How taxpayers subsidize Walmart: Walmart is the largest private employer in the US – and has the most workers on public assistance.
Since 2007, the company shifted from regular shifts to flexible shifts, a change labor activists said was designed to force full-time workers to downgrade their status to part-time, so they would not qualify for health insurance or other benefits.
The result is that hundreds of thousands of Walmart employees rely on state benefits or Medicaid. Most of the company’s waredhouses are contracted out to temp agencies, so even if a warehouse loader works full-time in a Walmart warehouse for years, he gets no benefits.
Walmart has also spent at least $1 billion since 2005 settling lawsuits over unpaid wages or illegal working conditions. One study estimated that Walmart workers cost taxpayers more than $1billion every year. [taken word-for-word from the week]
…Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Insitute points out, the six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, up from 30 percent in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, the collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000 (13 million Americans have negative net worth). [from mother jones.com]
Six members of the Walton family appear on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. Christy Walton, widow of the late John Walton, leads the clan at No. 6 with a net worth of $25.3 billion as of March 2012. She is also the richest woman in the world for the seventh year in a row, according toForbes. Here are the other five:
No. 9: Jim Walton, $23.7 billion
No. 10: Alice Walton, $23.3 billion
No. 11: S. Robson Walton, oldest son of Sam Walton, $23.1 billion
No. 103: Ann Walton Kroenke, $3.9 billion
No. 139: Nancy Walton Laurie, $3.4 billionThat’s a grand total of $102.7 billion for the whole family.
Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California-Berkeley, compared the Waltons’ cumulative net worth with that of the overall population, as cited in the Survey of Consumer Finances. (She used the Waltons’ wealth from 2010, which was valued at $89.5 billion.)
Allegretto found that in 2007, the wealth held by the six Waltons was equal to that of the bottom 30.5 percent of families in the U.S. In 2010, the Waltons’ share equaled the entire bottom 41.5 percent of families.
That 41.5 percent represents nearly 49 million families, notes Josh Bivens at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. While median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, Bivens wrote, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion in 2007 to $89.5 billion in 2010, or about 22 percent growth.