Each Wal-Mart Store Cost Taxpayers $400,000

Interesting....

I now boycott WalMart myself.

I never knew that people were FORCED to work at Wal-Mart!

I thought people who took wal-mart type jobs usually had more than one job, or they weren't the main provider for their family.

Are there statistics on how many wal-mart employees are on food stamps?

I try to boycott Walmart myself. But sss's post is just another example of how to lie with statistics.

Does this mean that every minimum wage job is a drain on the economy?

What about retirees working to supplement their other sources of income? Or kids working their way through school?

What about a spouse working to supplement the family income?

Surely every single Walmart employee cannot be the sole wage-earner for his/her family, and the Walmart salary is their only income.

Wow.......
A lot of you guys like to live in denial.........

Nobody is forced to work at wal-mart, but somebody has to do it, right ?

In some community's wal-mart is the biggest employer, should people refuse to work there ?

Not everyone is a genius, some people are only qualified to work at stores like wal-mart. If they did not work you guys would call them welfare queens, but if they do work at wal-mart you criticize them for doing that too. Some people take a job anywhere, it is better than not working at all. The point of my posting is that wal-mart makes billions of dollars in profits, yet the taxpayers pay their employees health care and food stamps.

Here are some more FACTS.

Today, the largest employer in America is not General Motors. It is Wal-Mart which pays people subsistence wages, minimal benefits, and is being sued by twenty-seven states because the company is not even paying the overtime it should be paying.

According to an article in the Arkansas Times the average hourly worker at Wal-Mart earns barely $14,000 a year. The article also notes that Wal-Mart pocketed $6.6 billion in profits last year. Furthermore, forty percent of employees opt not to receive coverage under the company's medical plan, which costs up to $2,844 a year, plus a deductible.

----------

Jennifer McLaughlin is 22, has a baby, drives a truck, wears
wide-leg jeans and spiky plastic chokers, dyes her hair dark red,
and works at Wal-Mart. The store in Paris, Texas -- Wal-Mart
Supercenter #148 -- is just down the road from the modest
apartment complex where McLaughlin lives with her boyfriend and
her one-year-old son; five days a week she drives to the store, puts
on a blue vest with "How May I Help You?" emblazoned across the
back, and clocks in. Some days she works in the Garden Center and
some days in the toy department. The pace is frenetic, even by the
normally fast-paced standards of retailing; often, it seems, there
simply aren't enough people around to get the job done. On a given
shift McLaughlin might man a register, hop on a mechanical lift to
retrieve something from a high shelf, catch fish from a tank, run over
to another department to help locate an item, restock the shelves,
dust off the bike racks, or field questions about potting soil and lawn
mowers. "It's stressful," she says. "They push you to the limit. They
just want to see how much they can get away with without having to
hire someone else."

Then there's the matter of her pay. After three years with the
company, McLaughlin earns only $16,800 a year. "And I'm
considered high-paid," she says. "The way they pay you, you cannot
make it by yourself without having a second job or someone to help
you, unless you've been there for 20 years or you're a manager."
Because health insurance on the Wal-Mart plan would deduct up to
$85 from her biweekly paycheck of $550, she goes without, and
relies on Medicaid to cover her son, Gage.

Complaints about understaffing and low pay are not uncommon
among retail workers -- but Wal-Mart is no mere peddler of
saucepans and boom boxes. The company is the world's largest
retailer, with $220 billion in sales, and the nation's largest private
employer, with 3,372 stores and more than 1 million hourly workers.
Its annual revenues account for 2 percent of America's entire
domestic product. Even as the economy has slowed, the company
has continued to metastasize, with plans to add 800,000 more jobs
worldwide by 2007.

Given its staggering size and rapid expansion, Wal-Mart increasingly
sets the standard for wages and benefits throughout the U.S.
economy. "Americans can't live on a Wal-Mart paycheck," says Greg
Denier, communications director for the United Food and
Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW). "Yet it's the
dominant employer, and what they pay will be the future of working
America." As Jennifer McLaughlin puts it, "They're on top of the
Fortune 500, and I can't get health insurance for my kid."

Angered by the disparity between profits and wages, thousands of
former and current employees like McLaughlin have started to fight
the company on a variety of fronts. Workers in 27 states are suing
Wal-Mart for violating wage-and-hour laws; in the first of the cases to
go to trial, an Oregon jury found the company guilty in December of
systematically forcing employees to work overtime without pay.

Wal-Mart has responded to the union drive by trying to stop workers
from organizing -- sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10
separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that
Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers,
confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first
sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union
busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, sometimes setting up
surveillance cameras to monitor workers. "In my 35 years in labor
relations, I've never seen a company that will go to the lengths that
Wal-Mart goes to, to avoid a union," says Martin Levitt, a
management consultant who helped the company develop its
anti-union tactics before writing a book called Confessions of a
Union Buster. "They have zero tolerance."

The retaliation can be extreme. In February 2000, the meat-cutting
department at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the
UFCW -- the only Wal-Mart in the nation where workers successfully
organized a union. Two weeks after the vote, the company
announced it was eliminating its meat-cutting departments in all of
its stores nationwide. It also fired four workers who voted for the
union. "They held a meeting and said there was nothing we could
do," recalls Dotty Jones, a former meat cutter in Jacksonville. "No
matter which way the election went, they would hold it up in court
until we were old and gray."

When Judy Danneman, a widow raising three children, went to work
as an hourly department manager in West Palm Beach, Florida, she
quickly realized that she would have to climb the management
ladder in order to survive -- because, as she puts it, "my kids had
this bad habit of eating." The only way to do that, she says, was to
work off the clock: "Working unpaid overtime equaled saving your
job."

ss2333, where did you get that Jennifer McLaughlin story? Its interesting.

I wonder if WalMart would consider stock options in the company for their employees...versus a union that is.

sss2333, I don't know where you get the idea that anyone is disparaging those who work for Walmart. What those of us who disagree with you are questioning is the assumption that every Walmart employee is. ipso facto, eligible for general relief. e.g. food-stamps, free medical care etc. If that were so, then anyone earning minimum wage would be likewise eligible. It doesn't work that way. Many (most?) of the people who work at Walmart are part-timers who are also homemakers, students or semi-retirees, earning a little extra money to supplement the main family income.

And that bombshell news-flash that Walmart employs far more people than, say, GM is very old news indeed. It's a well-known fact that only Uncle Sam pays more salaries than the heirs of Sam Walton.

Perhaps, but how many have options?

There are ALWAYS options. Sometimes the options all have negatives, but if one HATES Wal-Mart, it is NOT the only place to work.

I take umbrage at people dissing Wal-Mart. I think that this phenomena is part of the entire culture of "victimhood" that has proliferated over the last number of years. I think that with all the negatives (and there certainly are) I think that Wal-Mart has provided many positives to a community.

It is really very simple. If a person does not care for the way that Wal-Mart does business, don't shop there, and certainly don't work there.

Maybe, then maybe you include starving among your options !!

Why do you always shout ?

Unless one lives in a ghost town, there are always other options. If a person DID live in a ghost town, there obviously would be no Wal-Mart, so it is a moot point.

I don't shout. I type in green, as I have been doing for over 10,000 posts. It is my signature.

Operations like Walmart eliminate competition and reduce choice. They attempt to control suppliers, labour forces and consumers. I have noticed your support for economic license but am surprised that you extend the sentiment to commercial equivalents of Genghis Khan.

Green is not a problem. Bold and Capitals is offensive to the eye's ear.

This all makes me wonder whose responsibility it is to let employers, and manufacturers, know when they are out of line. I mean, there are some products I will or won't buy when it comes to animal testing, political contributions, charity donations, etc... but when it comes to how a company treats their employees, I think that would be more the employees responsibility to face the issue.

I shop at wal-mart because I have basically no income and am trying to stretch the money I have (I'm a college student) and I can't afford to go to Target or Kroger, etc. I just don't have enough money, and there IS a difference in the prices.

That difference is coming out of other peoples pocket, in both manufacturing and retailing.

Re: Each Wal-Mart Store Cost Taxpayers $400,000


Are you one of the people that can't find work anywhere but at Walmart???

Let's start with basic math. If the average employee makes $8.30/hr their annual income would be $17,264 - not $13,000 for a full time employee.

$13,000/year is also only under the poverty level for a family of 3 or more. The current poverty level for a family of 2 is $12,120.

Your claims about the numbers of employees elidgible for food stamps, etc.. is dwindling quickly. Tell your boss you need to go back to handing out carts. Money calculations aren't one of your strong points so you really shouldn't be working a register.

Could you explain that one to me, please

LRR,

Shopping at walmart is not a sin and I appreciate that, for some, cheapest must be best. That given, it is important to recognise the role of
companies such as Walmart and examine practices which undermine community welfare.