Thanksgiving, Wal-Mart style

Challenging Wal-Mart’s Freeloading Ways

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

Countless words have been published about the retrograde labor practices of Wal-Mart, but none of that writing conveyed as much as the short message recently reported to have been taped to a bin in an employees-only area at one of the company’s stores in Ohio: “Please donate food items here so Associates in Need can enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner.”

My first reaction was that this was a stunt staged by the Yes Men to embarrass the giant retailer. Yet it was all too real. In fact, a corporate spokesperson saw nothing amiss, saying it showed how much the company’s employees care about each other. No doubt they do, but the problem is that Wal-Mart is so deliberately obtuse about its obligation to provide a decent living to those on its payroll.

Leaving it to hard-pressed workers to support their colleagues is just one of the ways Wal-Mart shifts its costs to others. The company puts a much bigger burden on taxpayers, who end up paying for the healthcare coverage that so many of its employees must get from public programs such as Medicaid.

In the early 2000s some states began to disclose which employers accounted for the most low-wage workers and their dependents in these programs. Wal-Mart was invariably at or near the top of these lists. (See the Good Jobs First compilation here.)

Unfortunately, fewer of these lists are being released (and the Affordable Care Act will apparently do nothing to help). Yet the few recent disclosures show Wal-Mart is still creating more of these hidden taxpayer costs than any other company. 

For example, in July the Dayton Daily News obtained data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services indicating that Wal-Mart had more employees or household members on Medicaid or food stamps than any other employer in the state. 

The most recent compilation of employers accounting for the largest number of recipients in Connecticut’s Husky program (its version of Medicaid) also had Wal-Mart as number one.

Another approach was taken in a recent report by the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which estimates that the workforce of a typical Wal-Mart Supercenter costs taxpayers some $250,000 a year for Medicaid services (as part of at least $904,000 a year in overall federal safety net costs per store).

These hidden costs are not the only way Wal-Mart sticks taxpayers with the bill. The company has traditionally also been shameless in demanding special tax breaks and other forms of financial assistance when it opens a new store or distribution center. 

My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have been tracking this practice since 2004, when we published a report estimating that the company had collected some $1 billion in such subsidies. We later updated the report, finding that the total had risen to $1.2 billion, and we assembled all the data in a website called Walmart Subsidy Watch.

In many of its more controversial urban siting efforts in recent years, Wal-Mart has put less emphasis on special subsidies, which we like to think is because we made the practice more radioactive. Yet the company cannot resist its giveaway demands entirely.

Recently, for example, the company sought tax breaks totaling some $5.4 million for a Supercenter and Sam’s Club it is proposing to build in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. Thankfully, the plan was shot down by the board of the Summit Hill School District, which took its vote after a hearing in which one resident described Wal-Mart as a “corporate monster.”

In Texas, however, Wal-Mart seems to be on track to receive a property tax abatement worth $3 million in connection with its plan to build an e-commerce distribution center near Fort Worth Alliance Airport. (For other recent awards, see the company’s entries in the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker database, which covers all companies; be sure to search under the official corporate name Wal-Mart as well as the brand name Walmart).

The spirit of the Summit Hill School District is reflected in the activism of rank and file workers, who with the assistance of OUR Walmart are planning to resume protests at company stores on Black Friday. Their efforts will help replace food drives with a living wage and eventually get Wal-Mart to change all its freeloading ways.