Wal-Mart Wage Slavery Will End Itself. Exploited worker states the facts... Bentenville Arkansas

I'm amazed at all of the people on here defending Wal-Mart. I am a former employee who worked there for two years. I can tell you, when Carl Marx was writing about capitalist exploitation of labor, he was perfectly describing Wal-Mart. However, nothing last forever, and here's how I predict Wal-Mart will fall from power: Wal-Mart is now the world's largest private employer, with over 1.2 million U.S. employees. Turnover rate is 44% company wide, as high as 70% for hourly employees, and up to 300% at some store locations. In many markets Wal-Mart will simply use up the available labor pool! Consideration should be given to the facts that many people would never work for Wal-Mart to begin with, most former employees would never return, and birth rates only provide so many new workers to exploit. Therefore Wal-Mart may eventually run out of employees willing to be the subjects of their exploitation.

The company typically pays its workers $2 an hour less than unionized supermarket employees. The company knows this and unionization efforts are grounds for being fired. They did have a butcher's union form, and all butchers were fired and replaced by pre-packaged, boxed meats. Nearly two-thirds of its workers don't participate in the company's health plan, because of high insurance premiums and huge deductibles. The average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three. When I worked there I started at $5.85 per hour, before taxes.

That's quite a change from the just-ended era when GM and Exxon stood at the top of the corporate heap. They paid solidly middle-class wages. Wal-Mart illustrates the danger of what happens when well-paid industrial jobs give way to low-paid service positions.

Still think this doesn't affect you? Consider the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. Then a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million U.S. employees.

Just how well does Wal-Mart treat it's employees? Well, Wal-Mart has the dubious distinction of being the most sued private entity, second only to the US government itself. Wal-Mart has faced sex discrimination lawsuits, community protests, allegations of hiring illegal workers and a hefty dose of scorn in its 42-year history.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has agreed to pay $14.5 million in fines and other costs to settle a state lawsuit over thousands of gun sales violations at California stores between 2000 and 2003.

The world's largest retailer will pay $5 million in fines, $4 million for state compliance checks with gun laws and millions more to assure its stores meet state and federal firearms laws, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Wednesday.

Wal-Mart agreed in April 2003 to suspend gun sales at its sporting goods counters in 114 California stores after the state documented hundreds of violations at only six California stores. A subsequent investigation by the California Department of Justice found 2,891 more violations between 2000 and 2003.

The giant retailer's low prices truly come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. We are shopping our way straight to the unemployment line.

How much of Wal-Mart's success has been based on its exploitation of its employees -- especially women?

Wal-Mart undersell its competitors by an average of as much as 14 percent Here the picture darkens because Wal-Mart's ability to keep prices low depends not just on its productivity but also on its ability to contain, or even reduce, costs, above all labor costs.

The harshness of the working conditions at Wal-Mart helps to account for the exceptionally high employee turnover at the company. Some 50 percent of Wal-Mart workers employed at the beginning of 2003 had left the company by the end of the year.


What good can come from all these facts? Probably only that millions of workers will be educated firsthand about poor labor practice. That is, before they run out of workers willing to be subjected to it's exploitation...

It had over $256 billion in sales in 2004.

Daniel
Flint, Michigan
U.S.A.

Click here to read other Rip Off Reports on Wal-mart