Since Wal-Mart and health care are in the news again, a few tables to help you make sense of how deep their sins actually go. First, here's how Wal-Mart stacks up to the retail sector and the nation generally:
Not quite as demonic as you've been led to believe, but no kings are they. But here's a more apples-to-apples comparison using large retailers, grocers, and so on:
Back to utilization of government-entitlement programs:
And now, as a portion of wages:
I think this is all fairly self-explanatory, so I'll not bother with too much in the way of analysis. Suffice to say that Wal-Mart is worse than other large corporations but not abnormally bad for the industry as a whole. Should they be made to do better? Sure. But it'd be hard to justify laws targeting them and only them unless you're looking at a longer game aimed at nationalized health care. Luckily, according to this quote from the AFL-CIO, that's exactly what's being attempted:
"Last week, the AFL-CIO labor federation announced it intends this yearto push legislation similar to Maryland's Fare Share Health Care billin more than 30 states.' . . . 'An explicit part of the program is toput pressure on organizations nationally to do national reform,' saidGerald Shea, government-affairs adviser to AFL-CIO President JohnSweeney. 'If people can't manage the political will to do somethingnationally to solve this problem, then would they like to deal with usin 50 different ways in 50 different states?'"
Seems like a good strategy to me. For more on all this, read my Tapped post.
