Wal-Mart Found Guilty of Knowingly Screwing its Workers--again!

Jury says Wal-Mart mispaid employees

A Philadelphia jury says Wal-Mart must ante up for improperly compensating its Pennsylvania employees for time worked.

Jurors had yet to decide just how much the giant retailer was to pay. Lawyers for the nearly 187,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees involved in the class-action suit say the tab could run as high as $157 million, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The jury ended five weeks of testimony Thursday by finding that Wal-Mart, the state`s largest private employer, knowingly benefited from the practice, the Inquirer said.

This jury award comes on the heels of a similar verdict in December of 2005 when a California jury ordered Wal-Mart to pay $172 million for violations of a California law that requires meal breaks for employees. In 2004 an Oregon jury awarded 83 Wal-Mart workers in that state about $2,000 each for lunch period violations. Also in 2004, Wal-Mart settled a similar lawsuit by workers in its Colorado stores for $50 million.

Wal-Mart's screwing its employees like this is nothing less than stealing. So how come no member of management has been fired for these (and many other) acts of theft? Doesn't Wal-Mart have a rule chiseled-in-stone that calls for an employee's immediate dismissal if they're caught stealing any product or time from the company? Wal-Mart executives responsible for this are a gang of two-faced crooks that should be immediately thrown out of their jobs.

Wal-Mart defends itself by stating that corporations are responsible to their shareholders for creating as much wealth for them as they can. Yeah, well that’s not all corporations are responsible for. Corporations are responsible to other stakeholders, too, like the communities in which they operate and the workers who produce the wealth.

If Costco and other responsible corporate citizens can produce wealth for their shareholders and value for their clients while at the same time adequately rewarding their employees for their labors, like this article reports, then Wal-Mart can too. Like our current bankrupt Congress, it just needs an extensive executive house cleaning and injection of some moral leadership.