Wal-Mart Watch Releases New Health Care Report On Year Anniversary Of Chambers Memo
For Immediate Release
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Washington, D.C. – Wal-Mart Watch today, on the one-year anniversary of the Susan Chambers Health Care Memo story, releases a new report examining Wal-Mart’s methodical implementation of the memo’s controversial proposals. The report, titled “Out With The Old,” outlines the company’s deliberate strategy to cut spending on employee health care through Health Savings Accounts, hire more part-time employees and discourage unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.
The contents of the Chambers Memo, published in the New York Times on October 26, 2005, included a range of aggressive plans to attack growth in employee benefit expenses. Ms. Chambers warned that the company’s “growth in benefits costs is unsustainable” and she blamed “fundamental and persistent root causes,” including an aging workforce and an increasing average tenure of its employees.
One year after the memo, Wal-Mart is following through on many of the proposals that were widely criticized at the time. Wal-Mart is implementing family-unfriendly scheduling policies, changing its health care offerings to penalize those who actually use their benefits and imposing new wage caps that discourage employees from making a career at Wal-Mart.
In the memo, Ms. Chambers worried that “the least healthy, least productive Associates are more satisfied with their benefits… and are interested in longer careers with Wal-Mart.” Ms. Chambers also warned management that offering someone an annual raise was “pricing that Associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart.” And she recommended that the company “dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart” and from staying by “designing all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart gathering).”
Wal-Mart Watch’s executive director, Andrew Grossman, issues the following statement along with the release of the new report:
“A year ago today millions learned just how far America’s largest employer would go to pad its bottom line. Wal-Mart had an opportunity to reject these measures and declare publicly – and honestly – its commitment to the principles of its founder, Sam Walton.
“Instead, the current management at Wal-Mart broke Sam Walton’s compact with Wal-Mart employees, and continues to treat their workers as expendable mass-produced products of little value and with a sell-by date.”
- Click here (PDF) to read the full report.
- Click here (PDF) to read the full Susan Chambers Health Care Memo.
