At Confined Space, Jordan Barab notes that WM has settled a charge of child labor violations and taunts Bush's labor department, writing that it is doling out unique priviliges to WM--it now gets a heads up when being under investigation by the DOL Wage and Hour Division:
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer agreed to pay $135,540 to settle federal charges that it violated child labor laws in Connecticut, Arkansas and New Hampshire. As part of the agreement, revealed yesterday after it was secretly signed in January, the Labor Department agreed "to give Wal-Mart 15 days' notice before the Labor Department investigates any other 'wage and hour' accusations, like failure to pay minimum wage or overtime."Jordan goes on to quote highly partisan George Miller, who we already know, hates WM's guts. But more importantly, in a different post, Jordan discusses WM's policy of locking in night-shift employees in high-crime areas.
WM should be punished where it violates the law, and this lock-in behavior sounds awful, but I have a problem with making individual cases look like a company-wide pattern of abuse. I'm simply not convinced that, on a per-store basis, WM is any more or less a labor violator than any other retailer.
Posted by Kevin on February, 13 2005 at 01:50 PM
