6-06-05,5:16am

Wal-Mart is getting mad, and maybe a little paranoid.

In a desperate effort to revamp its image as the big corporate monopoly that pays low wages, few benefits, discriminates against its women employees, forces small businesses to close, and contributes to urban and suburban sprawl, the retail giant has gone on a public relations blitz.

As part of the PR campaign, the global conglomerate has described criticism of its health insurance policies as a “smear.”

The company has downplayed its widely recognized negative qualities and insists that it brings jobs to communities with good benefits and provides a valuable service by selling its products at low prices.

Wal-Mart’s critics aren’t buying it. A union-backed publicity campaign called Wake Up Wal-Mart takes a different view. At a series of rallies and other public events this past week activists with Wake Up Wal-Mart have highlighted Wal-Mart’s few health insurance benefits.

The company spends so little on providing health insurance to its workers and their wages are so low that many of them are eligible to receive public assistance to cover the costs of health insurance and for other needs.

Critics of the company’s policies say that low wages and severe restrictions on existing benefit plans deny many employees access to health insurance.

Workers earning around $17,000 a year can’t afford to spend 10% of their wages on the company’s expensive health insurance plans. Wal-Mart rules that require 6 months or more of tenure before employees are eligible for benefits also restrict access.

In Georgia, for example, a survey by that state’s Department of Community Health showed that in September 2002, 10,261 children who received the state’s public health insurance had a parent working at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart children on Georgia’s public health insurance plan totaled about 6% of all Georgia’s children receiving assistance from the state. This figure far out-distanced those of other large companies in the state; the next highest total was just in the hundreds.

In California, according to a Berkeley study published last summer, more than half of the company’s employees do not receive employer-sponsored benefits. Comparatively, 23% fewer Wal-Mart employees get health insurance from the company than other large retail companies. As a result, California spends annually $86 million to provide public assistance to Wal-Mart employees alone, almost 40% of which goes to covering health care costs.

And again, Wal-Mart far outpaces other large California retail companies in this category.

In Arkansas, where the company’s headquarters are located, Wal-Mart tops the list of companies with employees or their children on the state Medicaid program for uninsured children and adults, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported last March. Almost 4,000 of its 45,106 employees receive public assistance, while the state’s largest private employer, Triad Hospitals, only has three employees receiving public assistance.

Several other states including Tennessee, Washington, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Connecticut have also reported that Wal-Mart employees or their children are a disproportionately large share of those receiving public assistance for health care coverage.

In fact, store documents from one of Wal-Mart’s Las Vegas outlet published by Fortune magazine in 2003 showed that the company provided employees with paperwork that certified their poverty status in order to receive public assistance. Other stores, according to a former manager, provided low-wage workers with information on where and how to apply to state agencies for public assistance. In all, according to a report released last year by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), taxpayers will pay an estimated $420,000 each year for every Wal-Mart store for public assistance benefits for the company’s employees. It amounts to a massive taxpayer subsidy of a company for its low wages and stingy health care benefits package, says the report.

Minnesota lawmakers think they might have a solution to this problem. Some concerned state legislators are pushing for a law that would create a public list of companies whose workers are enrolled in the state’s public health care assistance program, MinnesotaCare. Though the bill does not target Wal-Mart, the retail giant has denounced the bill as a ploy, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Wisconsin residents didn’t regard a similar law passed a few years back as a ploy, however. Once they learned that their tax dollars were subsidizing big companies who refuse to provide adequate health care benefits to employees, they got angry.

Just last week, one Wisconsin state lawmaker introduced a bill that “would place a graduated 1 percent to 2 percent tax on gross receipts on any store that exceeds $20 million in sales in a taxable year, and that allocates less than 10 percent of its payroll to health insurance for its employees.”

Altogether, 24 states are considering legislation similar to Minnesota’s.

The retail giant took in over $10.5 billion in profits alone in 2004 and frequently tops the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world.



--Joel Wendland can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.