“Working Families for Wal-Mart”: Follow The Money

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Washington, D.C., December 20, 2005 - The Associated Press reports today on the formation of a new group, “Working Families for Wal-Mart.”  The group is primarily – if not solely, we ask – funded by Wal-Mart and plans to defend the practices of the world's largest corporation.

Wal-Mart Watch invites this new group – including the legendary heavy metal singer Pat Boone, overnight filmmaker Ron Galloway, and Rev. Ira Combs of the Greater Bible Way Temple of Jackson, MI – to review the latest data on the company.  Our Web site, www.walmartwatch.com, is the nation’s premier online resource for facts and research about the company.  It is there that this new group can learn that Wal-Mart does not, in fact, serve working families well.  

Some facts on Wal-Mart and working families:

•    The average annual pay for a cashier is $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

•    Wal-Mart fails to provide health insurance to over half of its 1.3 million U.S. employees.

•    By its own admission, 46% of the children of Wal-Mart employees are uninsured or covered by Medicaid.

And should this new Wal-Mart funded group want to refer to yesterday’s attack on us from a right-wing organization, they’d have something in common: Wal-Mart funded them, too.  

Read the attack piece here.

See the contribution to the American Enterprise Institute here.

Read more about the new group here.

Read earlier reporting about Wal-Mart's efforts to woo clergy here.