart, known for moving into a community with one of its huge stores and forcing its competition out of business, has fallen upon hard times in recent days.
The retail giant has been caught using illegal aliens on its maintenance teams, using underage workers on potentially hazardous jobs, showing discrimination against women in the work place and strong-arming local governments to provide special tax considerations when its stores locate in a community.
Wal-Mart is also having trouble in various locations in both the United States and Canada for keeping its employees from organizing into unions.
In the case of forcing its employees to work through breaks and after hours, late last year a California court awarded workers $172.3 million in a class-action case. Wal-Mart settled a similar case in Colorado for $50 million.
On Jan. 11 the Maryland legislature passed a law that would require Wal-Mart stores to increase spending for employee health benefits to at least 8 percent. Although the law pertains to all companies with 10,000 or more employees, it is clearly aimed at Wal-Mart.
The legislature’s action overrides a veto by Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R). Critics accuse the mega-chain of not paying its employees, who are called “associates,” a living wage and not providing health benefits.
Consequently, thousands of Wal-Mart employees are forced to seek health care assistance through the states’ Medicaid system, running up the cost to taxpayers.
Wal-Mart hired four lobbying firms to fight the bill in Maryland.
State Sen. Gloria G. Lawlah, who introduced the Maryland bill, called the Wal-Mart lobbying effort “horrendous.”
It has been reported that 12 lobbyists were working at the same time to kill the bill, earning them the nickname “the dirty dozen.”
Wal-Mart, which is planning to build a distribution center on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that would employ some 1,000 workers, threatened to build the center elsewhere if Maryland enacted the health care law.
(Issue #5, January 30, 2006)
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