More on Walmart

Following up on my note yesterday about Walmart: Rep. Anthony Weiner, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and Sen. Jon Corzine recently introduced the Health Care Accountability Act in Congress, which would require states to disclose the names of large employers whose workers are on Medicaid as a result of the companies refusal to provide insurance benefits. The purpose of this, of course, is to make public the names of companies inflicting costs onto already stretched state budgets. This Federal legislative effort comes on top of the local effort in Maryland to force companies to provide health care insurance — which failed because the Governor, Republican Robert Erlich, caved in to intense lobbying from Walmart and vetoed the bill. Most recently was the leaked memo from Walmart describing how the company planned to cull ill or potentially costly employees from its payrolls so as to reduce health care expense. Clearly up until now Wal-Mart shows no sign of accepting that its behaviour is anti-social. So we need to push back.

As a society we have three ways to respond to ‘Walmarting’ — allow me to coin the phrase. One is to accept that companies can do anything they want, and we all just have to live with the consequences, however nasty they are. Second, we can oppose the company’s actions and try to get them to change [Walmart Watch and Wake Up Walmart are two organizations dedicated to this]. Or, third, we can accept that big companies will always be rapacious and use things like cutting benefits as a way to shore up profits, but realize that we can legislate to get a national health care system so that unethical behaviour by companies doesn’t mean that our fellow citizens have to suffer. Of course we’d all like to think that Walmart and others had some ethics, or social awareness, but they don’t. So I for one will use ‘Walmarting’ as a rallying cry for national health care, which taxes on Walmart profits will help pay for. I can see some neat justice in that.