Replies

Wal-Mart boasts that 74% of its sales employees work full-time but this doesn't mean they are making good money. In 2001, Wal-Mart sales clerks made an average of $8.23 an hour ($13,861 a year). While $8.23 an hour doesn't sound like a bad wage for part-time work while you are getting through school, people who use that job as their full-time employment are in trouble: they make $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

There's a problems with this entire premis, as if a worker is making $8.23/hr, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, the annual wage is $16,460, a difference of $2599. I'm wondering exactly where they got the "$13,861?" Was the annual wage listed by using both part time and full time sales clerks? If so, then the "annual wage" would have been averaged using numbers coming from students who only worked 15 or 20 hours a week, as well as 40 hour a week full time employees.

Mark

The article says $8.23 for PART TIME employment. And to WalMart "full time" means 28 or more hours consecutively. Locally we have no WallyWorld, but in NC and a neighboring County (with a buffer County in between), I've been told my by Medicaid applicants that they have to work 28 or more hours a week for two full years before they are eligible for WalMart insurance. One woman came it, pregnant, in tears because she had TWO MONTHS of "full time" employment to go before she had worked 24 months at WM and was going to be eligibile for WM insurance. They cut her hours to less than 28 a week for six weeks and told her she'd have to start at the bottom and work another 24 months of 28 hours or more to qualify for WM insurance.

To make this model work, Wal-Mart must keep labor costs down. It does this by making corporate crime an integral part of its business strategy. Wal-Mart routinely violates laws protecting workers' organizing rights (workers have even been fired for union activity). It is a repeat offender on overtime laws; in more than thirty states, workers have brought wage-and-hour class-action suits against the retailer. In some cases, workers say, managers encouraged them to clock out and keep working; in others, managers locked the doors and would not let employees go home at the end of their shifts. And it's often women who suffer most from Wal-Mart's labor practices. Dukes v. Wal-Mart, which is the largest civil rights class-action suit in history, charges the company with systematically discriminating against women in pay and promotions [see Featherstone, "Wal-Mart Values: Selling Women Short," December 16, 2002].
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050103&s=featherstone

But yeah, WalMart is a "good" employer. /sarcasm