Wal-Mart Watch: The War Against Workers, Part... (I Forget)
Timothy Noah of Slate's Chatterbox column has a good deconstruction of a recent speech by H. Lee Scott Jr., chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, in which he touted Wal-Mart as being the engine that motors the American worker to prosperity (as well as the economy as a whole). Here's the section of the speech that Noah focuses on:

Wal-Mart's average wage is around $10 an hour, nearly double the federal minimum wage. The truth is that our wages are competitive with comparable retailers in each of the more than 3,500 communities we serve, with one exception—a handful of urban markets with unionized grocery workers. … Few people realize that about 74 percent of Wal-Mart hourly store associates work full-time, compared to 20 to 40 percent at comparable retailers. This means Wal-Mart spends more broadly on health benefits than do most big retailers, whose part-timers are not offered health insurance. You may not be aware that we are one of the few retail firms that offer health benefits to part-timers. Premiums begin at less than $40 a month for an individual and less than $155 per month for a family.

And here's some of the deconstruction:

Wal-Mart's average wage is around $10 an hour.

As Tom Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Washington (and author of Which Side Are You On?: Trying To Be For Labor When It's Flat On Its Back) points out, the relevant number isn't the average, which would be skewed upward by the large salaries of relatively few highly-paid company executives—Scott, for example, receives, by one reckoning, 897 times the pay of the average Wal-Mart worker—but the median. In the Dec. 16 New York Review of Books, Simon Head, director of the Project on Technology and the Workplace at the Century Foundation, stated, "the average pay of a sales clerk [italics mine] at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's definition of the poverty level for a family of three." That the current minimum wage of $5.15 per hour leaves families even farther below the poverty line is a depressing topic for another day.
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Few people realize that about 74 percent of Wal-Mart hourly store associates work full-time, compared to 20 to 40 percent at comparable retailers.

Yes, but what exactly is a "full-time worker"? Typically, full-time is defined as 40 hours a week or more. At Wal-Mart, it's defined as 34 hours a week. So of course Wal-Mart has more "full-time" workers. Fewer hours worked, I need hardly point out, means that Wal-Mart's "full-time" employees are less likely than employees elsewhere to be able to afford premiums for any health insurance they're offered. According to Head, fewer than half of Wal-Mart's employees can afford even the company's least-expensive health plan.

Side note: I was in Jacksonville, FL this last weekend and experience, first hand, the low, low prices of Wal-Mart. I went in search of a few necessary kitchen utensils for the home we were visiting (tongs and, most importantly, a corkscrew), and I visited the establishment because a) it was 8 o'clock in the evening and b) it was the most convenient place for me to acquire said items. I felt dirty, though. What was eye-opening was that both items were 94 cents apiece! What wasn't eye-opening was that both items were made in China. And that they were definitely not the high-quality kitchen utensils I would normally equip my home with, but then again, I'm a Blue-State, rose-sipping, liberal snob. (But one who knows that a restaurant waiter-style corkscrew's design shouldn't impede the progress of the cork exiting the bottle.)