Wal-Mart Real Wage and Turnover Study [Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now]

BACKGROUND Through a public records request, WARN obtained copies of reports of employee quarterly earnings filed with the State of Florida by employers for purposes of determining unemployment compensation tax liability. Data provided was for the first quarter of 2005. The names of both the employees AND the employers are exempt from disclosure, but the number of employees and the distribution of their reported earnings alone provided sufficient information to allow WARN to infer which report was Wal-Mart’s.
The data provided was simply a list of quarterly earnings as opposed to quarterly wage levels. The two differ in that many workers were not employed by the company for the entire quarter, workers logged different numbers of hours per week, some workers received salary increases, etc. The record did not provide any other pay-related information or demographic characteristics whatsoever, and that limited the analysis in some important ways. However, based on reasonable assumptions, information reported directly by the company, and other known factors (the minimum wage, the company’s aversion to paying overtime, etc.), WARN was able to construct a wage profile of Wal-Mart workers that fits the available information, shining a clearer light on a number of the company’s practices in Florida and corroborating what workers have reported anecdotally about those practices.

RAW EARNINGS DATA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS More than 113,600 Florida Wal-Mart workers had some earnings reported for the 1st quarter of 2005. Some 19,3001 of these earned a total of $1,000 or less during the entire quarter, which includes an estimated 2,800 seasonal or temporary workers. Another 1,300 such temporary workers are believed to have earned between $1,000 and $2,000 for the quarter.