Walmart Workers Deserve a RaiseSteve Restivo, senior director of communications for Walmart, fired back.
While Walmart rakes in annual profits of more than one billion dollars, the average hourly wage of a Walmart sales associate, according to a report by IBISWorld, is just $8.81. That translates to an annual salary of $15,575, far below the federal poverty level for a family of four. On top of being unjust, Walmart’s low wages come at a high price for American taxpayers: a recent report revealed that, because the retail giant's employees are forced to utilize government benefits to supplement their meager income, a single Walmart Supercenter could cost taxpayers from $900,000 to $1.7 million per year.
In an email with the subject header, “people who live in glass houses…”, Restivo wrote:
The Nation—“America’s leading progressive print and online magazine”—recently encouraged its readers to sign an open letter demanding that Walmart increase wages to $12/hour and this article called our company one of the “biggest abusers of low-wage labor.”
In an ironic twist, ProPublica recently reported that starting this fall, “interns at the Nation Institute will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program.” As ProPublica noted, The Nation has been paying its full-time interns a weekly stipend of $150 per week—less than the current federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.
According to the Daily Beast, Walmart pays its store employees an average of $12 to $13 an hour, which works out to around $25,000 a year.
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