This article first appeared in the Sept.-Oct.2002 issue of The Yankee Radical, published by Boston DSA. See our "Justice for Wal-Mart Workers" page for information about Wal-Mart activism.

Barbara is a divorced woman in her mid fifties, and a cashier at Wal-Mart. A high school graduate, she has worked all her adult life- through two marriages, and two children-in a variety of unskilled and low-paid jobs. But Wal-Mart, she says, "is the worst." After three years she earns $7.34 an hour, gets inadequate medical benefits and has no pension plan. She recently bought a condemned house for $100 dollars, and signed it over to her daughter, who now pays the taxes on the property. As a result, Barbara lives there rent-free. On her salary, she says, "I can't afford to pay rent."

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world. With a 23 percent share of the U.S. market, it has 2,744 stores in the U.S. alone, and almost 4,000 worldwide. It employs more workers than any other U.S. company and more than 1.2 million globally. The company has grown dramatically in the last two decades. Earning $1 billion in sales in 1979, today it earns as much in a single day.

Today about 20 percent of all employed women in the U.S. labor force-one out of every five- work in the retail industry. Sixty-four percent of non-supervisory workers in retail are women. No other occupational category employs such a large percentage.

At home and abroad Wal-Mart's goal is to reduce operating costs- large parts of which are in wages and salaries. Not only does Wal- Mart contract for sweated labor in its export processing zones, but at home Wal-Mart cuts costs by spending 25 percent less on labor than its leading competitors. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of September 2000, 69 percent of all women employed in U.S. retail sales earned less than $7.91 an hour.)

Low wages for workers contribute to Wal-Mart's low prices. Such prices may only be possible because the company is breaking the law. In fact Wal-Mart has been sued in several states for wage abuse-for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. In its contracting shops in China, Wal-Mart violates labor laws with impunity, paying less than subsistence wages. In the U.S. men hold 90 percent of its store manager positions, although 72 percent of the hourly sales force is female. Walmart has a long history of sex discrimination suits against it and is now being sued by 46,000 women workers in its California stores. This could be the largest sex discrimination suit the nation has ever seen.

Wal-Mart also saves money at home by denying workers legally required breaks and lunch hours. As one worker said, "Cashiers don't get the breaks required by law and sometimes get no lunch at all. We are made to work over and not paid overtime." Adds another, "Management is constantly breathing down our necks with subtle threats of being written up or just plain ole fired if we don't meet their demands."

Wal-Mart is known as a successful and well-run company. But it is breaking the law-just like Enron and Worldcom. The only difference is the kind of laws it breaks.

Brandeis Professor Ellen Rosen is researching working conditions in the retail trade (eirosen@brandeis.edu).