Something not easily distinguished from theft recently occurred in Annapolis. In legislation ostensibly concerned with any company with 10,000 employees but pertaining only to one, Maryland has said Wal-Mart must spend 8 percent of its payroll on health care, or must give the difference to the state.
Organized labor, having mightily tried and miserably failed to unionize even one of Wal-Mart's 3,250 American stores, has turned to organizing state legislators. Maryland was a natural place to begin because it has lopsided Democratic majorities in both houses of its legislature.
Labor's allies include the ``progressives'' who have made Wal-Mart the left's devil du jour. Wal-Mart's supposed sin is this: One way it holds down prices (when it enters a market, retail prices decline 5 percent to 8 percent; nationally, it saves consumers $16 billion annually) is by not being a welfare state. That is, by not offering higher wages and benefits than the labor market requires. Labor's other allies are Wal-Mart's unionized competitors, such as, in Maryland, Giant Food, a grocery chain. These allies are engaging in what economists call rent-seeking -- using government to impose disadvantages on competitors with whom they are competing and losing.
Wal-Mart's enemies say Maryland is justified in expropriating some of the company's revenues because the company's pay and medical benefits are insufficient to prevent some employees from being eligible for Medicaid. Well.
Eighty-six percent of Wal-Mart employees have health insurance, more than half through the company, which offers 18 plans, one with $11 monthly premiums and another with $3 co-payments. Wal-Mart employees are only slightly more likely to collect Medicaid than the average among the nation's large retailers, who hire many entry-level and part-time workers. In the last 12 months, Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the nation and in 25 states, estimates it has paid its 1.3 million employees $4.7 billion in benefits. That sum is almost half as large as the company's profits, which last fiscal year were $10.3 billion -- just 3.6 percent -- on revenues of $285 billion. Wal-Mart earns just $6,000 per employee, one-third below the national average.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Com..._19_06_GW.html
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