Why Get Involved
Wal-Mart contributes to working families in a variety of ways.
- By creating low-wage jobs with poor benefits and little chance for job advancement
- By eliminating local businesses so that customers have nowhere else to shop
- By costing tax payers millions of dollars in social safety nets like Medicare for refusing to pay their fair share
- By silencing its critics with multi-million dollar ad campaigns and legal battles
Wal-Mart touches the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans – but ignores its responsibilities to those people. We're standing up to challenge Wal-Mart, and help the world's largest company establish higher standards.
- As parents, we're always looking out for the health and safety of our kids. Nothing is more frightening for a hard-working parent than to know that your children don't have health care benefits. There's so much going on that Wal-Mart employees shouldn't have to worry about how they're going to pay their children's medical bills.
- As community leaders, we understand that Wal-Mart is a company that should care about its neighbors. Instead, it pushes local shops out of business, encourages urban sprawl, and shifts the burden to taxpayers. Wal-Mart will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to silence "site fights" across the country and settle law suits for illegal business practices.
- As customers, we want to ensure that we don't sacrifice good jobs and honest business for low prices. Wal-Mart may save shoppers money at the check stand, but taxpayers end up footing the bill for employees' social safety nets. Wal-Mart has threatened to end business in regions where legislation like "Fair Share Health Care" is passed.
- As Americans, we want to see our economy grow, and we want to see good jobs created. Wal-Mart has 1.3 million employees and created 210,000 jobs last year -- now it's our job to make sure they are good jobs.
The average pay for a Wal-Mart sales associate is $14,000 a year—$1,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. If this is Wal-Mart's idea of a "career," they're sadly mistaken.