Wal-Mart: Another Plank in Building the Future?

Maureen Lane

Wal-Mart: Another Plank in Building the Future?

In yesterday's New York Times Business section, Greenhouse and Barbaro report, "Wal-Mart...acknowledged that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million United States employees were uninsured or on Medicaid." Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer-- are we going to let them set the standard?

Access to health care is critical for families. But often families have to choose between meeting basic necessities, childcare, food and housing, or spending a chunk of their monthly income on health care. The Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement prepared a report that reveals important standards for evaluating family income.

The Self-Sufficiency standard for the City of New York documents the amount a family must earn in order to get by without public or private assistance. For example, an adult with a school age child needs $37,492.54 annually to have adequate housing, childcare, food transportation and health care in Brooklyn.

Working full time minimum wage in New York brings in $12,480 a year. This falls way short of the sufficiency standard the Women's Center offers. I hope Wal-Mart endorses a visionary increase from minimum wage, to living wage. The City Council's Health Care Security Act which has just passed over a mayoral veto is one example of how legislation can force companies to be accountable for community resources they drain when workers are underpaid.

Wal-Mart has actually endorsed raising the minimum wage across the board. Surprising? Yes, but they support the increase because it is a good business practice for them. People with slightly more spending money, can spend more money--- at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's employees usually earn more than minimum wage so it doesn't cost the company anything to support a minimum wage increase-- it just boosts their sales. However as the living wage standards show, even when earning more than minimum wage Wal-Mart employees are still qualifying for public assistance and barely scrapping by.

This has been a season for a deeper understanding of poverty in America. The needs of poor and low-income families intersect the health, education and well being of every other American in a variety of ways. When we cut off access to education or health care to poor and low income Americans, everyone suffers.

As we all consider electing a new round of policy-makers, we must understand how they will shape families in the future, and right now. Each corporate tax cut, each reduction in social service, each time government relinquishes oversight and intervention to the private sector we lay another plank in the foundation of a new generations future.