As long as we’ve interrupted our vacation, we might as well complete some unfinished
Wal-Mart business. A few days ago it was reported that the nation’s largest retailer is cooperating
with a federal probe of its employment practices. That’s so nice to
know, especially when there’s so much to investigate.
Maybe the feds will look into the fact that Wal-Mart saves on personnel costs and keeps
prices low by encouraging its workers to make use of community health-care services, which are
provided at public expense.
“The taxpayers are apparently taking care of a lot of Wal-Mart workers,” Bill Moyers’
investigative news program, NOW, reported Friday after we began our vacation. “According to
the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California/Berkeley, in 2002,
Wal-Mart workers in California relied on 50 percent more taxpayer-funded health care per
employee than those at other large retail companies. Put another way, taxpayers subsidized
$20.5-million-worth-of medical care for Wal-Mart in California alone.”
Maybe shoppers will realize Wal-Mart pays such low wages that many of its workers can’t
afford the company’s private (and expensive) health-care benefits plan and that it also keeps
workers from qualifying for benefits (even if they can’t afford them).
Here’s the complete transcript of NOW’s devastating report on
Wal-Mart, which shows how the giant retailer’s low prices are
achieved at taxpayer expense not only for health care but for tax breaks and other
concessions.
Those who don’t believe Wal-Mart pays its workers less than its competitors might consider
this: “Unionized supermarket workers pay little or nothing for their health plans and have an
average hourly wage of $10.35 per hour,” NOW reports. “Wal-Mart workers earn about 25
percent less … a reported $8.23 per hour.”
One Wal-Mart clerk who earns $14,500 a
year pointed out that on his salary he can’t afford “the roughly $250-dollars it costs each month
for Wal-Mart’s family medical plan.” To cover his wife and three children, he’ll need public
health-care assistance.
One Wal-Mart manager said that when he spoke out against the company’s “inadequate
health-care plan,” he was fired. Another explained that Wal-Mart “counted on [employee]
turnover to get rid of some of the people that … were actually eligible to get the [company’s]
insurance.” This went on for years, he said. Reporter Sylvia Chase concluded: “So putting it in
plain language you had to get rid of some workers. You had to replace them with part-time
workers. You had to keep your workers un-eligible for health insurance coverage.” He
agreed.
And one California official put the lie to Wall-Mart’s legendarily low prices: “When you walk
out of Wal-Mart and you look at your receipt, you need to add onto that receipt the cost that
you’re paying for increased transportation taxes for streets and roads, increased taxes to cover
subsidies for their employees. Both in health care and social services. That’s a hard concept to get
across. Because it’s not there in black and white on the receipt. But it’s — black and white in your
pocket. You pay it. “
