The Wal-Martians Have Landed

The Wal-Martians Have Landed

-Nolan Pitlick
Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States, with over one million workers. It is the largest food retailer and the third largest pharmacy in the nation.
CEO H. Lee Scott, Jr., made $17,543,739 in total compensation last year – nearly twice the average of $9.6 million for leading U.S. CEOs as a whole.
You’d think with numbers like these that Wal-Mart would be able to insure its employees. However, this is not the case, Wal-Mart insures on average 20% less of its employees from the UFCW. More than half of Wal-Mart’s employees, 600,000, are forced to get health insurance coverage from the government, or live without it. Now we can not only thank Wal-Mart for its falling prices but also for making tax payers foot the bill for up to 600,000 individuals health care plans.
Health care is not the end of Wal-Mart’s generosity to the US tax payer. The national average for comparable work to a Wal-Mart employee is $15.35/hr whereas Wal-Mart pays its employees $9.68/hr. This means that on average each Wal-Mart employee must rely on $2,103 in government subsidies each year.
Thanks to Wal-Mart’s enormous size it is able to dictate the market for its 68,000 suppliers. Wal-Mart imports $18 billion worth of goods from China where they have implemented a ban on unions. Of course in the US Wal-Mart has used many seedy tactics to bust unions that try to improve the working conditions for Wal-Mart employees.
This is sad, but not as sad as what Wal-Mart is doing to underage children in their US stores. In 2004 The New York Times found that in one weeks time there was 1,371 instances of minors working too late; this was after only studying 25,000 employee files. Oddly enough the US Department of Labor was only able to find 85 minors that had operated hazardous equipment in 3 states because of Wal-Mart’s size they walked away with only a $135,540 fine and were also told that they would receive a three day notice of any subsequent investigation. It’s a chilling fact to think that Wal-Mart can now control the US Government because of its sheer size.
Wal-Mart has no signs of stopping, and in fact, they have stated that they want to continue to grow at an exponential rate over the next five years. Only by educating people on the truths behind the Wal-Mart regime can people start to the truth that is Wal-Mart. It’s not the yellow smiley face that lowers prices throughout the day. The real face of Wal-Mart is the 1 million underpaid workers, and the kids that are forced to work after hours, it’s the almost slave labor that is used across the world, and worst of all it’s the uninsured children of thousands of single moms employed by Wal-Mart.