Life in the minority isn’t easy. When you’re in the minority and a recipient of threats and abuse because of your minority status, life gets even harder. But when you bring these issues and concerns for your own safety to the attention of your employer, and they do nothing, thats called the tipping point.

And so it was for Louay Kezy, a Michigan man who has filed a $12 million lawsuit against Wal-Mart after being on the receiving end of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab abuse at work. Kezy’s attorney, Nabih Ayad, relayed Kezy’s story to the Detroit News:

“They demeaned him, harassed him, called him names. They accused him of being a terrorist,” Ayad said. “Supervisors ordered him to do jobs that were unrelated to his duties. They allowed a joke, a game to continue where co-workers would toss a ball near him and pretend it was a grenade, a bomb. Wal-Mart allowed this hostile environment to continue and they fired him when he complained.”

Dearborn, Michigan, has a very large Arab and Muslim population, and with that in mind Wal-Mart opened an experimental store there in March which offers a special line of products geared toward the Arab American and American Muslim communities in the Metro Detroit area. Unfortunately, the same respect shown to customers may be missing with regards to employees.

“It is absurd that his supervisors think they can take this action against an Arab American without consequences right in the middle of the largest Arab community outside of the Middle East,” Ayad said. “That Wal-Mart can take their money as consumers but allow an Arab employee to be abused is absurd.”

This is a refrain we’ve heard all too often. Issues of discrimination within Wal-Mart seem to follow the company like paparazzi on Britney Spears.

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The collection is from an undisclosed company - unnamed because of state tax confidentiality laws.

The REIT loophole issue, which focuses on the use of captive real estate investment trusts to avoid paying state corporate income taxes, has been in the national spotlight for going on two years now. In North Carolina, Wal-Mart saved millions of dollars in state tax bills by essentially transferring its properties to its own REIT and paying rent to itself, then writing it off as a tax deduction. These transactions were frequently followed by rather suspicious looking characters in black masks trudging back to Bentonville with big old gobs of money that could have gone to funding state programs.

North Carolina got wise to the scheme and assessed Wal-Mart for back taxes. Additional states have sought ways to close the loophole up, either through attacking it directly or by adopting combined reporting. Maryland is one of those states - last year Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot announced that his state would no longer allow payments to captive REITs to be deducted from state tax returns. Now following its first publicized audit since then, Maryland will receive $10.8 million in back taxes for a 3-year period from the unnamed company.

We’ve chronicled again and again that Wal-Mart is one of the worst offenders in this area. Simply closing the loophole is one way to fix it. Adopting combined reporting is another. At least in Maryland’s case, the effort has already resulted in nearly $11 million coming back into the state treasury.

Maryland collects millions after closing tax loophole [Washington Post]

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Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the world, with just over 2 millions employees on its payroll. So when the company does something wrong, there are usually a lot of people involved and for that reason, Wal-Mart often finds itself the subject of class action lawsuits.

An article today from Bloomberg News notes that there are currently over 70 lawsuits currently pending against Wal-Mart which deal with wage-and-hour violations alone. A 2005 federal law, which ruled that any lawsuit involving parties from multiple states and damages exceeding $5 million must go to federal court, means some of the cases filed since 2005 and currently pending against Wal-Mart will be combined. This had included class action suits from Delaware, South Dakota, Nevada and Alaska, until U.S. District Judge Phillip Pro denied their class status in June. Today’s article asserts that Wal-Mart stands to benefit from the 2005 law, which could make it harder for employees to collectively litigate against the company.

Whether Wal-Mart “shaved” time off employees’ schedules is not up for debate here: Judge Pro explained each wage-and-hour violation will simply be treated individually. Wal-Mart continues to look for ways to spend as little as possible on payroll, even if this means unfairly compensating employees for their hours worked. Rulings such as this one make it more difficult for employees to change Wal-Mart as a whole, but the company should stop breaking labor laws in the first place and pay its workers fairly.

Wal-Mart Shareholders Benefit From Judge’s Pay Ruling [Bloomberg News]

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., facing as much as $2 billion in damages in a Minnesota employee-pay trial, may be shielded from similar cases in the future thanks to a 2005 federal law.

The statute requires federal courts to handle class-action lawsuits of $5 million or more when plaintiffs and defendants are from different states. Because judges have been less willing to certify these cases as class actions, the law may save Wal-Mart as much as $5 billion, said Robert Bonsignore, lead workers’ attorney in Nevada suits against the world’s largest retailer. That’s equivalent to 77 percent of Wal-Mart’s $6.5 billion first- half profit.

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Proposal to locate a Wal-Mart near Cheswold tabled [The News Journal (Del.)]

A proposal to locate a Wal-Mart Super Center off U.S. 13 between Dover and Cheswold was tabled Thursday night by the Kent County Regional Planning Commission, which had raised numerous questions about the project at a public hearing a week earlier.

Constantine Malmberg, the local lawyer for Cheswold Village Properties LLC, the project developer, requested the delay, promising to meet during the interim with residents of the area and to address a raft of concerns raised by the planning staff.

The site plan calls for a 225,000-square-foot Super Center on 22 acres and an adjacent strip shopping center offering 25,000 square feet of retail floor space on seven acres just off U.S. 13 south of Simms Woods Road. The two developments would be served by a traffic signal at a new access road on U.S. 13, about 1,000 feet south of Simms Woods Road.

At the public hearing, residents said the project would worsen existing flood problems and attract traffic and crime to the area. Several commissioners expressed dismay at the time that representatives of Wal-Mart and the developers had not met with residents to hear their concerns.

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Kent wants answers on Wal-Mart [Delaware Online]

Developers of a proposed Wal-Mart Super Center off U.S. 13 between Dover and Cheswold were dressed down Thursday night by members of the Kent County Regional Planning Commission, who complained loudly that advocates of the project should have been better prepared.

Constantine Malmberg, the local lawyer for Cheswold Village Properties LLC, and a clutch of engineers tried to persuade commission members the project would not worsen traditional flooding problems for residents who live along Simms Woods Road, located at the northern edge of the proposed site.

Commission members were angered Malmberg could not assure that the store facade of Wal-Mart would not be of the “big blue box” variety.

The commission held a public hearing Thursday night, but was not slated to vote on a site plan until its meeting June 12. Commission Chairman Albert Holmes Jr., said the project, in the works since 2004, would be tabled at that time unless the developers came bearing answers to a raft of questions raised by commission members.

“First of all, there’s no way in the world I would want this next to my home,” Vice Chairman Ken Edwards said, drawing applause from residents.

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Many communities are eager to see a new Wal-Mart come to town, but few think of the effect the retailer will have if and when it leaves. This article from Minnesota’s St. Cloud Times gives a local perspective to the retailer’s global prospects. Visit Battle-Mart for more information about fighting Wal-Mart in your local community.

Wal-Mart’s exit is boon, bane for communities [St. Cloud Times (Minn.)]

An empty Wal-Mart building sits along a stretch of road in Little Falls and shoppers have been rerouted to a newer, bigger Wal-Mart down the street.

Its owners have taken care of the old building after the Wal-Mart Supercenter was built in August. It’s been repainted a shade of light green, masking signs of what once thrived there.

At any given time, about 300 to 400 former Wal-Mart stores sit empty around the nation, in some cases for as long as five to seven years, said Ken Stone, a retired professor from Iowa State University who has studied Wal-Mart for about 20 years. Those empty buildings can be a blight to a community and area businesses if they sit untouched for too long.

“It’s a real problem, there’s no question about it,” Stone said.

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