Walmart’s winning ways

Walmart, currently facing down a massive strike, is America’s largest private employer. In 2011 it enjoyed a profit of 16.4 billion dollars, by the simple wheeze of paying their staff so little that the state has to make up their wages. It’s not illegal. The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. That’s dollars, mind, not pounds. If you work in a restaurant or anywhere that might provide tips, the federal minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour, against which the value of meals provided by the employer can be deducted.

A recent study by University College Berkeley found that Walmart’s low wages are costing the state of California alone $86 million a year to provide public assistance like food stamps. The state spends nearly $2,000 every single year on each Walmart employee who can’t afford basic essentials like housing, food, and healthcare. The tax-payer has to fork out more than $2.6 billion every single year to enable Walmart workers to live. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Walmart has just adopted a new healthcare policy that will deny insurance for any employees working fewer than 30 hours a week. And guess what – hardly any of them are now employed for more than 30 hours a week.

So who exactly are the benefit scroungers? Not the wretched workers stuggling to stay alive, but their wealthy employers (owners of the British chain, ASDA, by the way) who are clawing money in from the state in order to foot their own wages bill. Talk about bah, humbug – it makes Scrooge look like the Angel Gabriel.