Wal-Mart Sets A New Ethical Low In Corporate Greed

The photo above was taken by a Wal-Mart employee and was found at cleveland.com. It shows a collection set up by Wal-Mart management in an employees only section of a Canton (Ohio) Wal-Mart. The company is asking their employees to donate food items to help their fellow employees have a good Thanksgiving dinner.

Canton resident Norma Mills, who works with Stand Up for Ohio, said she was outraged when she saw the picture. She went on to say:

"Then I went through the emotion of compassion for the employees, working for the largest food chain in America, making low wages, and who can't afford to provide their families with a good Thanksgiving holiday. That Walmart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers -- to me, it is a moral outrage."

I have to agree with her. It is ridiculous for a company like Wal-Mart, which specializes is providing low-wage, no-benefit jobs to do this. The company tried to defend itself, and their spokesman Kory Lundberg said:

"It is for associates who have had some hardships come up. Maybe their spouse lost a job. This is part of the company's culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships." 

I wonder if he, or the company he works for, understands just what they have admitted to. First, it is not the company that is providing a Thanksgiving dinner for these needy employees. They are asking other employees to do it. Second, this is an admission that the wages they pay will not support a family -- that a Wal-Mart worker would need another family member to have an income also to support that family. And if that second job income was lost, the family could not live on what Wal-Mart paid its employees.

I expect that many of those low-wage employees will sacrifice a bit for their fellow employees and come up with donations. It is just a fact that those who have the least are more generous with the little they have than most of those who have a lot (the rich).

Wal-Mart made a profit of nearly $16 billion last year -- profit (not sales), after all expenses are accounted for. Wal-Mart could afford to provide their employees with a Thanksgiving dinner, but they prefer to horde their profits and ask their low-wage workers to do that. Actually, Wal-Mart could easily afford to pay all of their employees a livable wage, making something like this unnecessary (and saving taxpayers a ton of money that's currently paid out in poverty benefits to Wal-Mart workers).

But this is normal in a capitalist economy. The rich horde most of the income, while the rest struggle to live and to take care of each other. It's time to raise the minimum wage substantially (to at least $10.00 an hour) and tie it to the inflation rate. It's time to make the giant corporations pay their own expenses, and not foist part of those expenses onto the taxpayers.