Wal-Mart: Still Cutting Back on Everyday Wages and Benefits

by Tula Connell, Oct 17, 2006

More than 200 Wal-Mart workers walked off the job yesterday in Florida to protest a work schedule that showed cuts in hours. According to the The Tampa Tribune: 

Workers at a store in Hialeah Gardens, north of Miami, left work after Wal-Mart posted an erroneous schedule, spokesman David Tovar said. 

“This was a mistake, and we have corrected it,” he said. 

Funny how quickly Wal-Mart admitted its “mistake.” Probably had nothing to do with the wage suit won last week by 187,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees in Pennsylvania. A jury on Oct. 12 ruled Wal-Mart violated state labor laws by forcing hourly employees to work through breaks and beyond their shifts without overtime pay. Lawyers say Wal-Mart could pay $62 million in damages. 

But the world’s largest retailer still has many means by which to squeeze everything it can out of workers. One way is to continually cut back on benefits. 

Writing yesterday at Tom Paine, Cindy Zeldin, the federal affairs coordinator for the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, reminds us that Wal-Mart plans to limit its 2007 health insurance options for new hires to two choices, both high-deductible plans, to squeeze benefit costs. Writes Zeldin: 

Wal-Mart’s health insurance options for 2007, dubbed the “value plan” and the “freedom plan,” feature deductibles reaching as high as $6,000 for family coverage under the “freedom plan”—meaning that a Wal-Mart employee selecting that plan would have to fork over $6,000 before insurance started covering their family’s medical bills. That’s a lot of money for a cashier earning Wal-Mart wages, and it begs some serious questions about how a deductible that high can be met without going into debt. 

Even before this new insurance plan, by Wal-Mart’s own admission, its workers are forced to spend 8 percent of their salary, twice the national average, for health care. 

And then there’s the issue of pay. Wal-Mart is pushing to cap wages, use more part-time workers and schedule more workers on nights and weekends. 

Wal-Mart’s latest move to create a “flexible workforce’’—corporate-speak parroted by The New York Times and other media when referring to the new means by which workers can be forced to work more and earn less—is just the latest insult to its workers. 

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