SEARCH
Pay Taxes? Chances Are, You Subsidize Wal-Mart |
 |
|
As usual, Wal-Mart is up to its ears in class-action lawsuits filed by its employees. In the latest, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled May 31 that a lawsuit claiming off-the-clock violations could proceed as a class action on behalf of nearly 80,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees.
The retail mega-monster’s treatment of its employees is, unfortunately, an ongoing outrage. But what’s less known is how much Wal-Mart costs all of us as taxpayers.
So here’s the everyday low deal: Wal-Mart’s state and local government economic development subsidies include 39 deals worth more than $200 million in just the past three years. The info is in a new report released this morning by the nonprofit research group Good Jobs First, which updated its landmark 2004 report Shopping for Subsidies.
In conjunction with the report, Good Jobs First’s Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch website enables consumers to select their cities and states and find out how much Wal-Mart subsidies are costing them.
The state with the most new deals is Illinois with nine. It is followed by Florida and Missouri with four each; Arizona, California and Kansas with three each; and Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio with two each. Alabama, Maryland, Minnesota, Texas and Wyoming each had one recent deal.
Illinois also accounts for the most deals in the entire Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch database with 38. Following it are Texas (29), Missouri (23), Louisiana (20) and California (18).
Subsidies? For the nation’s biggest employer (1.39 million U.S. workers in 2005) whose profits The New York Times sums up as follows:
In 2006, it sold $350 billion worth of merchandise, four times more than its next biggest rival, Home Depot, and it earned $12 billion in profit. Even after stumbling in Germany and South Korea, the chain is growing rapidly abroad, in countries like Mexico, China and Brazil.
The Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch website also includes a summary of disclosures made by some two dozen states on the number of Wal-Mart workers (or their dependents) who have enrolled in taxpayer-funded health care programs such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. More than 60 percent of Wal-Mart employees—600,000 people—are forced to get health insurance coverage from the government or through spouses’ plans or live without any health insurance.
Last year, the AFL-CIO released a report showing how Wal-Mart shifts health care costs to consumers and a bunch of studies showing how Wal-Mart profits from taxpayers. These can be found at the AFL-CIO Paying the Price at Wal-Mart website.
Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First, puts it this way:
What we said in 2004 still holds true today: Wal-Mart presents itself as an entrepreneurial success story, yet it routinely gets big tax breaks, free land, cash grants and other forms of taxpayer assistance.
The most common type of subsidy among the new deals was infrastructure assistance, which occurred in 21 facilities and accounted for $124 million of the total subsidies (with the money usually raised through tax increment financing). The second most significant type, by value, was sales tax rebates, which went to 10 stores and totaled $55 million.
These rebates occur when a locality allows Wal-Mart to keep a significant portion of the sales taxes it collects from customers that would normally go to local government.
As Mattera notes:
We saw few such rebates in our previous work. This new trend suggests that Wal-Mart seeks increasingly to be subsidized directly by its customers, even though it often brags about how much money it saves them.
Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, nicely sums up the findings:
That a company with a predatory business model and a poverty-wage labor policy can even qualify for job subsidies suggests many public officials still don’t get it.
6 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Here we go again-we continue to put the mouth on Wal-Mart, yet Union after Union wants to support Hillary Clinton - that would be the I served on the Board of Dorectors Hillary Clinton who as recently as 2004 stood up and praised Wal-Mart and commented on how much she enjoyed her time on their Board of Directors.
So we are going to support Ms Corporate America while attacking her employer????
This is one issue which makes it plain that labor can not trust this canidate on any issue. Her they are great - but now that I need labor - they aren’t so great attitude is only a prelude to what we can expect from her if she was to be elected.
Labor can more than likely expect a continued attack by this canidate. She not only has supported Wal-mart, but you can probably bet she will continue to support plans put in place by her husband such as NAFTA which have cost millions of Union members their jobs.
You ask yourself why national Union membership has gone down??? Try the exportation of America’s jobs due to trade agreements such as those pushed by the Clintons.
The continued demise of America’s labor and middle class can be assured by supporting Ms Corporate America Hillary Clinton.
NAFTA, CAFTA and now Comprehensive Immigration Reform which Hillary is supporting, all legislation the Democrats promised was good for the American worker. The Democrats are no better for us than the Republicans, they both are willing to sell us down the river for campaign contributions and corporate profits. We need a candidate that stands up for the working people of this country, Hillary is not the one and if she is I’ll be voting Republican this election day.
We must pray the working peoople are protectectd from our government. Our taxes go to support and protect hundreds of Mosques financed by Saudi Arabian extremist Muslims, sending money to Palsestine and supporting terrorists and criminals who have entered the USA through open borders.
Paul & BGordon said it all….when are we, as labor, going to stop supporting people simply because they are Democrats? Hillary and her likes assume that our wallets are going to be open to them based soley on their politicial party, and sadly, that is a very valid assumption. This AFL-CIO site rips on Wal-Mart, but I haven’t seen much “ripping” on Hillary for her ties to this company that has cost organized labor thousands of jobs.
I only hope that more unions follow the lead of the International Association of Fire Fighters, and start looking at what the candidate can do for us, as opposed to just looking at the label of Democrat or Republican before they open the union check book. The check book that is filled with money from dues paying members! Members need to start holding their officials in the union accountable for who they back. I for one am urging my members to do just that.
The best and I feel the only way we can tell and show these mongers that NO MAS is to boycott them and put them out of business. Until we stop buying there, it will continue. This battle of not paying good wages, not paying for overtime, discrimination against women will continue. Americans will have to realize that we are in fact creating these monsters by our constant financial support.
Good point about Hillary and the Unions. Of course, when was the last time any major candidate talked about worker concerns? OSHA, union organizing, etc. etc.
The one thing I heard Kerry mention was that the minimum wage woud get raised to a whopping $7/hour over several years. The unions are kinda out to lunch.