No, a majority of Wal-Mart employees do not have health insurance. I don’t know how you are arriving at your conclusions. From the article I posted on Wal-Mart today, the average Wal-Mart worker makes seventeen thousand something a year. Only 48% of them have any health insurance from Wal-Mart at all, and it is apparently extremely expensive, since most employees cannot afford it.
Of 100 PETA full-time employees, the figures are listed below.. Are you a mathematician? I am not, but from looking at the figures for full-time PETA employees, the average certainly looks higher than for Wal-Mart. There is an employer match for the 401k program (does Wal-Mart offer this to its line associates?) and an extremely generous vacation program, with employees who have worked for 60 months earning a month’s vacation per year—generosity almost unheard of in the private sector. Plus those free lunches and bringing your dog to work! I would have to email PETA to find out what the employee contribution is for health care, and I am not going to do that because I think this conversation is a complete waste of my time. It is simply a way for you to try to discredit PETA. I note that PETA’s employees are dedicated animal rights activists and Wal-Mart’s employees are desperate to work at all, even at extremely low wages. I still believe that PETA’s package is more generous than Wal-Mart’s, and I do not believe you can disprove that.
The majority of PETA's dedicated staff, 53 percent, earn only $13,100 to $27,999, 32 percent earn $28,000 to $39,499, and only the remaining 15 percent make more than $39,500. Our president, Ingrid E. Newkirk, earned $31,385 during fiscal year ending July 31, 2004.
peta.org
Wal-Mart’s health care coverage is well below the national average
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· High premiums and deductibles keep more than half of Wal-Mart workers from participating in the company health plan. While the national average of workers covered by employer health insurance is 67 percent, only about 47 percent of Wal-Mart’s employees are covered by the company’s health care plan.
Majority of Wal-Mart employees can’t afford company health care
· The average worker would have to pay one fifth of his paycheck for health care coverage at Wal-Mart. On a wage of about $8 an hour and 29-32 hours of work a week, many workers must rely on state programs or family members or simply live without health insurance.
· Employees must pay $218 per month for family health care coverage from Wal-Mart.
· In Wal-Mart's employee health plan, deductibles range from $350 to as high as $3,000 for family coverage.
Wal-Mart’s refusal to provide affordable health care impacts taxpayers and other employers
· More than 60 percent of Wal-Mart employees--600,000 people--are forced to get health insurance coverage from the government or through spouses’ plans—or live without any health insurance. Wal-Mart shifts the cost of health insurance to taxpayers and other employers, driving up the health costs for all of us.
· Recent reports show that Wal-Mart tops the list of companies in many states whose employees and/or their children rely on taxpayers to foot the bill for health care:
o In Alabama, Wal-Mart employees with children on Medicaid cost the state between $5.8 million and $8.2 million to cover 3,864 children.
o Wal-Mart workers in California rely on the state taxpayers for about $32 million annually in health-related services.
o In Tennessee, almost 10,000 Wal-Mart employees are on the state’s expanded Medicaid program.
o In Georgia, over 10,261 children of Wal-Mart employees are enrolled in the state’s PeachCare program for health insurance in families meeting federal poverty criteria.
· When other companies get tired of paying the bill for Wal-Mart, they drop or reduce health care benefits for their employees. There are more than 40 million uninsured working families. The more Wal-Mart grows, so do the number of the uninsured.
Wal-Mart continues to further restrict health care coverage eligibility
· In 2002, Wal-Mart further restricted the number of employees eligible for coverage by requiring full-time workers to work six months before become eligible to purchase the company’s health insurance. Part-time workers need to wait two years for health care insurance—which only qualifies for single coverage, not dependent coverage. Also in 2002, the company raised the bar for new full-time workers from 28 hours to 34 hours per week to be eligible to purchase the health care coverage.
Wal-Mart’s health plans are getting further out of reach to it employees
· Wal-Mart has increased the premium cost for workers by over 200% since 1993--medical care inflation only went up 50% in the same period. In 2002 alone, Wal-Mart’s health care premiums increased by 30%.—nearly triple the national average increase of 11%.
· Wal-Mart further restricted the number of associates eligible for coverage by requiring fulltime associates to work six months before becoming eligible to purchase Wal-Mart health insurance. The company also raised the number of hours new employees must work from 28 to 34 hours per week to be eligible to purchase the expensive health care coverage.
Wal-Mart spends minimal on covering employee health benefits
· The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2002, average spending on health benefits for each of Wal-Mart’s 500,000 covered employees was $3,500—almost 40% less than the average for all U.S. corporations and 30% less than the rest of the wholesale/retail industry.
The Walton family is worth about $98 billion. Just 1% of the family wealth could provide affordable health care for all Wal-Mart employees.
ufcw.org |
