by Tula Connell, Aug 16, 2006

It’s not enough for the world’s largest retailer to contribute millions of dollars to support presidential candidates who will do the bidding of corporations at the expense of America’s workers. Now it turns out, Wal-Mart is trying to tell its employees how to vote—and you can bet its list doesn’t include any candidate who supports working families.

Wal-Mart is mailing 18,000 “voter guides” to its employees in Iowa, state of the first presidential primary in 2008. The guides attack potential candidates for president—all Democrats—for supporting groups that oppose Wal-Mart’s everyday low wages that mean many workers require public assistance to support their families.

In an effort to smear lawmakers who seek to improve Wal-Mart’s treatment of its workers, Wal-Mart vice president of corporate communications, Bob McAdam, says those  lawmakers—including Govs. Bill Richardson (N.M.) and Tom Vilsack (Iowa), Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.) and former Sen. Joe Biden (Del.)—are “playing to a small, increasingly special-interest audience” (made up of millions of working families).

The four are taking part in a 35-city bus tour sponsored by the union-backed organization WakeUpWalMart.com this month to educate elected officials about how Wal-Mart’s low wages, poor benefits and shoddy treatment of its employees damage entire communities.

In his letter to Iowa Wal-Mart workers, regional manager Tom Underwood writes:

We believe it’s wrong for these political candidates to attack Wal-Mart and the transformation underway at our company. We would never suggest to you how to vote, but we have an obligation to tell you when politicians are saying something about your company that isn’t true.

Wal-Mart wants it both ways: The corporate behemoth tries to make it appear as if critics of Wal-Mart are attacking Wal-Mart workers—“after all, you are Wal-Mart,” Underwood writes to Iowa workers, saying such attacks are directed “at your company.” But if workers really had a say in “their” company, it’s a good bet they’d get wages that supported their families and health care benefits they could afford.

In a March 2006 study, the AFL-CIO found that of 23 states surveyed, Wal-Mart workers made up the bulk of recipients receiving state health care aid in 19 states. According to The Wal-Mart Tax—Shifting Health Care Costs to Taxpayers:

In Arizona and Maine, roughly 10 percent of Wal-Mart’s workers get their health benefits from the state. In Washington state, it’s almost 20 percent. In New Jersey, Wal-Mart tops the list of employers pushing workers into state-provided health care programs although the retailer is only the state’s eighth largest employer.

In fact, each Wal-Mart store employing 200 people costs taxpayers approximately $420,750 annually in public social services used by Wal-Mart workers whose low wages and unaffordable health insurance mean most of them are among the working poor.

Then there are all those lawsuits workers have filed—and won—against Wal-Mart. Such as the 116,000 hourly workers who received $172 million in damages because Wal-Mart failed to provide meal breaks and the janitors who won $11 million to settle allegations that the company had failed to pay them overtime, many of whom worked seven nights a week.

Wal-Mart’s viciously anti-union policies mean workers are forced to get redress through the nation’s court systems rather than at the workplace, through a mutually-beneficial bargaining process.

“We want you to know that your voice matters when these political candidates attack your company,” Underwood writes to Wal-Mart employees.

Just not when it comes to matters like pay, benefits and respect on the job.

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