Oct. 5—While consumers may think they are getting a good deal by shopping at Wal-Mart, a new AFL-CIO website shows how taxpayers, workers and communities get stuck paying the tab for those “always low prices.”
Launched today, www.walmartcostsyou.com describes how Wal-Mart’s policies forces its employees to turn to taxpayer-funded public programs for their health care, violate workers’ rights and drain community coffers. Even as Wal-Mart workers and consumers pay the price at Wal-Mart, five descendants of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton were recently listed among the nation’s top 10 billionaires, according to Forbes magazine. In fiscal year 2005, Wal-Mart plans to accelerate the pace of its expansion, opening as many as 295 discount and supercenter stores in the United States and 165 outlets overseas, according to Bloomberg News.
Always Low Wages for Wal-Mart Workers
While Wal-Mart boasts that it creates jobs, many workers are questioning its employment practices. In June 2004, a U.S. District Court in San Francisco gave class-action status to a lawsuit representing 1.6 million women currently or formerly employed by Wal-Mart, who allege the company has discriminated against them in pay and promotion.
Wal-Mart workers—more than 70 percent female—earned an average $8.23 hourly in 2001, according to BusinessWeek magazine. Working 29 hours weekly—Wal-Mart’s definition of full-time that year—Wal-Mart workers who averaged the $8.23 hourly wage were paid $12,411 in 2001, well below the $14,630 federal poverty guideline for a family of three.
Tax Dollars Support Wal-Mart Workers
Taxpayers supplement those poverty wages through public programs. In California, Wal-Mart workers earn 31 percent less than workers employed in similar large retail operations statewide, according to an August 2004 report by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. To make ends meet, California Wal-Mart workers often get their health care, housing and food through public social service programs at a taxpayer cost of some $86 million annually, the researchers found.
Wal-Mart shifts its labor costs to taxpayers nationwide. In Chicago, Latasha Barker made such low wages as an employee of Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club division that she was forced to rely on public health care for herself and her two children. “Someone has to make Wal-Mart accountable for their way of doing business,” she says.
Community Activists Organize to Protect Their Neighborhoods
Consumers also finance subsidies such as tax breaks the giant retailer solicits through city or county councils or via ballot initiatives. Over the past 20 years, taxpayers have provided at least $1 billion in subsidies to Wal-Mart, according to a study by the nonprofit research group Good Jobs First. Many local leaders have learned too late that Wal-Mart doesn’t hesitate to abandon tax-subsidized stores or stonewall when asked by its neighbors to pay for property damages.
Communities large and small have begun fighting back against “Wal-Mart-ization.” In Inglewood, Calif., this spring, more than 61 percent of the community’s mostly African American and Latino voters rejected Wal-Mart’s ballot measure that would have created a supercenter the size of 17 football fields and exempted Wal-Mart from local and state planning reviews. In Franklin, Wis., a coalition of union, consumer and environmental activists this July won passage of a local size limit ordinance that stopped development of a proposed 184,000-square-foot Wal-Mart “supercenter” which sought to sell groceries and other goods.
In Los Angeles, activists won passage of a city ordinance in August requiring retailers such as Wal-Mart that propose supercenters to pay for economic analyses showing whether the stores would eliminate community jobs, depress wages or harm neighborhood businesses.
To learn more about how Wal-Mart-ization of American jobs costs consumers, communities and workers, visit www.walmartcostsyou.com.
