Nov. 10—A pair of recent reports and a just-released documentary hammer home how Wal-Mart’s everyday low wages and nearly always unaffordable health care benefits harm workers, lower community living standards and set negative precedents for other large U.S. corporations.
Next week, the new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, will be screened in thousands of locations as part of a nationwide effort by unions and their community allies to show the real Wal-Mart: A corporation that made $10 billion in 2004 and yet pays its full-time employees less than the annual $18,850 federal poverty guideline for a family of four. Produced by Robert Greenwald, the documentary shows the effects of Wal-Mart’s greed through the personal stories of everyday workers and their families.
In fact, during the 1990s economic expansion, Wal-Mart’s low-wages reduced retail workers’ take-home pay by $4.7 billion annually, according to a report by three University of California economists that offers data on how local retail wages drop when Wal-Mart stores and super centers open in suburban or urban areas.
“We found that a Wal-Mart store reduced the average earnings per retail worker in urban
and suburban counties for sectors it affects most—general merchandising and grocery,” according to the report’s authors.
Wal-Mart’s ‘Flagrant Child Labor Violations Deserve More than Slap on Wrist’
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General released a report that reveals a January 2004 Labor Department agreement settling alleged child labor violations by Wal-Mart that gave “significant concessions” to Wal-Mart “in exchange for little commitment from the employer beyond what it was already doing or required to do by law.”
The agreement called on the Labor Department to provide Wal-Mart with a 15-day “advance notification of future investigations and ability to avoid civil money penalties,” the Inspector General’s report says.
“Flagrant violations of child labor laws demand more than a slap on the wrist,” says AFT President Edward McElroy. “But that’s all Wal-Mart got when it settled a DOL investigation of multiple violations of child labor laws by agreeing to pay $135,000 while refusing to acknowledge any wrongdoing. For a company with annual revenues exceeding $250 billion, the penalty was akin to fining the average American worker about three cents.”
AFT represents 1.3 million pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, paraprofessionals and other school-related personnel, as well as health care workers and public employees.
Shortly after the Inspector General’s report was released, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced a bill (H.R. 4190) that would bar advance notification provisions in Labor Department compliance agreements.
“Wal-Mart’s settlement with the Department of Labor puts the interests of one of the nation's worst labor law violators ahead of the protection of America’s workers,” says DeLauro.
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