compiled by George Draffan of Endgame Research

• By 1998 Wal-Mart was larger than all three of its main rivals (Sears, Target, and Kmart) combined.
• Wal-Mart is the world's largest company measured by sales: $256 billion in 2003.
• "As of May 31, 2004, the Company had 1,412 Wal-Mart stores, 1,559 Supercenters, 539 Sam's Clubs and 68 Neighborhood Markets in the United States. Internationally, the Company operated units in Argentina (11), Brazil (144), Canada (236), China (39), Germany (92), South Korea (15), Mexico (626), Puerto Rico (54) and United Kingdom (269)." (Wal-Mart Investor Relations website accessed June 4, 2004).
• In 2004 Wal-Mart also had 400 stores in Japan in partnership with Seiyu Ltd. in Japan.
• In 2004 Wal-Mart employed 1.1 million workers in the USA and 300,000 outside the USA.
• "Wal-Mart CEO David Glass has stated that "Our priorities are that we want to dominate North America first, then South America, and then Asia and then Europe." (Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Wal-Mart and the Strip-Mining of America, Focus on the Corporation, Nov 9, 1998, citing Grant, USA Today).

Wal-Mart director resigns after internal investigation. USAToday, March 27, 2005. "A high-profile Wal-Mart (WMT) board member resigned Friday after an internal probe turned up evidence of financial improprieties of up to $500,000 dollars. Three Wal-Mart employees, including a company officer, also lost their jobs..."

Religious leaders join in successful community fight against Wal-Mart. Catholic Onlne, May 5, 2004.

Sequim [Wash]: Judge again refuses citizens group on Wal-Mart. By Jan Rodak. Peninsula Daily News, May 7, 2004.
Citizens group Sequim First was dealt another blow by Thurston County Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee in its attempt to stall construction of a Wal-Mart ``supercenter'' in Sequim. McPhee on Wednesday in Olympia refused to reconsider his March 19 ruling which denied an appeal filed by Sequim First challenging the City Council's initial permitting for a 195,000-square-foot Wal-Mart at West Washington Street and Priest Road. The appeal sought an independent environmental-impact statement prior to any permitting for the project. Sequim First has until June 4 to decide whether it will appeal McPhee's decision before the state Court of Appeals...

Chicago City Council puts hold on Wal-Mart. By Alex Daniels. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 23, 2004.
Wal-Mart is getting its first dose of life in the city. The Bentonville-based retail giant's plans to open two discount stores in Chicago have been put on hold by the City Council. Original plans for a May 5 vote on the two new stores, which are planned for lower-income neighborhoods, were postponed until Wednesday. Four city aldermen requested the delay. Religious leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., founder of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, argued that the jobs created by the new stores would not provide adequate health care and wages. They have called on Wal-Mart to offer concessions on wages and health-care benefits. Some local leaders want the retailer to guarantee it would hire ex-convicts...

Group sees Wal-Mart threat to Vermont. CNNMoney, May 24, 2004.
Historic trust group says new stores would smash state's rural life. "In its annual list of most endangered historic places, the National Trust for Historic Preservation included the state of Vermont because of an "onslaught of big-box" stores by Wal-Mart , the Arkansas-based retailer. Trust President Richard Moe said Wal-Mart planned to "saturate" Vermont -- known for its quaint villages, winding back roads and strong sense of community -- with seven new "Super Stores." These stores, said Moe, would spur more development, sprawl and lead to disinvestment in historic downtown areas and a loss of locally owned business..." Report by National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Medford council nixes proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter, cites traffic concerns. Portland Daily Journal of Commerce, May 24, 2004. "The Medford City Council reversed an advisory commission's recommendation last week and nixed a proposal to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter..."

Mexican sues to stop Wal-Mart at ruin: Activist sues to stop store construction near pyramids after alter unearthed in parking lot. Reuters/CNNMoney.com, Oct 19, 2004.
A Mexican leftist leader filed criminal charges against Wal-Mart and local and federal officials Tuesday over construction of a huge discount store in the shadow of ancient pyramids outside Mexico City.
Gerardo Fernandez, a national director of one of Mexico's biggest opposition parties -- the Party of the Democratic Revolution -- filed charges with the federal Attorney General's office to block the Wal-Mart owned store at the Teotihuacan archeological ruins.
Wal-Mart damaged archeological relics during construction, a crime subject to imprisonment, Fernandez said in his complaint, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. The company had no immediate comment.
Fernandez also charged that federal, state and local officials broke the law in fast-tracking the project, showing "mercantile and irresponsible conduct."
Construction of the Bodega Aurrera, a unit of global retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (Research), is nearly complete. The big-box style discount store is scheduled to open by December about half a mile from a tourist park housing the 2,000-year-old ruins on a United Nations World Heritage Site.
The project has fueled a growing national debate that pits notions of Mexican identity against global interests.|
Many residents and local authorities want the store for the low prices and jobs it will bring. And Wal-Mart calls it an investment in the poor community.
But some local opponents, along with leading Mexican artists and writers, say the outpost of U.S. consumer culture will mar the ruins, kill small enterprise and change the local way of life.
"Teotihuacan is for Mexicans our greatest cultural heritage, an expression of our history and our identity as a people and nation," 63 writers, painters and other cultural figures said in a letter to President Vicente Fox last week.
Fernandez called the store "an insult."
Their fight echoes opposition to Wal-Mart in the United States, where activists have fought, sometimes successfully, to block construction by the world's biggest retailer.
In his complaint Fernandez said national anthropology institute INAH should have stopped construction after a small altar was unearthed at the site, although preliminary excavations showed no evidence of valuable relics there.
INAH has said the altar will be preserved in the store parking lot, and that the store poses no threat to the ruins. The Paris-based International Council on Monuments and Sites and UNESCO have also signed off on the project.
No one is certain who founded the ancient seat of power and then abandoned it around A.D. 600. The Aztecs later came upon it and named it Teotihuacan (The Place Where Men Become Gods).

Steven Greenhouse, Illegally In U.S., And Never a Day Off At Wal-Mart, New York Times, Nov 5, 2003.

The Wal-Mart Effect. Los Angeles Times, November 2003 -- Part III: Unions Battle to Stop Invasion (11/25/03)

Job Creation or Destruction? Labor-Market Effects of Wal-Mart Expansion. By Emek Basker, University of Missouri, 2004.

Wal-Mart announces new employee plan. USAToday.com, June 4, 2004.
Wal-Mart will cut the bonuses for top executives if the company does not promote women and minorities in proportion to the number that apply for management positions, its top executive announced Friday. Chief executive Lee Scott said bonuses, including his own, would be cut up to 7.5% this year and 15% next year if the company does not meet its diversity goals. (Related story:Celebrity appearances at Wal-Mart's annual meeting) "If 50% of the people applying for the job of store manager are women, we will work to make sure that 50% of the people receiving those jobs are women," Scott said...

Court OKs Class-Action Against Wal-Mart. By Jesus Sanchez, Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2004.
A lawsuit claiming that retail giant Wal-Mart Stores discriminated against its female employees today became the largest civil rights case ever filed after a U.S. judge in San Francisco granted the legal complaint class-action status. The ruling by U.S. District Court judge Martin Jenkins means that as many as 1.6 million current and former female Wal-Mart employees can now be represented under the 2001 lawsuit filed on behalf of six workers. The world's largest retailer is charged with discriminating against women in promotions, pay and job assignments in a far-reaching lawsuit...

Judge Approves Wal-Mart Class-Action Case, By David Kravets, Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, June 22, 2004.
A federal judge on Tuesday approved class-action status for a sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that has become the largest private civil rights case in U.S. history. It could represent as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the retailing giant. The suit alleges Wal-Mart created a system that frequently pays its female workers less than their male counterparts for comparable jobs and bypasses women for key promotions... U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins took nine months to decide whether to expand the lawsuit to include virtually all women who work or have worked at Wal-Mart's 3,500 stories nationwide since 1998. His ruling makes the lawsuit the nation's largest class action... The trial is expected to start with the women trying to demonstrate that Wal-Mart has a pattern of paying women lower wages and passing them over for promotions. Wal-Mart would then get a chance to dismantle that theory. If a judge or jury found Wal-Mart did have a pattern of discrimination, a second phase of the trial would let the plaintiffs seek damages. The Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the company is evaluating its employment practices. "Earlier this month Wal-Mart announced a new job classification and pay structure for hourly associates," Williams said. "This new pay plan was developed with the assistance of third-party consultants and is designed to ensure internal equity and external competitiveness.

Wal-Mart Must Face Huge Sex-Bias Suit, By Lisa Girion and Abigail Goldman, Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2004

Women Recount Pervasive Inequality at Wal-Mart, By Nancy Cleeland, Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2004

Judge Is Known as Diligent and Fair, By Anna Gorman, Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2004

Wal-Mart And Sex Discrimination By The Numbers, By Dan Ackman, Forbes, June 23, 2004.
... For the case to get this far is already a victory for the plaintiffs. Indeed, most sex discrimination allegations don't make it to a courthouse at all; according to data compiled by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there were 27,146 sex discrimination claims resolved administratively by its office last year, and the level of enforcement has been stable for a decade. More than 15,000 EEOC claims, or 57%, were found to have "no reasonable cause," and were likely dropped. Just 28.77, or 10.6%, resulted in settlements, which totaled $94.2 million. The average settlement was just $34,200. The EEOC filed just 393 lawsuits on sex discrimination grounds. To be sure, there are cases outside the EEOC system, but not many. There were 20,507 employment-based civil rights actions--of all kinds, not just sex discrimination--filed in all federal courts last year, according to the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. There are no statistics for how the federal cases were resolved. But the numbers hardly seem alarming for an economy with 146 million workers. In 2000, the U.S. government agreed to settle for $508 million a sex discrimination case filed 20 years earlier on behalf of more than 1,000 women who alleged they were refused employment by the now defunct U.S. Information Agency. The Wal-Mart case may be headed in that direction, though there are miles to go before that happens. For now, and generally, the multi-million verdicts that make the papers are rare indeed.

Quebec Wal-Mart workers get go-ahead to unionize, By Robert Melnbardis, Reuters, USAToday, Aug 3, 2004.
Workers at a Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) outlet in Canada have been granted permission to form a union, which would be the first in North America for the world's largest retailer. In a decision dated Aug. 2, the Quebec Labour Relations Board said it accredited Local 503 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to represent roughly 170 workers at the Wal-Mart store in Jonquiere, Quebec, 137 miles north of Quebec City. The company can appeal the decision and the workers still have to establish a bargaining unit before proceeding to negotiations on a first contract... Pelletier said Wal-Mart has no plans to close the store because of the union certification. "We would only close the store for economic reasons," he said. The Quebec Federation of Labour, the province's biggest union group, said it hopes the labor board will approve accreditation for a second Wal-Mart store in the Montreal suburb of Brossard. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which is affiliated with the federation, filed its request with the board July 22 for the Brossard store's accreditation. The federation said the campaign to unionize Wal-Mart stores in Quebec and the rest of Canada would continue. Four other accreditation requests have been filed with provincial authorities - two in Saskatchewan, and one each in Manitoba and British Columbia. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union is also leading a drive to establish unions at Wal-Mart outlets in the United States.

Wal-Mart in talks with Justice Department; Report: Illegal immigrants issue may include $10 million fine. MSNBC, Aug 4, 2004.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is in talks to settle a U.S. probe into whether it knowingly hired contractors who used illegal immigrants to clean its stores, the Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday, citing unnamed people close to the company and the investigation. Though no deal has been struck, officials for the U.S. Department of Justice and the world's largest retailer have discussed a $10 million settlement... Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, isn't expected to admit wrongdoing in a settlement, and criminal charges are unlikely against its top executives, the paper said, citing no sources. But the Journal, citing the unnamed people, said a stiffer penalty is likely if Wal-Mart hires undocumented workers in the future... Wal-Mart has been the subject of a probe by a federal grand jury seated in Scranton, Pennsylvania, into violations of U.S. immigration laws... The hearings began after a series of raids last October, when U.S. agents rounded up about 250 illegal immigrants working at 61 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states. Law enforcement officials then said some Wal-Mart executives had direct knowledge of the illegal workers, based on recorded conversations, surveillance and monitoring.

Workers at Wal-Mart in Colorado Reject Union. Reuters / New York Times, Feb 25, 2005.
Tire shop workers at a Colorado supercenter operated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Friday voted ``No'' to union representation, dealing another blow to efforts to unionize employees at the world's largest retailer.
Wal-Mart -- which recently shut down a Canadian store that voted in favor of a union -- said tire and lube express associates at its Loveland supercenter voted 17-1 to reject representation by the United Food & Commercial Workers Union.
The union has been spearheading the Wal-Mart unionization drive for more than a decade, with very little success.
The vote at the Loveland tire center coincided with growing criticism that Wal-Mart mistreats its workers, and a UFCW spokesman said the outcome showed just how well Wal-Mart's fear tactics work.
``Wal-Mart did what it does best. It scares people. They are very good at putting the fear of God in their employees,'' said Dave Minshall of the UFCW.
He said the union would file several charges with the National Labor Relations Board, officials of which oversaw the balloting.
Minshall said the UFCW would wanted to charge Wal-Mart with interfering with the balloting. He said the retailer had barred the union from sending its own representative to observe the vote.
But Terry Srsen, vice president of labor relations for Wal-Mart, said in a statement: ``Many of our associates are former union members -- they know better than anyone that the only guarantee a union can make is that it will cost the members money -- and that is why they continue to reject the UFCW.''
Minshall at the UFCW vowed that there would be no let-up in the push for unionization at Wal-Mart.
``As long as Wal-Mart treats its people the way it does, there's going to be lots of organizational efforts. Sooner or later there's going to be a group of people that are going to stand up to Wal-Mart's fear tactics,'' he told Reuters.
Another UFCW official said before the results were made public that the balloting had been itself a big victory because the company had resisted previous attempts by the tire workers to vote.
The vote came after a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board. The outcome of the voting in Loveland was closely watched as Wal-Mart recently said it would shut down a store in Jonquiere, Quebec, which had won union certification last year but had failed to reach a labor agreement with the discounter.
Meat cutters had voted to unionize at a Texas Wal-Mart store in 2000. That Texas vote, however, was shortly followed by the company's announcement that it was eliminating meat-cutter positions within the company.
In addition to union pressure, the discounter is grappling with growing opposition from some communities where it is trying to set up shop.
Just this week, Wal-Mart's push for the first Wal-Mart store in New York City hit a snag as a large real estate developer ditched plans to include the discounter's outlet in a Queens shopping complex, according to news reports.

Wal-Mart Mops Up Immigrant Flap. CBSNews.com, March 18, 2005.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has agreed to pay $11 million to settle federal allegations it used illegal immigrants to clean its stores...
Since 1998, federal authorities have uncovered the cases of at least 250 illegal immigrants who were employed by janitor contracting services and hired by the giant retailing chain in 21 states. Many of the janitors -- from Mexico, Russia, Mongolia, Poland and a host of other nations -- worked seven days or nights a week without overtime pay or injury compensation...
Those who worked nights were often locked in the store until the morning...
The $11 million settlement clears Wal-Mart of federal allegations of hiring the illegal immigrants...
Officials said at the time of the raids the investigation involved wiretaps that revealed Wal-Mart executives were aware that the subcontractors used illegal workers...
An employer can face civil and criminal penalties for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants or failing to comply with certain employee record-keeping regulations...

Union Seeks Wal-Mart Files About Payments, By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, April 9, 2005.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union called on Wal-Mart Stores yesterday to release all documents connected with accusations that its former vice chairman, Tom Coughlin, had obtained improper expense account reimbursements to finance secret anti-union activities.
The union's call for release of the materials comes two weeks after Mr. Coughlin resigned, accused by Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, of taking $100,000 to $500,000 through expense account abuses.
The company, based in Bentonville, Ark., said it had turned the matter over to the United States attorney for the Western District of Arkansas for criminal investigation.
The union voiced dismay over a report in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that cited several Wal-Mart employees who said that Mr. Coughlin diverted thousands of dollars in expense account reimbursements as part of a plan to make secret payment to union staff members so they would tell Wal-Mart officials the names of pro-union employees at stores.
"We are deeply disturbed by these allegations," said Bill McDonough, the union's director of organizing. "These are serious criminal offenses and cast Wal-Mart's systematic anti-worker activities on a much more sinister level. Wal-Mart should not try and cover up its activities but should do the right thing and make all of the documents public immediately."
Wal-Mart executives said they knew nothing about such a plan and that the company had not cooperated in any arrangement to funnel money to improper anti-union efforts.
"We reported the unsupported assertion about payments to union representatives to the U.S. attorney when we made our initial report of misappropriated corporate funds," said Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for corporate communications. "Neither Mr. Coughlin nor anyone else at Wal-Mart was ever authorized by the company to make payments to anyone for information about union activity."
Ms. Williams said a company investigation had found no evidence supporting accusations of money being funneled to illegal anti-union activities. Instead, she said, the money was misappropriated for the personal benefit of specific individuals.
Greg Denier, a union spokesman, said the union did not know of any officials who had accepted payoffs from Mr. Coughlin to inform on pro-union employees. He said he would be shocked if any staffers had accepted such payments.
Federal law prohibits companies or their managers from paying money to union officials to help derail organizing drives. The food and commercial workers have sought to unionize dozens of Wal-Mart stores, but have failed to organize any workers except for those in the meat department of one store in Jacksonville, Tex.
That was five years ago, and a few weeks after the organizing drive succeeded, Wal-Mart, with a reputation for fiercely fighting unions, announced that it was phasing out its meat-cutting operations at its stores in many states and would start using prepackaged meat instead.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Coughlin, long viewed as a protégé of Sam Walton, the company's founder, had faked invoices over more than five years to receive reimbursements for among other things, hunting vacations, a $1,359 pair of custom-made alligator boots and a $2,590 dog pen for his Arkansas home.
In a statement, Mr. Coughlin's lawyers, William W. Taylor III and Blair G. Brown, said: "Mr. Coughlin did not seek nor obtain any improper reimbursements from Wal-Mart. We are unable to respond further to allegations concerning expense reimbursement without seeing the records. Wal-Mart has refused to provide them to Mr. Coughlin."
The lawyers said it was unfair for Wal-Mart not to provide Mr. Coughlin, who had once been in the running for chief executive, with the documents after he had worked for the company for 27 years.
William Cromwell, first assistant United States attorney for western Arkansas, declined to comment on the accusations against Mr. Coughlin. The Coughlin resignation is part of a continuing string of embarrassments for Wal-Mart. Last month it reached an $11 million settlement with the federal government over the use of illegal immigrants to clean its stores. In January, it reached a $135,540 settlement with the Labor Department over allegations that it violated child labor laws in three states by letting minors use dangerous equipment.
This week, Wal-Mart held its first conference for journalists in an effort to burnish the company's image. Lawrence Jackson, an executive vice president, said Wal-Mart had repeatedly told its managers and employees to comply with the law.
"We have people who feel pressure, who do the wrong thing, whether it's a vice chairman or whether it's the first person on the floor, and none of it has ever been condoned," Mr. Jackson said. "We make sure that we tell people to do the right thing and not the expedient thing."
At the conference, Wal-Mart's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., commented about Mr. Coughlin's departure saying, "It's an extraordinarily difficult issue for the company because of Tom's tenure with the company and the status he held."

Can't Wal-Mart, a Retail Behemoth, Pay More? By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, May 4, 2005.
With most of Wal-Mart's workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.
A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more.
And in a book to be published this fall, a group of scholars will argue that Wal-Mart Stores, having replaced General Motors as the nation's largest company, has an obligation to treat its employees better.
Among workers at Wal-Mart's 3,700 stores across the United States, the debate is also heating up.
Frances Browning, for example, once earned $15 a hour, but now at Wal-Mart, where she is a cashier in Roswell, Ga., she is paid $9.43. She says she is happy to have the job.
"I was unemployed for two and a half years before I found my job at Wal-Mart," Ms. Browning, 57, said. "Like everybody else I'd love to make a lot more, but I have to be realistic."
But Jason Mrkwa, 27, a high school graduate who stocks frozen food at a Wal-Mart in Independence, Kan., maintains that he is underpaid. "I make $8.53, even though every one of my evaluations has been above standard," Mr. Mrkwa (pronounced MARK-wah) said. "You can't really live on this."
Labor groups and their allies are focusing on Wal-Mart because they say that the campaign will not just benefit its workers but also reduce the existing pressure on unionized competitors to reduce their own wages and benefits.
"Wal-Mart should pay people at a minimum enough to go above the U.S. poverty line," said Andrew Grossman, executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, the coalition of community, environmental and labor groups running the series of ads criticizing Wal-Mart. "A company this big and this wealthy has the ability to pay higher wages."
H. Lee Scott Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, vigorously defends his company, arguing that wages are primarily determined by market forces and that Wal-Mart pays more than most retailers and provides better opportunities for advancement.
"If people tell you that Wal-Mart is leading the so-called 'race to the bottom' in terms of job quality or pay, they're not only wrong, they're dead wrong," he said to journalists at a company-sponsored conference here in April, the first time Wal-Mart has gone out of its way to invite a number of reporters to its headquarters to hear its views. "We are instead creating a better workplace with more opportunity and more benefits than have been available in retail."
Mr. Scott contends that the critics, including competitors, are defenders of an outdated status quo, intent on upholding a retailing system full of inefficiency and inflated prices.
He said that if Wal-Mart were as greedy as its detractors say, it would never have attracted 8,000 job applicants for 525 places at a new store in Glendale, Ariz., or 3,000 applicants for 300 jobs in outlying Los Angeles.
Michael T. Duke, chief of the company's stores division, said, "Wal-Mart is a very good place to work for our associates, and every day we make it even better."
Mr. Mrkwa, the food stocker, does not see it that way. With pay that brings him about $20,000 a year, he said he could not afford a decent apartment or a vehicle better than his 1991 Dodge Dakota. "I don't see why Wal-Mart can't pay more," Mr. Mrkwa said. "Unfortunately, in the market we live in there just aren't many jobs available."
Wal-Mart says its full-time workers average $9.68 an hour, and with many of them working 35 hours a week, their annual pay comes to around $17,600. That is below the $19,157 poverty line for a family of four, but above the $15,219 line for a family of three.
Wal-Mart critics often note that corporations like Ford and G.M. led a race to the top, providing high wages and generous benefits that other companies emulated. They ask why Wal-Mart, with some $10 billion in profit on about $288 billion in revenue last year, cannot act similarly.
"Henry Ford made sure he paid his workers enough so that they could afford to buy his cars," said William McDonough, executive vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. "Wal-Mart is doing the polar opposite of Henry Ford. Wal-Mart brags about how its low prices help poor Americans, but its low wages are helping increase the number of Americans in poverty."
Mr. Scott argues that retailers, with narrow profit margins, face a different competitive situation and cannot afford to be as generous to their workers as automakers and other capital-intensive companies.
"Some well-meaning critics," he said, "believe that Wal-Mart, because of our size, should play the role that General Motors played after World War II, and that is to establish the post-world-war middle class that the country is so proud of. The facts are that retailing doesn't perform that role in the economy as G.M. does or did. Retailing doesn't perform that role in any country in the world."
Many of those assailing Wal-Mart argue that the company can, and should, pay its workers at least $2 more an hour and add $1 or $2 an hour beyond that to improve its health benefits. A Harvard Business School study found that Wal-Mart paid $3,500 a year for each employee for health care, while the typical American corporation paid $5,600.
If Wal-Mart spent $3.50 an hour more for wages and benefits of its full-time employees, that would cost the company about $6.5 billion a year. At less than 3 percent of its sales in the United States, critics say, Wal-Mart could absorb these costs by slightly raising its prices or accepting somewhat lower profits.
But company executives dismiss such proposals, saying they would largely wipe out Wal-Mart's profit or its price advantage over competitors. Wal-Mart had a profit margin on sales last year around 3.5 percent. If "we raised prices substantially to fund above-market wages, as some critics urge," the company argued in a recent two-page ad in The New York Review of Books, "we'd betray our commitment to tens of millions of customers, many of whom struggle to make ends meet."
Here in Bentonville, Mr. Scott pursued that theme. "If you're telling me because you're Wal-Mart and you're going to pay $12 an hour and this other retailer is going to pay $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage, and they're not going to provide any benefits at all and somehow the consumer is rewarded in all this, all you're doing is perpetuating the status quo," he said. "You're driving inefficiencies into the system. It doesn't make any sense."
Wal-Mart argues that, as retailing companies go, it treats its workers better than average. It says 74 percent of its employees work full time, compared with fewer than 40 percent at many other retailers. But critics note that a leading competitor, Costco, pays $16 an hour - 65 percent more than the average wage at Wal-Mart stores and 33 percent more than the $12 average at its Sam's Club stores. At Costco, 82 percent of the workers are covered by company health insurance, compared with 48 percent at Wal-Mart.
George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants in San Marcos, Calif., said that Wal-Mart should ignore the attacks. "Retail has always paid poorly and it probably always will," he said. "Wal-Mart has a responsibility to serve their customers - to give them a good product - and to their shareholders. They don't have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay."
But Burt Flickinger, another retailing consultant, said it would be in Wal-Mart's long-run interest to pay better. "Wal-Mart's turnover will be close to half a million workers this year," he said. "By paying higher wages, Wal-Mart will make its employees happier and will reduce turnover. A lot of its new workers, for instance, don't know where to stock things. Higher wages will mean more productivity per person, and that should help raise profits."
The debate is far from over. LaTasha Barker, a single mother who worked for two years as a cashier at a Sam's Club in Cicero, Ill., said she earned so little that she could not afford the $1,860 a year for family health insurance.
"They don't pay a living wage," said Ms. Barker, who quit her $8.40-an-hour job in 2004 to take a $15-an-hour social work job. While at Sam's, she said, she qualified for Medicaid and $139 a month in food stamps.
By contrast, Jamie Schifferer, manager of the health and beauty aids department at a Wal-Mart in Algonquin, Ill., said Wal-Mart was a terrific employer. She quit her $25,000-a-year post running a Cingular wireless shop to go to Wal-Mart.
After 20 months, she earns $12.50 an hour - close to her previous pay - but now works 40 hours a week rather than the 60 hours at Cingular.
"I was very miserable," she said. "As soon as I heard about this store opening, I jumped. It's perfect for me right now."

Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs. By Steven Greenhouse and Michael Barbaro, New York Times, Oct 26, 2005.
An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart's board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer's reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.
In the memorandum, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits. The memo voices concern that workers with seven years' seniority earn more than workers with one year's seniority, but are no more productive.
To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for "all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering)."
The memo acknowledged that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, had to walk a fine line in restraining benefit costs because critics had attacked it for being stingy on wages and health coverage. Ms. Chambers acknowledged that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million United States employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.
Wal-Mart executives said the memo was part of an effort to rein in benefit costs, which to Wall Street's dismay have soared by 15 percent a year on average since 2002. Like much of corporate America, Wal-Mart has been squeezed by soaring health costs. The proposed plan, if approved, would save the company more than $1 billion a year by 2011.
In an interview, Ms. Chambers said she was focusing not on cutting costs, but on serving employees better by giving them more choices on their benefits.
"We are investing in our benefits that will take even better care of our associates," she said. "Our benefit plan is known today as being generous."
Ms. Chambers also said that she made her recommendations after surveying employees about how they felt about the benefits plan. "This is not about cutting," she said. "This is about redirecting savings to another part of their benefit plans."
One proposal would reduce the amount of time, from two years to one, that part-time employees would have to wait before qualifying for health insurance. Another would put health clinics in stores, in part to reduce expensive employee visits to emergency rooms. Wal-Mart's benefit costs jumped to $4.2 billion last year, from $2.8 billion three years earlier, causing concern within the company because benefits represented an increasing share of sales. Last year, Wal-Mart earned $10.5 billion on sales of $285 billion.
A draft memo to Wal-Mart's board was obtained from Wal-Mart Watch, a nonprofit group, allied with labor unions, that asserts that Wal-Mart's pay and benefits are too low. Tracy Sefl, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart Watch, said someone mailed the document anonymously to her group last month. When asked about the memo, Wal-Mart officials made available the updated copy that actually went to the board.
Under fire because less than 45 percent of its workers receive company health insurance, Wal-Mart announced a new plan on Monday that seeks to increase participation by allowing some employees to pay just $11 a month in premiums. Some health experts praised the plan for making coverage more affordable, but others criticized it, noting that full-time Wal-Mart employees, who earn on average around $17,500 a year, could face out-of-pocket expenses of $2,500 a year or more.
Eager to burnish Wal-Mart's image as it faces opposition in trying to expand into New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, Wal-Mart's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., also announced on Monday a sweeping plan to conserve energy. He also said that Wal-Mart supported raising the minimum wage to help Wal-Mart's customers.
The theme throughout the memo was how to slow the increase in benefit costs without giving more ammunition to critics who contend that Wal-Mart's wages and benefits are dragging down those of other American workers.
Ms. Chambers proposed that employees pay more for their spouses' health insurance. She called for cutting 401(k) contributions to 3 percent of wages from 4 percent and cutting company-paid life insurance policies to $12,000 from the current level, equal to an employee's annual earnings.
Life insurance, she said, was "a high-satisfaction, low-importance benefit, which suggests an opportunity to trim the offering without substantial impact on associate satisfaction." Wal-Mart refers to its employees as associates.
Acknowledging that Wal-Mart has image problems, Ms. Chambers wrote: "Wal-Mart's critics can easily exploit some aspects of our benefits offering to make their case; in other words, our critics are correct in some of their observations. Specifically, our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of associates and their children on public assistance."
Her memo stated that 5 percent of Wal-Mart's workers were on Medicaid, compared with 4 percent for other national employers. She said that Wal-Mart spent $1.5 billion a year on health insurance, which amounts to $2,660 per insured worker.
The memo, prepared with the help of McKinsey & Company, said the board was to consider the recommendations in November. But the memo said that three top Wal-Mart officials - its chief financial officer, its top human relations executive and its executive vice president for legal and corporate affairs - had "received the recommendations enthusiastically."
Ms. Chambers's memo voiced concern that workers were staying with the company longer, pushing up wage costs, although she stopped short of calling for efforts to push out more senior workers.
She wrote that "the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity. Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart."
The memo noted that Wal-Mart workers "are getting sicker than the national population, particularly in obesity-related diseases," including diabetes and coronary artery disease. The memo said Wal-Mart workers tended to overuse emergency rooms and underuse prescriptions and doctor visits, perhaps from previous experience with Medicaid.
The memo noted, "The least healthy, least productive associates are more satisfied with their benefits than other segments and are interested in longer careers with Wal-Mart."
The memo proposed incorporating physical activity in all jobs and promoting health savings accounts. Such accounts are financed with pretax dollars and allow workers to divert their contributions into retirement savings if they are not all spent on health care. Health experts say these accounts will be more attractive to younger, healthier workers.
"It will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier work force than it will be to change behavior in an existing one," the memo said. "These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families U.S.A., a health care consumer-advocacy group, criticized the memo for recommending that more workers move into health plans with high deductibles.
"Their people are paying a very substantial portion of their earnings out of pocket for health care," he said. "These plans will cause these workers and their families to defer or refrain from getting needed care."
The memo noted that 38 percent of Wal-Mart workers spent more than one-sixth of their Wal-Mart income on health care last year.
By reducing the amount of time part-timers must work to qualify for health insurance, Wal-Mart is hoping to allay some of its critics.
One proposal under consideration would offer new employees "limited funding" so they could "gain access to the private insurance market" after 30 days of employment while waiting to join Wal-Mart's plan.
Such assistance, the memo stated, "would give us a powerful set of messages to use in combating critics. (For instance, 'Wal-Mart offers associates access to health insurance after they've worked with us for just 30 days.')"

Labor Dept. Is Rebuked Over Pact With Wal-Mart. By Steven Greenhouse. New York Times, Nov 1, 2005
The Labor Department's inspector general strongly criticized department officials yesterday for "serious breakdowns" in procedures involving an agreement promising Wal-Mart Stores 15 days' notice before labor investigators would inspect its stores for child labor violations.
The report by the inspector general faulted department officials for making "significant concessions" to Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, without obtaining anything in return. The report also criticized department officials for letting Wal-Mart lawyers write substantial parts of the settlement and for leaving the department's own legal division out of the settlement process.
The report said that in granting Wal-Mart the 15-day notice, the Wage and Hour Division violated its own handbook. It added that agreeing to let Wal-Mart jointly develop news releases about the settlement with the department violated Labor Department policies.
The inspector general, Gordon S. Heddell, said the agreement did not violate federal laws or regulations.
The Labor Department reached the settlement in January after finding 85 child labor violations at Wal-Mart stores in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Arkansas, involving workers under 18 who operated dangerous machinery, including cardboard balers and chain saws.
Wal-Mart settled the investigation by agreeing to pay $135,540, but it continued to deny any wrongdoing.
In addition to allowing the 15-day notice, the agreement lets Wal-Mart avoid civil citations and fines if it brings a store into compliance within 10 days of when the department notifies it of a violation.
In exchange for these concessions, the inspector general wrote, there was "little commitment from the employer beyond what it was already doing or required to do by law."
"In our view," the inspector general's office wrote about the Wage and Hour Division, "the Wal-Mart agreement may adversely impact W.H.D.'s authority to conduct future investigations and issue citations or penalty assessments, and potentially restrict information to the public."
Responding to its inspector general, the Labor Department said it "strongly disagrees with the report's overall characterization of the effectiveness of the Wal-Mart child labor settlement agreement."
The department said the inspector general had wrongly given the impression that Wal-Mart had been permitted to avoid all penalties for violations of wage and hour laws by bringing its stores into compliance.
Even though department officials asserted that the agreement was much like that with other companies, Mr. Heddell found that the agreement between Wal-Mart and the Wage and Hour Division "was significantly different from other agreements entered into by W.H.D." and "had the most far-reaching restriction on W.H.D.'s authority to conduct investigations and assess" fines.
Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who asked the inspector general to investigate the settlement, said the report showed that the Bush administration was seeking to do favors for a powerful friend and a major Republican contributor in Wal-Mart.
"The Bush Labor Department chose to do an unprecedented favor for Wal-Mart, despite the fact it is well known for violating labor laws, including child labor laws," Mr. Miller said. "The sweetheart deal put Wal-Mart employees at risk, undermined government effectiveness, and further undermined public confidence that the government is acting on its behalf."
Mr. Heddell said he did not find that the agreement resulted from improper pressures. "Nothing came to our attention indicating evidence of influence or pressure from internal or external sources," he wrote.
Martin Heires, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said, "We think it's important to note that the inspector general's office found that the agreement is in compliance with federal law."
"We continue to believe the agreement was the appropriate course of action," he added. "Our goal remains to make sure that our stores are in full compliance in that our associates are fully informed of all policies, regulations and laws that apply to the employment of workers who are 16 and 17 years of age."
The inspector general recommended that the Wage and Hour Division develop procedures for developing and approving agreements and require that all future settlements be developed in coordination with the department's legal division.
The department said that it had developed a new policy on reaching settlements that, it was confident, would carry out the inspector general's recommendations.
The Labor Department said that the advance notification provisions applied only to child labor matters. But the inspector general voiced concern that "the plain language of the advance notification clause applies to any potential violations, not just child labor violations." Department officials say that giving 15 days' notice helps to ensure that Wal-Mart will come into compliance.
The department denied the inspector general's suggestion that it had consulted with Wal-Mart before issuing a news release on the settlement. The department took the unusual action of announcing the agreement a month after it was signed, doing so only after some details were leaked to a newspaper.
The report said: "The inspector general has specific concerns with the Wal-Mart agreement because it contained significant provisions that were principally authored by Wal-Mart attorneys and never challenged by W.H.D., and because it did not receive adequate W.H.D. review and approval."

100 Arrested at Wal-Mart Construction Site, By Michael Rubinkam, AP / Abcnews.com, Nov 18, 2005.
Allentown, Pa. - Federal immigration agents arrested more than 100 workers at a construction site for a new Wal-Mart distribution center, authorities said.
The workers were detained Thursday on suspected immigration violations and were being taken to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers for processing, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Marc Raimondi said.
More than 50 federal immigration agents, joined by the U.S. Labor Department, Social Security Administration and state police, raided the construction site near Pottsville, about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Wal-Mart spokesman Marty Heires said the detained workers were not employed by Wal-Mart, but by subcontractors, and the company would cooperate fully with federal authorities.
"We have written contracts with these subcontractors requiring that they follow all applicable local, state and federal employment laws," he said in a statement.
At least 120 illegal immigrants, most of them from Mexico, were detained, Schuylkill County Sheriff Frank McAndrew said. He said he began investigating the site and contacted federal officials after getting complaints from local tradespeople.
"You've got a situation here where illegal immigrants are coming into Schuylkill County and taking (local union workers') jobs for eight bucks an hour. They are working for poverty wages, and creating unemployment because our skilled tradesmen are out of work," McAndrew said.
In 2003, a raid of 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states led to the arrests of 245 illegal workers. An affidavit claimed that a pair of senior Wal-Mart executives knew cleaning contractors were hiring illegal immigrants. The retailer agreed to pay $11 million in March to settle the case but denied senior executives knew of the hirings.

An Alameda County jury on Thursday awarded $172 million to thousands of California employees at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who claimed they were illegally denied lunch breaks.
The world's largest retailer was ordered to pay $57 million in general damages and $115 million in punitive damages to about 116,000 current and former California employees for violating a 2001 state law that requires employers to give 30-minute, unpaid lunch breaks to employees who work at least six hours.
The jury's $172 million judgment works out to about $1,000 a worker, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone. In a written statement, Wal-Mart said it will appeal and said the company acknowledged it had compliance issues when California's meal break law was first enacted. But the company said it now has systems to ensure all associates receive their meal breaks. The workers' attorneys, however, said Wal-Mart continued refusing to pay for missed meals even as the case wound its way through the courts.
The class-action lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court is one of about 40 nationwide alleging workplace violations by Wal-Mart, and the first to go to trial. The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer, which earned $10 billion last year, settled a similar lawsuit in Colorado for $50 million.
In the lunch-break suit, Wal-Mart claimed that workers did not demand penalty wages on a timely basis. Under the law, the company must pay workers a full hour's wages for every missed lunch.
The company also said it paid some employees their penalty pay and, in 2003, most workers agreed to waive their meal periods as the law allows.
The lawsuit covers former and current employees in California from 2001 to 2005. The workers claimed they were owed more than $66 million plus interest, and sought damages to punish the company for alleged wrongdoing.
Attorney Fred Furth, who brought the case on behalf of the workers, said outside court the jury "held Wal-Mart to account."
The jury's verdict was reached after nearly three days of deliberations and four months of testimony.
The company contended that the lunch law does not allow for punitive damages because "the meal-period premiums in question are penalties, rather than wages," it said in the statement. "In short, California law prohibits penalties on top of penalties."
A spokesman did not return a call by The Associated Press for further comment.
Wal-Mart attorney Neal Manne also claimed the state law in question could only be enforced by California regulators, not by workers in a courtroom.
"We absolutely disagree with their findings," Manne said of the jury's verdict. He conceded that Wal-Mart made mistakes in not always allowing for lunch breaks when the 2001 law took affect, but said the company is "100 percent" in compliance now.
The lawsuit was initially filed by a handful of former Wal-Mart employees in the San Francisco Bay area in 2001, but it took four years of legal wrangling to get to trial.
Blackstone reports that attorneys say Wal-Mart faces similar employee lawsuits in 30 states, including a huge class action suit. More than 1.5 million women are suing Wal-Mart for paying them less than men.
Critics have also launched campaigns trying to stop its expansion efforts and have targeted it for giving short shrift to workers.
Paul Blank, campaign director for WakeUpWalMart.com, an union-affiliated advocacy group that believes Wal-Mart's policies over wages, health benefits and other issues harm families and communities, said he's delighted with the verdict.
"It is a sad day when Wal-Mart provides these so-called low prices by exploiting their workers and even the law," Blank said.
The company added lower-cost health insurance this year after an internal memo surfaced that showed 46 percent of Wal-Mart employees' children were on Medicaid or uninsured.
A trial also is underway in Marin County Superior Court in which a group of boys were injured while riding bicycles. They claim Wal-Mart and San Rafael-based Dynacraft BSC Inc. conspired to hide defects in a key bicycle part.
The case decided Thursday is Savaglio v. Wal-Mart, C-835687.

Law Aimed at Wal-Mart May Be Hard to Replicate. By Reed Abelson and Michael Barbaro. New York Times, Jan 16, 2006.

When the Maryland legislature passed a law last week requiring that its largest employers, including Wal-Mart Stores, spend at least 8 percent of their payrolls on health care, supporters of the measure claimed they had delivered a clear message to corporate America: companies cannot shirk their duty to employees.

"Let's light the torch. Let us lead the way," said Senator Gloria G. Lawlah, a Democrat who sponsored the bill.

Elated union leaders claim that they have lined up legislators in 30 states to introduce similar bills this year - and that the Maryland vote is likely to give their campaign added impetus.

For all the unions' success in Maryland, though, it is doubtful that the campaign will steamroll across the country, policy analysts say. Because the other states' bills are written much more broadly, they are likely to draw more opposition from companies that watched the Maryland debate from the sidelines.

Still, the new Maryland law has already begun to raise the decibel level of the debate over how to handle the nation's growing number of people with no health insurance, which is now at 46 million. Union activists and others say the law focuses more attention on the role of employers in providing the insurance.

"There is now more public consciousness about how large employers do not provide health care," said Anthony Wright, the executive director of Health Access California, a consumer coalition that supported a similar law in California that was narrowly defeated by voters a little more than a year ago.

Only a handful of states, among them Rhode Island, Washington, Colorado and New Hampshire, are likely to seriously consider requiring employers to provide a certain level of coverage, according to health care advocates and union activists.

Maryland's bill, drafted to apply to companies with 10,000 or more employees, actually affects only one company in the state: Wal-Mart Stores, which has come to symbolize corporations that do not provide adequate health benefits to their employees. The laws being contemplated elsewhere, aimed at companies with a thousand or two thousand employees in that particular state, could affect dozens of other corporations, like McDonald's and the CVS Corporation, the drugstore chain.

"The broader the scope of the attack, the broader the counterattack that will be mounted," said Prof. Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, who does not expect the Maryland law to lead to the passage of similar bills in many other states.

Retailing and restaurant chains, which are most vulnerable to any state law mandating coverage because they employ so many low-income workers, are already preparing an aggressive campaign to prevent lawmakers from passing the legislation outside Maryland. Three trade groups - the National Retail Federation, the National Restaurant Association and the International Franchise Association - have created a coalition to oppose legislation.

"If retailers are hit with this extra cost, this is going to put them in a position to raise prices for consumers or lay off workers," said J. Craig Shearman, vice president of government relations at the retailers' federation.

The Maryland law is likely to face legal challenges to determine whether federal law allows states the authority to mandate health benefits, said J. D. Piro, the chairman of the health law group at Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm.

The Maryland Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group, argued that the Maryland bill was pre-empted by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or Erisa, even though the Maryland attorney general found that the bill did not violate federal law because it imposed no requirements on how companies spend their money. "It's likely this will go to court," Mr. Piro said.

Struggling to balance their own budgets in the face of rising health care costs, some state officials are likely to look favorably on action that would force companies to shoulder more of the bill. "I think they will be looking," said Helen Darling, the president of the National Business Group on Health, an employer coalition based in Washington. "It seems to be a cheap fix."

States are searching for ways to pay for programs like Medicaid, Mr. Piro agreed. "It's a question of who has the money," he said.

Amy G. Rice, a Democrat in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, said the bill that she planned to introduce next week had "a high chance of passing" in the Democratic-controlled state legislature.

"Legislators in both parties are very concerned about the health care crisis in Rhode Island," said Ms. Rice, who cited a poll that found that a majority of the state's residents supported the idea of requiring large corporations to increase spending on health care.

Her bill would require companies with more than 1,000 employees to devote 8 percent of their payroll to health insurance. Ms. Rice estimates that of 38 employers with more than 1,000 employees, only 6 do not meet the 8 percent requirement.

Proponents of similar bills in other states say most companies would not be affected. As a result, they say, companies that do provide coverage may be reluctant to support the efforts of those that do not.

"They won't be the leaders of the opposition," said Mr. Wright, the California advocate who said the majority of the resistance in his state came from fast-food and retailing companies. In fact, some companies may even support the measures. In Maryland, for example, Giant Food, a regional supermarket chain that competes with Wal-Mart, came out in favor of the legislation.

Because it is so narrowly written and may not result in coverage for significant numbers of uninsured people, policy analysts say the Maryland bill cannot be viewed as a model for any states looking seriously at gaps in health care coverage. "The Maryland law is aimed at Wal-Mart, not the issue of the uninsured," said Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonprofit research group in Washington.

Wal-Mart insures fewer than half of its 1.3 million employees in the United States. According to an internal memo, 5 percent, or roughly 65,000, of its workers rely on state Medicaid plans, compared with 4 percent for other national companies.

Even if other laws apply to significantly more employers, some policy analysts say these measures do not represent long-term solutions to the problem of paying for health care. "I'd rather see the state work with all employers to see if they can come up with incentives to spread the risk among a broader pool," said Laura D. Tyson, dean of the London Business School and former chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton. "This is a Band-Aid, arbitrary, firm-specific solution to one of the most important policy problems of the United States."

The focus on the issue of low-income workers who cannot afford coverage even when it is offered is important, said Peter V. Lee, the chief executive of the Pacific Business Group on Health. But, he said, the question of who pays for the care for these individuals - the state or the employer - does not address the fundamental problem of rising health care costs in this country, he said.

"All we're doing is playing squeezing the balloon," he said.

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Wal-Mart Says It Will Boost Health Benefits. By Abigail Goldman, Los Angeles Times, Feb 24, 2006.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., under pressure to shoulder more of its workers' healthcare costs, outlined plans Thursday to improve its benefit offerings, including opening more clinics in stores and shortening the period that part-time employees have to wait before they can buy coverage.

The world's largest retailer also said it would expand its cheapest health insurance option, an $11-a-month plan that has been offered in selected areas. The "value plan," which costs about $20 for families and allows three doctor visits and three prescriptions before a $1,000 deductible kicks in, will be offered to half of the company's employees, Wal-Mart said.

The proposals are in a speech that Wal-Mart's chief executive is scheduled to deliver Sunday. They follow promises the company made last year to bring healthcare within reach of all its nearly 1.4 million U.S. employees.

Over the last several months, Wal-Mart has come under increasing criticism for what opponents call stingy health benefits. The company released highlights of the CEO's speech the same day a union-backed group issued a report claiming that U.S. taxpayers spent $1.5 billion last year providing medical care for uninsured Wal-Mart workers.

Wal-Mart said the five-page report was a publicity stunt based on poor methodology.

The company said the number of employees covered by its health plans increased slightly last year to 46% — below the national average of 60%. It said almost one-third of its workers get health insurance elsewhere, which critics say is evidence that the retailer relies on state programs and other companies to cover its workers.

At a time when expansion is crucial to the company's future growth, especially along the East and West coasts, the attacks against Wal-Mart are taking a toll, at least in terms of public opinion.

In Fortune magazine's 2006 list of America's most admired companies, released this week, Wal-Mart fell eight spots to No. 12. The Bentonville, Ark., retailer, which has more than 3,850 U.S. stores and nearly 2,300 international locations, held the top spot on the list in 2003 and 2004.

The speech by CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. at a National Governors Assn. meeting in Washington is aimed at an audience playing a key role in the company's latest healthcare battle: state-by-state efforts to force Wal-Mart to pay more of its workers' medical costs.

In California, state Sen. Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) introduced a bill Wednesday that would require companies that employ 10,000 or more state residents to spend at least 8% of their total payroll on health benefits or make payments into a state fund for the uninsured.

"Wal-Mart's commitment is not enough and is hardly affordable to their hardworking employees," Migden said in a statement Thursday. She said Wal-Mart's 70,000 California employees average about $15,000 in annual pay, and even under the company's coverage proposals, workers would be charged monthly premiums and large deductibles.

Migden's bill is based on legislation passed last year in Maryland — which survived a veto by that state's governor — and introduced in several other states.

In his speech Sunday, Scott is expected to denounce those efforts and call on government to work with business on healthcare issues, the company said.

He also will announce that for the first time, part-time employees will be able to buy health insurance for their children, the company said. Part-time Wal-Mart workers now wait two years before being eligible for individual health coverage. The company said it had not yet decided what the shortened waiting period would be.

The company said Scott also would outline plans to expand a pilot program of nine in-store health clinics to 50 sites. Those clinics, the company said, offer nonemergency care to employees and members of the community, many of whom might otherwise go to a hospital emergency room for routine ailments.

In October, Scott had said he wanted to make affordable healthcare coverage available to all U.S. employees of the company, which this week reported annual profit of $11.2 billion on $312 billion in sales.

A company memo leaked just after Scott's pledge outlined stark recommendations for reining in healthcare costs, such as making jobs more physically rigorous to discourage unhealthy workers and using more part-time workers.

The memo also recommended boosting the company's image by touting initiatives such as the ones Scott plans to highlight Sunday.

Wal-Mart has said that the memo was a preliminary document and not a final list of proposals.

But critics said Scott's planned speech this weekend appeared to take its cue from the memo, which suggested "reframing" the issue of uninsured workers as a societal problem as well as engaging in a "sustained communication campaign" about the company's healthcare offerings.

In its report Thursday, Wake Up Wal-Mart, the union-backed group critical of the company, projected that American taxpayers would pay $9.1 billion in healthcare costs for Wal-Mart employees by 2010.

The group based the figure on the number of Wal-Mart employees now using Medicaid and projections for the company's growth.

Wal-Mart disputed the report. "The fact is, Wal-Mart jobs move people from public health programs onto private insurance," said company spokeswoman Sarah Clark.

"Seven percent of associates join Wal-Mart already on Medicaid. Within two years, that number drops to 3%."

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In legal cases with potential repercussions for businesses and employees, current and former workers are accusing U.S. companies of violating immigration law and driving down wages.

The federal lawsuits — against carpet maker Mohawk Industries, Tyson Foods, retailer Wal-Mart, and others — are winding their way through appeals courts. The Mohawk case will be argued today before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The class-action lawsuits were filed by plaintiffs under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) statute, typically used against organized crime.

Under RICO, if a business engages in an enterprise of racketeering activity, it could be found liable for triple damages and attorneys' fees and face criminal prosecution.

If the Supreme Court allows lawsuits similar to Mohawk to be filed against companies, some industry groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, fear that businesses will face billions of dollars in potential liabilities.

"This would open the floodgates to RICO being used in all garden-variety lawsuits against corporate defendants," says Robin Conrad, an attorney at the National Chamber Litigation Center, the legal arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In the Mohawk case, the former workers allege that the carpet manufacturer conspired with employment agencies to hire undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Mohawk used forged Social Security cards and recruited workers from the border at Brownsville, Texas, the suit alleges.

Johnson & Bell attorney Howard Foster, who represents workers in the Mohawk case and similar lawsuits, says, "The key issue is, can a corporation be sued for engaging in illegal conduct with its recruiters? If we win this case, there probably will be quite a few more cases filed against corporations."

Juan Morillo, an attorney at Sidley Austin for Mohawk, denies the allegations. He argues that businesses will be hurt badly if federal courts hold corporations and their associated business parties fit the legal definition of an "enterprise" under the RICO statute.

"This could turn every ordinary business dispute involving a third-party — a business partner, a vendor, a subcontractor — into a potential RICO case," Morillo says.

Federal appeals courts have issued conflicting rulings on whether the RICO statute applies to such immigration cases. Under immigration law, it's a crime to hire and harbor illegal immigrants. None of the cases have gone to trial yet.

Zirkle Fruit, an apple-packing company in Selah, Wash., recently settled a RICO lawsuit for $1.3 million in back wages to an undetermined number of workers it employed between 1999 and 2004.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a Cornell Law School professor, says immigration laws already exist to crack down on "employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers." A Supreme Court ruling allowing the RICO lawsuits would provide more legal ammunition, he says.

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Wal-Mart Stores must pay at least $78 million for violating Pennsylvania state labor laws by forcing employees to work through rest breaks and off the clock, a jury decided Friday.

Michael Donovan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, had asked the jury for at least that amount in compensatory damages for what he said were missed or shortened breaks, or time employees worked off the clock.

He will seek an additional $62 million in damages because the jury found that Wal-Mart acted in bad faith.

The class action involves 187,000 current and former employees who worked at Wal-Mart and Sam's Clubs in Pennsylvania from March 1998 through May this year.

Wal-Mart attorney Neil Manne said the company plans to appeal the class certification and the jury's findings.

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Wal-Mart was today preparing to challenge a court's green light for a sex discrimination case involving over a million women employees.

In a major setback for the world's biggest retailer, an appeal court yesterday upheld a 2004 decision to let America's largest class action employment discrimination lawsuit go to trial.

The plaintiffs estimate they could win billions of dollars in lost pay and damages and that as many as 2 million women who have worked for Wal-Mart in its US stores since 1998 could join the class action, a kind of lawsuit that allows a small number of plaintiffs to sue on behalf of a much larger group.

The two-to-one ruling by the three-judge panel in San Francisco yesterday took no position on the merits of the case, stressing that its decision only reaffirmed a lower court ruling certifying the case as a class action against Wal-Mart.

Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff who claims she has suffered discrimination in terms of pay and promotion while working at a Wal-Mart in San Francisco said she sued because of neglect she and fellow female employees felt when openings for positions were advertised within her store.

After working as a cashier for three years, Ms Dukes said she advanced to become a customer service representative, a position some male employees attained even before their initial probationary periods of employment had expired.

"I had seen males go into the position with less than 90 days experience," Ms Dukes said.

Wal-Mart argued it did not discriminate and that class action status should be dismissed, because the company grants its 3,400 US stores a great deal of independence in their management. The company said it would appeal against the ruling to a larger appeal court and to the US supreme court if necessary.

"This was one step in what is going to be a long process, and we are still at a very early stage in this case," said Ted Boutrous, lead counsel for Wal-Mart's appeal. "We are very optimistic about our chances for obtaining relief from this ruling as the case progresses."

In a dissent, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld said the case should not be a certified as a class action, since it could enrich lawyers and undeserving plaintiffs, while diluting the rewards to any who were actually injured by sex bias.

"Plaintiffs' only evidence of sex discrimination is that around two-thirds of Wal-Mart employees are female, but only about one-third of its managers are female," he wrote. "Not everybody wants to be a Wal-Mart manager. Those women who want to be managers may find better opportunities elsewhere."

The judge in the original case ruled that the attorneys for the six named women presented sufficient evidence for a class action suit.

He said "largely uncontested descriptive statistics" showed that women working in Wal-Mart stores were paid less than men in every region, that pay disparities existed in most job categories and that the salary gap widened even for men and women hired for the same job at the same time.

Brad Seligman, a lawyer for The Impact Fund, a non-profit group in Berkeley, California representing the female plaintiffs, told reporters: "It is time for Wal-Mart to face the music. Two courts now have ruled that Wal-Mart is going to have to face a jury ... We fully expect Wal-Mart to keep appealing but we're very confident now that two courts have upheld this [class] certification."

Most large discrimination cases are settled out of court. In 1996, the oil firm Texaco paid a $176.1m (£89m) settlement after black employees sued for racial discrimination. The DIY firm Home Depot settled a sex discrimination class action suit in 1997 for $104m.

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Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch from Good Jobs First

Study: Wal-Mart's U.S. Expansion Has Benefited From More Than $1 Billion In Economic Development Subsidies. Good Jobs First, May 24, 2004. "Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has benefited from more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments across the United States, according to a new study by Good Jobs First, a Washington, DC-based research group (the study, Shopping For Subsidies, is available online at www.goodjobsfirst.org). "Wal-Mart presents itself as an entrepreneurial success story, yet it has made extensive use of tax breaks, free land, cash grants and other forms of public assistance," said Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First and principal author of the study... The publicly evident value of subsidy deals for individual distribution centers ranged as high as $48 million (with an average of $7.4 million), while for retail outlets the largest was $12 million (with an average of $2.8 million). Wal-Mart subsidy deals were found in 35 states, with the largest number in California, Illinois, Missouri, Texas and Mississippi. In total dollar terms, Louisiana, Florida and New York also ranked high. Although comparative data are not available, the study says it is likely that Wal-Mart, given the extent of its operations, receives state and local subsidies from more jurisdictions than any other corporation in the United States... The types of subsidies given to Wal-Mart projects included the following: Free or reduced-price land; Infrastructure assistance, including access roads and water/sewer lines; Tax increment financing, a diversion of property (and/or sales) tax generated by a new development; Property tax abatements; State corporate income tax credits; Sales tax rebates or exemptions; Enterprise zone status, which typically provides for a menu of subsidies such as property tax abatements, state tax credits, sales tax exemptions and reduced utility rates; Job training and worker recruitment funds; Tax-exempt bond financing; and General grants, including outright cash payments to the company. "

Wal-Mart increases work for police forces. By Alexandria Sage. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 23, 2004. Harrisville, Utah. "For the tiny police force in this bedroom community, the south end of town never caused much bother. Horses grazed in the green pastures, and for years two solitary bars provided the only late-night distractions for those who needed something to do. That was before early 2001, when Wal-Mart opened a 24-hour supercenter that swallows all 212,000 square feet of rural fields. Since then, police in Harrisville, population 4,000, have been forced to confront big-city realities..."

Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart Jobs by Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs (University of California-Berkeley Labor Center, Aug 2, 2004) and Authors' Response to Wal-Mart's Statements.

BENTONVILLE, Ark., Oct. 26 - Inside a stuffy, windowless room here, veterans of the 2004 Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns sit, stand and pace around six plastic folding tables. Open containers of pistachio nuts and tropical trail mix compete for space with laptops and BlackBerries. CNN flickers on a television in the corner.

The phone rings, and a 20-something woman answers. "Turn on Fox," she yells, running up to the TV with a notepad. "This could be important."

A scene from a campaign war room? Well, sort of. It is a war room inside the headquarters of Wal-Mart, the giant discount retailer that hopes to sell a new, improved image to reluctant consumers.

Wal-Mart is taking a page from the modern political playbook. Under fire from well-organized opponents who have hammered the retailer with criticisms of its wages, health insurance and treatment of workers, Wal-Mart has quietly recruited former presidential advisers, including Michael K. Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan's image-meister, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton's media consultants, to set up a rapid-response public relations team in Arkansas.

When small-business owners or union officials - also employing political operatives from past campaigns - criticize the company, the war room swings into action with press releases, phone calls to reporters and instant Web postings.

One target of the effort are "swing voters," or consumers who have not soured on Wal-Mart. The new approach appears to reflect a fear that Wal-Mart's critics are alienating the very consumers it needs to keep growing, especially middle-income Americans motivated not just by price, but by image.

The first big challenge of the strategy will come Nov. 1 with the premiere of an unflattering documentary. "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" was made on a shoestring budget of $1.8 million and will be released in about two dozen theaters. But its director, Robert Greenwald, hopes to show the movie in thousands of homes and churches in the next month. The possibility that it might become a cult hit like Michael Moore's 1989 unsympathetic portrait of General Motors, "Roger & Me," has Wal-Mart worried.

So, Wal-Mart has embarked on a counteroffensive that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Relying on a preview posted online, Wal-Mart investigated the events described in the film and produced a short video contending the film has factual errors. (Mr. Greenwald denies there are errors and says that Wal-Mart has not seen the final cut.)

Wal-Mart has also begun to promote a second film, "Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy," which casts the company in a rosier light. Wal-Mart declined to make its executives available for the Greenwald film, but it participated with the second film's director, Ron Galloway. The war room team helped distribute a letter, written by Mr. Galloway, that challenges Mr. Greenwald to show the two movies side-by-side.

To keep up with its critics, Wal-Mart "has to run a campaign," said Robert McAdam, a former political strategist at the Tobacco Institute who now oversees Wal-Mart's corporate communications. "It's simply nonsense for us to let some of these attacks go without a response."

Wal-Mart's aggressive new posture is a departure from its tradition of relying on an internal staff to manage the company's image. The war room, which is part of a larger Wal-Mart effort to portray itself as more worker-friendly and environmentally conscious, runs counter to the philosophy of the chain's founder, Sam Walton. Believing that public relations was a waste of time and money, the penny-pinching Mr. Walton would not likely have hired a public relations firm like Edelman, Wal-Mart's choice to operate its war room.

So what has changed? For one thing, Wal-Mart's critics have become more sophisticated.

For years, unions hurled little more than insults at the chain. But over the last year, two small groups - Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart - set up shop in Washington with the goal of waging the public relations equivalent of guerilla warfare against the company. Wal-Mart Watch received start-up cash from the Service Employees International Union; Wake Up Wal-Mart is a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Unions have tried, unsuccessfully, to organize Wal-Mart's employees.

At the suggestion of Wake Up Wal-Mart, members of the nation's largest teachers' unions staged a boycott of Wal-Mart for back-to-school supplies this fall. Wal-Mart Watch, meanwhile, set up an automated phone system that called 10,000 people in Arkansas in June seeking potential whistle-blowers willing to share secrets about the retailer.

Wal-Mart did not rebut such attacks, even when Wal-Mart Watch released a 24-page report blasting the company's wages and benefits. Wal-Mart Watch said the report had been downloaded from its Web site 55,000 times.

Once a darling of Wall Street, Wal-Mart's stock price has fallen 27 percent since 2000, when H. Lee Scott Jr. became chief executive, a drop that executives have said reflects, in part, investors' anxieties about the company's image. Sales growth at stores open for more than a year has slowed to an average of 3.5 percent a month this year, compared with 6.3 percent at Target. And Wal-Mart is facing growing resistance to new urban stores, with high- profile defeats in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

There is some evidence that criticism is influencing consumers. A confidential 2004 report prepared by McKinsey & Company for Wal-Mart, and made public by Wal-Mart Watch, found that 2 percent to 8 percent of Wal-Mart consumers surveyed have ceased shopping at the chain because of "negative press they have heard."

The Greenwald movie threatens to make matters worse. It features whistle-blowers who describe Wal-Mart managers cheating workers out of overtime pay and encouraging them to seek state-sponsored health care when they cannot afford the company's insurance. And it travels across small-town America to assess the effects on independent businesses and downtowns after a Wal-Mart opens.

The film is a particular concern now that Wal-Mart is trying to move upscale, a strategy it hopes will appeal to higher-income consumers. In the last year, Wal-Mart has introduced a line of urban fashions called Metro 7, hired hundreds of fashion specialists to monitor how clothing is displayed in stores, and produced more polished advertising.

But for the fashion strategy to pay off, Wal-Mart must win over a group of shoppers who are sensitive to criticism of the chain's record - consumers, in the words of Wal-Mart's chief executive, "who are not worried about their next paycheck."

Hence the war room in Bentonville. Wal-Mart executives realized they were unprepared to react to what Mr. Scott began to call the most expensive campaign ever waged against a corporation. So the company quietly mailed a letter to the country's biggest public relations firms several months ago seeking their help in developing a response.

The contract went to Edelman, which assigned its top two Washington operatives to the account. Wal-Mart would not say what it is paying Edelman, nor would it allow interviews with the war room staff. Mr. Dach, who is active in environmental and Democratic causes, was an outside adviser to President Clinton during the impeachment battle. Mr. Deaver was President Reagan's communications director and the creative force behind Mr. Reagan's so-called Teflon image.

Edelman also dispatched at least six former political operatives to Bentonville, including Jonathan Adashek, director of national delegate strategy for John Kerry, and David White, who helped manage the 1998 re-election of Representative Nancy Johnson, a Connecticut Republican. Terry Nelson, who was the national political director of the 2004 Bush campaign, advises the group.

In turn, Wakeup Wal-Mart is led by, among others, Paul Blank, former political director for the Howard Dean presidential campaign, and Chris Kofinis, who helped create the DraftWesleyClark.com campaign.

Wal-Mart Watch's media team includes Jim Jordan, former director of the Kerry campaign, and Tracy Sefl, a former Democratic National Committee aide responsible for distributing negative press reports about President Bush during the 2004 campaign.

The war room staff arrives at Wal-Mart's headquarters, a short drive from a nearby corporate apartment where they live, by 7 every morning. The group works out of an old conference room on the second floor, christened Action Alley, the same name Wal-Mart gives to the wide, circular aisle that runs around its stores.

Three display boards are covered with to-do lists. One says: "Promote Week of 10/24/05: MLK Memorial Donation. Urban/blighted community plan." Two large maps show the location of Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores across the United States.

The team starts the day by scanning newspaper articles and television transcripts that mention Wal-Mart. Next come conference calls with Wal-Mart employees around the country to plan for events. Whenever possible, Mr. McAdam said, the war room will try to neutralize criticism before it is leveled.

That was the strategy behind what Action Alley considers its first coup. In late September, after several unions broke off from the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the splinter groups announced they would hold a convention in St. Louis on a Tuesday.

Action Alley members, assuming Wal-Mart would be a target of criticism during the union gathering, arranged for Wal-Mart to hold its own news conference the day before. It invited three local suppliers, a sympathetic local official and a cashier to say that Wal-Mart had a positive effect on the community.

"If you look at many of the stories that were written about that overall convention, they've got our messages in them," Mr. McAdam said. "In the past, when we've just responded to something somebody else is doing, it's sort of 'you know, by the way, Wal-Mart says ...' We got ahead of this one."

A campaign atmosphere pervades Action Alley. A small bus with the words "Clinton-Gore" on the side sits on the table. When discussing Wakeup Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Watch and the Greenwald movie, Mr. McAdam slips into political-speak.

"The people who show up at Mr. Greenwald's film are probably not swing voters," he said. "They are probably the true believers of their point of view and I doubt there is a heck of a lot we can do to change their minds."

Mr. McAdam continued: "They've got their base. We've got ours. But there is a group in the middle that really we all need to be talking to."

"Tax Benefits and Sales Boost Wal-Mart Profit. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, said Tuesday its fourth-quarter earnings rose 13.4 percent after aggressive holiday advertising helped boost sales by 8.6 percent. But Wal-Mart shares slipped as the retailer's fourth-quarter revenue fell short of Wall Street projections, and it also forecast a profit outlook that is below Wall Street projections. Wal-Mart's shares fell 12 cents to $45.98 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Net income rose to $3.6 billion, or 86 cents per share, for the quarter ended January 31 from $3.2 billion, or 75 cents per share, a year ago. Earnings in the latest quarter included a $103 million net tax benefit that boosted net income by 2 cents per share... (New York Times, Feb 21, 2006).

Miscellaneous Articles

Wal-Mart sees room for over 1,500 new stores. World’s largest retailer plans expansion in United States in coming years. AP / MSNBC, Feb 8, 2006.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to open more than 1,500 stores in the United States in the coming years, on top of nearly 3,200 it already operates, the world's largest retailer said Tuesday.

John Menzer, the company's vice chairman and head of its domestic Wal-Mart stores division, said Wal-Mart was on schedule to meet an announced target of between 335 and 370 new U.S. store openings this year after 341 last year.

That number includes Wal-Mart discount stores, Supercenters that also have a full grocery section, smaller Neighborhood Markets and Sam's Club membership warehouses. Supercenters are the largest single group with 1,980 locations in the U.S. and the focus of future growth plans.

Menzer did not specify a timeline for the new stores. He also did not refer to zoning and permit fights that have erupted in some places where Wal-Mart wants to expand, including big markets such as California where the company has fewer locations than in its traditional bases in the South and Midwest.

"We are really focused on opening new stores right now. We see so many opportunities to open new stores that that's where our capital is going first," Menzer said during a Web cast from a financial conference hosted by Citigroup in Miami.

Wal-Mart opened 69 new stores and Sam's Clubs in January, a company record for one month, it announced last week.

Menzer said 1,800 of its existing Supercenters would be remodeled over the next 18 months to make them more inviting, adding touches such as faux wood floors, wider aisles and digital television display walls.

The remodeling program, which Menzer said would not require a large capital outlay, is part of a broader strategy to interest consumers who are already in the store for basics to buy more fashions, electronics, home furnishings and fancier foods.

Wal-Mart began working on the remodeling program last year, and formally unveiled it in October at its annual meeting with analysts.

As part of its growth plans, Wal-Mart also is experimenting with new formats for Supercenters to fit the big box structures into tighter urban neighborhoods. New styles will include multilevel stores and underground or above-store parking rather than a huge lot out front.

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ROGERS, ARK. In a hotel meeting room not far from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s headquarters, company executives told a gathering of 70 reporters Tuesday that Wal-Mart was working hard for working families.

Nearby, union organizers and other foes trotted out statistics, current and former Wal-Mart employees, and community leaders to try to prove that the company is a bane to those same families.

The dueling messages were aimed at the reporters attending Wal-Mart's second annual media conference.

For the executives, managing the steady drumbeat of negative news is consuming almost as much of their time as running the company, which has more than 6,500 stores in 16 countries and nearly $316 billion in annual sales. The past year in particular has been brutal.

"It's been an extremely trying year when the chief executive of the world's largest retailer has to devote himself full time to defending the company's business model," said Mark Husson, an analyst with HSBC Securities in New York. "By any measure it's an extraordinary amount of very senior management time being taken up in a noncommercial, unproductive manner."

Increasingly keen to change public perceptions, Wal-Mart again opened its doors to the media as it continues its global expansion. This year's conference, which concludes today, is a series of meetings featuring top Wal-Mart executives extolling the company's virtues.

"In the past, we've been forced to respond to criticism, but in the last year, we've taken a more proactive approach to sharing information and our critics have had to respond to us," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark. "With success comes criticism, but we know if we didn't tell our story, no one else would and we didn't want to let our critics define our reputation."

Wal-Mart certainly has had its hands full, having to contend with:

• A leaked memo that outlined proposals to trim the company's healthcare costs by discouraging unhealthy workers.

• A scathing anti-Wal-Mart documentary that screened nationwide in churches, living rooms and schools.

• Farmers, bankers and rural Americans who raged against the company's proposal to open a limited-purpose bank to save money on credit card transactions.

• State houses around the country which debated forcing the company to pay more for employees' healthcare or pay into state funds for that purpose.

The company has fared no better on Wall Street, where its stock has been relatively unchanged for the last 6 1/2 years. Shares of Wal-Mart rose 58 cents Tuesday to $46.40.

The trying times are taking their toll on Chief Executive Lee Scott, who has been traveling the globe fending off attackers. He recently said he would take a month off to go fishing.

Among those coming to Wal-Mart's defense Tuesday was Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

"Wal-Mart has really become the whipping boy of labor unions across the country who would love to demonize the Wal-Mart brand and the Wal-Mart culture," Huckabee told the gathering. "Wal-Mart would tell you they're not a perfect company. But one of the reasons they're successful is that they reinvent themselves every week."

Former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, chairman of the 16-member steering committee of Working Families for Wal-Mart, said at a small news conference that none of the problems affecting the poor were caused by the company.

"We all have an interest in Wal-Mart; we all want Wal-Mart to succeed," Young said, gesturing at his fellow committee members who came to Arkansas from around the country. "We don't think it ought to be trashed. We think it ought to be perfected."

Part of what Wal-Mart is battling is better-organized opponents. Two of its biggest detractors are Wal-Mart Watch, backed by the Service Employees International Union, the Sierra Club, the National Partnership for Women & Families and other activist groups, and WakeUpWalMart.com, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Like Wal-Mart, those groups are fine-tuning their message for the coming year.

Andrew Stern, the founder of Wal-Mart Watch and the president of the Service Employees union who last year broke his and six other unions away from the AFL-CIO, said the next step was moving from a campaign-type organization to a permanent one.

"We spent a year trying to be heard, trying to make our case, trying to get legislators, businesspeople and reporters to pay attention to what we thought was a big problem in the American economy," Stern said. "Now we are looking at how we can provide very specific ways for helping Wal-Mart change its business model, instead of being perceived as just being critics."

To that end, Wal-Mart Watch is likely to ask the company to work more closely with local leaders to minimize the environmental and traffic problems associated with new stores. Also on the agenda: challenging Wal-Mart to set an example for the retail industry by providing affordable health insurance to all employees.

WakeUpWalMart.com continues to push similar demands, including paying a "living wage," offering affordable health coverage and increasing the amount of U.S.-made products it sells.

On Tuesday, the group set up camp steps away from Wal-Mart's meeting hall, flanked by workers describing their experiences with the company.

"I'm here because I can think of 100 people offhand — single mothers — who are forced to go on public assistance because Wal-Mart, which could afford to give people health insurance, chooses not to," said Greg Pierce, a 29-year-old from Ocala, Fla., who quit working at Wal-Mart a week ago.

Wal-Mart isn't the first American company to face withering attack by a groundswell of organized opposition and individual critics.

Standard Oil Co.'s dominance in a host of enterprises provoked widespread public outcry in the early years of the 20th century. Henry Ford, came under intense criticism in the late 1930s for heading the only nonunion American carmaker. In more recent years, Nike and Gap faced a barrage of criticism, particularly on college campuses, for what critics said were sweatshop conditions at its overseas factories.

Each company mostly or partly won over opponents after instituting change — either voluntarily or by force, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at UC Santa Barbara and editor of "Wal-Mart: The Face of 21st Century Capitalism."

Standard Oil fell to the new antitrust laws demanded by the American public. Ford unionized, and Nike and Gap opened themselves and their factories up to inspection, review and oversight by independent observers.

If history is any guide, Wal-Mart probably will be forced to make changes as well, Lictenstein said.

"If they see that the political winds are moving against them, if the Democrats win big or something, then they'll start to deal," he said.

At Tuesday's media gathering, normally tight-lipped Wal-Mart executives took questions and described their efforts to remain relevant to the hundreds of millions of shoppers who pass through their doors each week.

Those plans include offering trendier and more-upscale merchandise; working with communities to design stores that better fit in with local architecture; employing local contractors and suppliers — particularly minority-owned businesses — to broaden the company's appeal in urban areas; and offering healthcare coverage for as little as $20 a month for families.

"One visit to Arkansas to be lectured on how America is better off with Wal-Mart isn't going to change anything, but if they're doing a whole raft of things, then Wal-Mart starts to look proactive and progressive rather than reactive and regressive," said analyst Husson. "If that's the strategy there is a tipping point where we get to where enough of that stuff will move public opinion and may even move press opinion."

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THE sheer magnitude of Wal-Mart's plans to become more environmentally friendly has been enough to give pause to all but the most vehement of the company's critics.

The online environmental magazine Grist gave soft applause to Wal-Mart last week in its introduction to a Q. and A. session with H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive. When the company this month signed on to a call by a group of energy executives for caps on greenhouse-gas emissions, "the heart of this monolithic retail Grinch grew three sizes that day," writes Amanda Griscom Little, a Grist reporter, on grist.org.

To be sure, it is a little startling to hear Wal-Mart's chief executive bandying about phrases like "democratizing sustainability," but given that Wal-Mart plans to spend $500 million a year to, among other initiatives, reduce its greenhouse gases, build more energy-efficient stores and reduce packaging waste, even longtime naysayers have to take notice.

Ms. Little points out that Wal-Mart's size — the very thing that makes it so vulnerable to attack — is precisely what "could make it a powerful force for good for the planet."

"The company controls so much of the retail market, and has such sway over manufacturers, that any green initiatives on its part have huge ripple effects," she writes.

But even more, Mr. Scott says, Wal-Mart's size "enables us to help create markets for clean technologies that exist today, but don't yet have fully established markets."

"If Wal-Mart started using or selling those items all of a sudden, there would be enough scale that those would be viable alternatives," he added.

One commenter on Grist's blog wondered if Ms. Little's "glowing" article was "a cruel joke." The interview drew a lot of commentary in the blogosphere. Many bloggers seemed unsure how to react. Raven Brooks of buyblue.org, which "supports businesses that share our progressive values and ideals," wrote that he found the interview "shocking." He wondered about Wal-Mart's sincerity, but concluded that "this is progress." Wal-Mart has a change of heart? (buyblue.org)

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There is no candidate. There are no ballots. There won't be an Election Day. And yet it may be the hottest, highest-stakes political contest in America today.

It's the campaign against Wal-Mart.

A year-old effort to force the nation's No. 1 private employer to change its business practices has evolved into a Washington-style brawl: tens of millions of dollars spent by Republican and Democratic political consultants using polling, micro-targeting, ads, e-mails, direct mail, grass-roots organizing and strategic "war rooms" to ply their trade in the corporate world.

Their fight involves some of society's most vexing trends, including the rising cost of health care, the painful realities of globalization and the waning relevance of organized labor.

"Our opponents have organized the likes of a political campaign against us," said Bob McAdam, vice president of corporate affairs at Wal-Mart. "It would be nonsense for us not to respond in a similar fashion."

Wal-Mart's main opponents are the Service Employees International Union, which started Wal-Mart Watch, and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) , which funds a separate campaign called WakeUpWalMart.com

After failing to organize employees of Wal-Mart Stores with traditional tactics, the unions decided to use modern campaign and communications methods to drag the company into the public square and to try to shame them into change.

Both groups have hammered the world's largest retailer about its wages, employee health insurance, treatment of workers and proclivity for buying non-U.S. goods. Wal-Mart has responded with counterattacks and a multimillion-dollar campaign to polish its image.

On both sides are some of the best political strategists money can buy.

WakeUpWalMart.com is run by Paul Blank, political director for Howard Dean's 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, and Chris Kofinis, who helped draft retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark into that race.

Their campaign has all the markings of the Dean and Clark insurgencies: a snappy Web site, volunteer action lists and an issues-based, grass-roots campaign.

Among those lined up against the company at Wal-Mart Watch are Jim Jordan, campaign manager for 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry; and Terry Holt, a spokesman for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign.

Odd bedfellows: a Republican working for unions against Wal-Mart.

"Wal-Mart is giving capitalism a bad name," Holt said. "It's lost touch with its small-town roots and has become a company that is depending on corporate welfare ... and an all-too-cozy relationship with China."

Under fire, Wal-Mart turned to Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Bush-Cheney political director Terry Nelson and several Democrats, among them civil-rights leader Andrew Young and campaign strategist Leslie Dach.

More odd bedfellows: Democrats working for Wal-Mart against organized labor.

"We were being attacked. We wanted to hire people who knew how to respond," said Wal-Mart's McAdam, formerly a GOP aide on Capitol Hill and political strategist for the tobacco industry.

WakeUpWalMart.com claims 212,000 supporters who can be mobilized with a computer stroke to recruit members and be at media events to shine a bad light on the Bentonville, Ark., company.

A goal of the UFCW is to show Wal-Mart's 1.3 million U.S. employees — many of whom have a low opinion of unions or fear retribution if they organize — that unionized labor can change their workplace and lives for the better.

"For years, labor leaders were fighting Wal-Mart the old way, but times have changed," Kofinis said. "Instead of organizing workers, they're trying to organize the nation" against Wal-Mart.

In its own way, this campaign over Wal-Mart is as important as the congressional races this year.

Bringing Wal-Mart to heel with 21st-century tactics would signal a fresh approach for organized labor after a decades-long decline in membership.

At stake for Wal-Mart is the future course of a company with $312.4 billion in sales in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31. Its stock has fallen 20 percent over the past two years, and the company has had trouble sustaining its historically high rates of profit growth.

Analysts say bad publicity from the union-backed campaigns may be hurting Wal-Mart, although unrelated business pressures are also a factor.

Wal-Mart denies the union-backed campaign has hurt its bottom line. But the company sees the effort as a threat.

After the Maryland Legislature passed a labor-backed bill requiring companies — Wal-Mart in particular — to spend more on workers' health insurance, the Arkansas company came out with improvements in its health-care coverage.

Amid criticism, Wal-Mart also has announced plans to:

- Help competing local companies stay in business.
- Expand its share of the Hispanic market.
- Sell more environmentally friendly products.
- Increase diversity in its work force.

A multimillion-dollar advertising campaign featuring testimonials of happy customers and employees cast Wal-Mart as a good corporate citizen.

Nelson was hired to wage a grass-roots campaign by recruiting Wal-Mart shoppers and local leaders sympathetic to the corporation's cause.

In the union camp, both groups send opposition research on Wal-Mart to reporters, e-mail supporters and stage events such as rallies and documentary-film screenings.

They have had an impact.

Maryland-style health-care bills have been introduced in more than 30 states. Democratic candidates in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania have spoken out against Wal-Mart, as have elected officials in Wisconsin, Georgia, Connecticut and several other states.

Then there is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The potential 2008 presidential candidate served on Wal-Mart's board for six years when her husband was governor of Arkansas. Just two years ago, the New York Democrat called her time on the board "a great experience in every respect."

But now she does not want anything to do with the company. Her re-election campaign returned a $5,000 contribution from Wal-Mart, citing "serious differences with current company practices."

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Wal-Mart has hired Democratic P.R. experts to help improve its reputation on such issues as low wages, miserly benefits, sex discrimination, and union busting.

Wal-Mart has hired Democratic P.R. experts to help improve its reputation on such issues as low wages, miserly benefits, sex discrimination, and union busting.

On the second floor of Wal-Mart’s headquarters, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a windowless room called Action Alley. In the Wal-Mart idiom, the term "Action Alley" usually refers to the main aisle of the company’s two thousand Supercenters—the stores that have upended the retail business by selling enormous quantities of groceries and imported goods at prices that competitors find difficult or impossible to match. At the "home office," as Bentonville is known, Action Alley is the company’s war room, a communications center that was set up and is staffed by Washington-based operatives from Edelman, a public-relations firm that advises companies on issues of "reputation management." Wal-Mart corporate culture is parsimonious except in the matter of executive compensation, but, according to a source, the company has been paying Edelman roughly ten million dollars annually to renovate its reputation.

Twenty years ago, Wal-Mart was widely viewed as a scrappy regional retailer, and its founder, Sam Walton, an Ozarks eccentric with a vision of super-discounting, was praised for intuiting the needs of his customers, and for maintaining high morale among his workers. When Walton retired, in 1988 (he died in 1992), the company had revenues of sixteen billion dollars. Today, Wal-Mart is the second-largest company in the world in terms of revenue—only ExxonMobil is bigger. Its revenues last year came to more than three hundred and fifteen billion dollars, with profits of more than eleven billion, and it has developed a reputation as a worldwide colossus that provides poor pay and miserly benefits to its 1.8 million employees. The image of the company is not helped by the immoderation of Sam Walton’s widow and children, who together control forty per cent of Wal-Mart’s outstanding shares, and who are worth roughly eighty billion dollars; they are, by a striking margin, the richest family in America. (They are worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.)

Wal-Mart is traditionally a Republican-leaning company (during the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five per cent of its political donations have gone to Republicans) and has become a favorite target of Democratic politicians. Hillary Clinton, who once served on Wal-Mart’s board, recently returned a five-thousand-dollar donation because of what a campaign spokeswoman said were "serious differences with current company practices." Barack Obama and John Edwards have joined union-led campaigns to denounce the company for its wage-and-benefit policies. Wal-Mart is notably unfriendly to unions; in 2000, when meat-cutters at a single Wal-Mart in Texas organized into a collective-bargaining unit, Wal-Mart responded by shutting down its meat counters across Texas and in five neighboring states. It closed an entire store in Quebec, rather than see workers unionize.

The company has also been criticized for driving American jobs overseas, by demanding immense discounts from its suppliers. Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who is one of Wal-Mart’s main foes in Congress, says that the company, by forcing its suppliers to manufacture goods in China, shows that it "doesn’t stand for American values." Wal-Mart has been the subject of numerous unflattering documentaries and books. Even Ron Galloway, the maker of a recent pro-Wal-Mart documentary, "Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People Crazy," has turned against the company. Galloway told me that he now considers Wal-Mart to be a "heartless" employer. "They just instituted a wage cap for long-term employees—people making between thirteen and eighteen dollars an hour. It’s a form of accelerated attrition. They can’t expect me to defend that," Galloway said.

Two unions—the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers—fund anti-Wal-Mart lobbying groups that catalogue what they see as the company’s diverse sins. Each month seems to bring a new, self-inflicted embarrassment. Most recently, Wal-Mart announced that it had fired a technician from its Threat Research and Analysis division (which combats industrial espionage) for eavesdropping on telephone calls made by the Times’ Wal-Mart beat reporter, Michael Barbaro. Wal-Mart claims that the technician acted alone; the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas is investigating.

In 2005, Barbaro and another Times reporter, Steven Greenhouse, cited an internal memo written by the company’s chief human-resources executive, M. Susan Chambers, in which she suggested that the company could control personnel costs by not hiring unhealthy people. (To keep the sick and the lame off the payroll, Chambers suggested that all jobs should include "some physical activity; e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering.") In the same memo, Chambers noted that forty-six per cent of the children of Wal-Mart’s million-plus American employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.

More recently, the company experienced a run of bad publicity when it announced new scheduling policies for its store workers (known as "associates"). Under what critics call the "open availability" policy, workers must make themselves available for different shifts from month to month or risk losing hours. Kathleen MacDonald, a cosmetics-counter manager at a Wal-Mart in Aiken, South Carolina, explained to me, "It’s simple. They say you have to be there when the computer says the customers will be there. So if you have kids at home you can’t show up, but then your hours are being cut."

The company is facing more consequential challenges over its treatment of women. A class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco in 2001 by six female Wal-Mart employees, alleging that the company has denied promotions and equal pay to women, is proceeding steadily to trial; by some estimates, the suit could cost the company as much as five billion dollars. Wal-Mart has denied that it discriminates against women. Kathleen MacDonald joined the suit after she learned that a male counterpart, who, like her, was stocking shelves, earned more than she did. When she raised the issue, she told me, "my immediate supervisor said, ‘Well, God made Adam first, and Eve came from him.’ I was, like, what? That’s when I decided enough was enough."

Full-time hourly workers at Wal-Mart stores make an average of $10.51 an hour, according to the company. Wal-Mart’s most energetic adversary, a group called Wake Up Wal-Mart, which is sponsored by the food workers’ union, notes that $10.51 may be the average full-time wage, but the company won’t disclose the average hourly wage of part-timers. "We think the true average is probably less than nine dollars," Chris Kofinis, the Wake Up Wal-Mart spokesman, said.

The company has had its bright moments, most notably in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Wal-Mart mobilized its truck fleet to deliver goods to the storm zone. But that was a rare instance of good public relations. Owing in part to its status as a retail behemoth, Wal-Mart has met with resistance in numerous communities (including New York City) when it has tried to open stores. And its recent business performance has been less than stellar; sales have slowed, and the stock price is stagnant. Problems like these have concentrated the minds of Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s C.E.O., and his top executives. "We used to be the David and now we’re seen as the Goliath," John Fleming, the company’s chief merchandising officer, told me.

The job of the Edelman people—there are about twenty, along with more than three dozen in-house public-relations specialists—is to help Wal-Mart scrub its muddied image. Edelman specializes in helping industries with image problems; another important client is the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington lobbying group that seeks to convince Americans that oil companies care about the environment and that their profits are reasonable. Edelman does its work by cultivating contacts among the country’s opinion élites, with whom it emphasizes the good news and spins the bad; by such tactics as establishing "Astroturf" groups, seemingly grass-roots organizations that are actually fronts for industry; and, as I deduced from my own visit to Bentonville, by advising corporate executives on how to speak like risk-averse politicians.

It became clear to me in Bentonville that Wal-Mart’s senior executives had been tightly scripted. When I talked with John Menzer, a company vice-chairman, a spokeswoman named Sarah Clark, my official escort there, told me that the conversation would be limited to the company’s new Jobs and Opportunity Zones concept, which is designed to help smooth the arrival of new stores in urban areas. (A company source told me that the Zones idea was intended by Edelman as a public-relations maneuver to soften Wal-Mart’s image among minority communities; the entire budget for the program is five hundred thousand dollars over two years.) Menzer, a slender man with a thin smile, explained the company’s attraction to underemployed inner-city residents, saying, "One of the biggest opportunities a person has at Wal-Mart is to be part of this growth company. There are always opportunities for promotion, learning, and education, and people know they can build a career here."

When I asked about the "open availability" policy, Clark interrupted, while Menzer stared at me. "I can certainly take that one," Clark said. "I’ll make a note of that. We’ll talk about