Guardian UK: Discounted employees (Wal-Mart)

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Discounted employees
Wal-Mart's appalling labour practices mean it's getting rich at the expense of workers and their families
Sasha Abramsky

May 27, 2008 9:30 PM | Printable version


Wal-Mart, the world's largest private employer, now employs over 1.3 million Americans. Globally, more than two million people are now Wal-Martees, and several million more are dependent on these employees. Millions also make their livelihoods by selling their products, albeit at rock-bottom prices, to Wal-Mart. In America the only employer with more clout than this overgrown supermarket chain is the federal government. The company has annual revenues three times larger than California's state budget, profits bigger than the GDP of many small developing nations and the clout to set its own purchasing prices and drive competitors out of business by undercutting them with consumers.

This is all bad - very bad. I'm not going to try to make the argument that all big corporations are, by definition, problematic. For better or worse, we live in a corporate world. Unless we want to dedicate our lives to living some back-to-land dream, for the foreseeable future most of us are going to spend a significant portions of our incomes shopping at one megastore or another.

No, the reason it's bad that Wal-Mart is so extraordinarily dominant (and, arguably, the reason why Wal-Mart is so dominant in the first place) is that the company has appalling labour practices.

The monitoring group Wal-Mart Watch has reported stories of employees refused bathroom breaks, forced to work off-the-clock overtime and punished for attempting to unionise their fellow employees.

In recent weeks, I've spoken with employees who have been with the company nearly a decade and still make only about $10 per hour. Huge numbers of Wal-Mart workers earn far less, scraping by on as little as $7 an hour.

Many are technically part-time, because if they're listed as not working a full 40-hour work week they don't qualify for health insurance for the first year of employment. Afterwards, when the benefits kick in, Wal-Mart removes a startlingly high percentage of the already-low wages to help cover the costs of the insurance. In other words, while Wal-Mart claims to provide most of its employees with health insurance, in reality the employees themselves are paying much of the bill. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2008/05/discounted_employees.html