Wal-Mart has had legal problems

Editor,

Let us take a look at some of Wal-Mart's legal problems. Wal-Mart used to advertise that they always had the lowest prices. The better Business Bureau investigated and found this was not true and ordered Wal-Mart to cease and desist. In December 2005 in Oakland, Calif., a jury awarded $172,000,000 to thousands of employees at Wal-Mart who claimed they were illegally denied lunch breaks.

Wal-Mart is a recidivist violator of employee rights, dressing repeated convictions and fines throughout this country. The equal opportunity commission has had to file more suits against Wal-Mart for cases of disability discrimination than any other corporation.

A national class-action suit by women employees reveals an astonishing pattern of sexual discrimination. Workers compensation laws, child labor laws (1,400 violations in Maine alone), surveillance of employees, etc., Wal-Mart is a repeat offender. You may have read about Wal-Mart hiring illegal aliens for janitor work, paying about half-minimum wage.

For years Wal-Mart saturated the airwaves with a "We Buy American" advertising campaign, but it was nothing more than a red, white and blue sham. All along, the vast majority of the products it sold were from foreign cheap-labor hellholes, especially in China. The balance of trade deficit with China is now approximately $200 billion a year. Wal-Mart alone is responsible for much of this.

Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee (NLC) reports, "In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst." The NLC, acclaimed for its fact-packed reports on global working conditions, found several Chinese factories that make the toys Americans buy at Wal-Mart. NLC interviewed workers in China's Guangdon province who toil in factories make toys sold in Wal-Mart. In "Toys of Misery," a shocking 58-page report that the establishment media ignored, NLC describes:

? 13 to 16-hour days molding, assembling and spray-painting toys, seven days a week, with 20-hour shifts in peak season.

? Even though China's minimum wage is 31 cents an hour which doesn't begin to cover a person's basic subsistence level needs, the production workers, mostly young women and teenage girls, are paid 13 cents an hour.

? Workers typically live in shacks, seven feet by seven feet, or jammed in company dorms with more than a dozen sharing a cubicle costing $1.95 a week for rent. They pay $5.50 a week for terrible food. They are fined if they are too ill to work.

? The work is literally sickening since there's no health and safety enforcement. Workers have constant headaches and nausea from paint-dust hanging in the air; the indoor temperatures tops 100 degrees, repetitive stress disorders are rampant, and there's no training on or protection from the health hazards of handling the plastics, glue, paint thinners and other solvents, which these workers are immersed in each day.

A feature that is ignored by the pro-Wal-Mart letter writers is that retail service jobs are low-paying, and often minimum wage type jobs. They are often a drain on the economy as they are a burden on the state. Are you aware that Wal-Mart provides its workers with access information to county social workers so they can quickly verify if they are eligible for food stamps, health insurance coverage and other state-funded assistance.

In the book, "American: Who Stole the Dream?" by Pulitzer prize-winning reporters Barlett and Steele, there are quoted statistics from the a U.S. Bureau of Labor.

Now hear this: In 1955 retail workers were paid 57 percent of the median family income; in 1995 retail workers got 29 percent of the median family income. In 2005 the percentage is probably worse. Does this deplorable state of affairs give you pause for a thought? Do you want to guess how much of this is attributable to Wal-Mart?

Stanley Petersen

Polson