A Look At The New Upscale Wal-Mart

   As you may well know, Wal-Mart has decided to go upscale with many of their stores. They wish to service a more upscale crowd and not just the working class person who frequents their stores the majority of the time.

    While this is well and good, the story is that Wal-Mart is still continuing with their less than stellar business practices and treatment of their employees.

    From Alternet:

Beneath Wal-Mart's new cosmetic sheen lies the same old ugliness. The average employee toils for $8.23 an hour -- a poverty-level wage that amounts to about $16,700 a year gross (in both meanings of that word). Many don't even make that, for Wal-Mart defines "fulltime" work as 36 hours a week rather than the usual 40. It's common for bosses to hold workers to under 24 hours a week, which reduces gross annual income to only about $10,000.

Meanwhile, fewer than half of Wal-Mart's employees get any healthcare benefits at all -- and those who do must pay 41 percent of the cost for a lousy plan that carries a $3,000 deductible per family plus a $300 pharmacy deductible and a $1,000 in-patient hospital deductible. Honchos at headquarters keep insisting that the health benefits they offer are "competitive" with other retailers. But look no further than Costco, where a good plan covers 80 percent of employees and the company pays 90 percent of the premiums.

The richest corporation in retailing, with $312 billion in sales (more than the next five biggest retailers combined), pushes the bulk of its workers onto public-assistance programs, even telling employees how to sign up for government help in a company bulletin called "Instructions for Associates." In all 23 states that have released data on their state-funded health-care programs, Wal-Mart is the corporation with the most employees and dependents enrolled. Also, in a 2005 internal memo, the company's head of benefits conceded that "46 percent of associates' children are either on Medicaid or uninsured."   Entire Article

        So as you can see, even with going somewhat upscale, Wal-Mart employees and their families will still be getting shafted at every possible turn.

    With $312 billion in sales this company should be ashamed of itself!

 

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