[Peace-discuss] good news on Wal:-(Mart front

[Ricky Baldwin]

Wal-Mart must pay $200m to workers denied lunch breaks

Independent (London)
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 
Published: 23 December 2005 

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retail company, has
suffered a potentially ominous legal setback, with a
California jury awarding more than $200m (£115m) to
thousands of employees who alleged they were illegally
and systematically denied lunch-breaks.
 
The company has been fighting allegations for years,
in and out of court, that it cuts corners to keep
labour costs low. Yesterday's jury verdict in Oakland,
near San Francisco, marked the first time that the
company had been forced to go to trial and lost.

The suit was one of about 40 in the works nationwide
alleging that the Arkansas-based retailer, which
boasts a chain of mostly suburban superstores across
the United States and beyond, routinely violates US
labour laws - keeping workers off the clock so they
are not credited for overtime, denying them
lunch-breaks and other rests, and so on.

Wal-Mart is at the centre of a growing dispute over
the economic desirability of the sort of superstore it
has pioneered. While the chain, and others like it,
provides affordable consumer goods and plentiful
employment, especially in impoverished areas of the
country that are badly in need of both, its critics
complain that it earns its profits at the expense of
both the communities where it takes up occupancy and
its own underpaid employees.

While the surviving members of the founding Walton
family are all multi-billionaires, almost half the
children of company employees either have no health
insurance or else rely on government-sponsored
subsistence programmes to gain access to basic medical
care, according to the company's own figures. An
unknown number of employees relies on government food
stamps to keep body and soul together month to month.

Labour unions have been complaining about Wal-Mart for
years, and in the past few months have focused their
organising efforts around a new documentary entitled
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, produced and
directed by the prominent Hollywood liberal activist
Robert Greenwald.

The film has been a considerable PR blow to the
company, which has fought back via conservative
think-tanks and its own media information machine to
try to pour cold water on the film's most incendiary
attacks and discredit the film-makers. A pro-Wal-Mart
documentary has also made the rounds, albeit far less
prominently.

In the wake of the California ruling, it now appears
that the company's labour practices may prove to be
its Achilles heel. It has already settled one
class-action lawsuit in Colorado for $50m - a case
that bears many similarities to the California one.

A judge in Missouri, meanwhile, has just granted
class-action status to another suit originally filed
in 2001. Although that case is still some distance
away from trial, the judge's ruling accepted the
plaintiffs' contention that whatever was going on was
the result of a systematic policy dictated by Wal-Mart
headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

In other parts of the country, Wal-Mart has fared
better. Courts in Florida, Ohio, Texas, Louisiana and
North Carolina have either refused to grant
class-action status to plaintiffs in Wal-Mart cases or
otherwise thrown the suits out. 




		
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