Wal-Mart refers to Bowie protest as a union attack

Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005

Children and adults dressed as cowboys, witches and the Grim Reaper gathered in Bowie Saturday to speak out against a bitter fear facing thousand of Americans. For them, it was not ghost and goblins that haunted their thoughts, but the price of healthcare from one of the world’s biggest stores.

Local activists rallied in front of the Wal-Mart store on Crain Highway to protest what they called unfair healthcare benefits for the company’s employees. The protesters joined a nationwide effort by Wake-upWal-Mart.com, a grass-roots activist group that seeks labor changes in the company and planned similar protests at 84 stores in 26 states.

The group is sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. They sold candy to support uninsured employees and passed out literature on the issue.

“There’s nothing scarier than not having healthcare,“ said Mark Federici, a strategic program director for the union.

According to Wake-upWal-Mart.com, employees have to pay a $1,000 deductible, while most clerks and sales associates make between $11,000 and $13,000 a year. Full-time employees must wait six months from the date of hire before receiving benefits, while part-time employees must wait two years and cannot get benefits for their family members. As a result, more than 600,000 of the 1.3 million Wal-Mart employees are uninsured, Federici said.

Wal-Mart is a global retail empire, boasting $285.2 billion in sales last year from over 5,000 stores worldwide, according to the company’s Web site.

Such size and wealth should allow Wal-Mart to provide low-cost and accessible healthcare to all of its employees, the group said. Though the Bowie store is powerless to change corporate policy, the protesters believed increasing awareness will create enough public outcry for a change. So far, over 110,000 supporters have join in less than six months.

“This is simply un-American,“ said Jeremy Bird, a field director with Wake-upWal-Mart.com. Bird said he was on government-subsidized healthcare while his mother was employed at Wal-Mart. “Every single customer needs to hear the truth, and eventually things will get bigger and bigger.“

The store’s managers declined to comment, referring all questions to Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters.

“They put this under the trick-or-treat guise,“ Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Folgeman said. “The trick is that that this is a union-funded attack to spread myths. The treat is that our [sales] associates value our benefits and see through their destructive agenda.“

Folgeman said the company's healthcare benefits are affordable and accessible. He added Wal-Mart now offers a value plan that provides three doctors visits and three prescriptions before the deductible kicks in.

Chris Kofinis, communications director for Wake-UpWal-Mart.com, said the union is not dragging Wal-Mart's name through the mud.

Several store employees enrolled in the healthcare program – most of whom did not wish to reveal their names for fear of losing their jobs – said they were satisfied with the coverage and its cost. Many others said they were not enrolled because they receive coverage from a spouse or former employer.

Mariana Lahai, 25, has been enrolled in the program since she started the job 15 months ago, and said she finds no fault with the coverage, which costs her $17.50 every two weeks.

“I haven’t used it, but I think it’s fair,“ Lahai said.“

Wal-Mart acknowledged problems with its healthcare coverage in a June report of its benefits package. While the company’s benefits earned an overall satisfactory rating with its employees, healthcare scored the lowest despite being rated the most important benefit. The report also said Wal-Mart employees are more likely to be uninsured or on Medicaid than the national average, but had better percentages compared to other retail stores.

Like many corporations, Wal-Mart is battling the rising cost of healthcare. The company reported its benefits expenditure is 19 percent higher than sales in the last three years, and its employees age faster and are more likely to become sick than the national average, according to the report.

Three days before the protest, Wal-Mart issued a statement vowing to improve its healthcare benefits. Though it did not respond to the problems stated in its report three months earlier, the statement said Wal-Mart will consider adding health clinics to its stores, creating a more affordable plan and decreasing the waiting time to receive benefits while increasing the number of plans to choose from.

As hundreds of customers rushed in and out of the store on one of busiest shopping weekends of the year, their opinions of the protest were mixed. One woman rebuffed a protester by saying high healthcare costs is “a fact of life.“ Many simply ignored the protesters’ attempts to give them flyers.

Kofinis said the protest at the Bowie stores and other locations were a success, though he would not release the revenue collected from candy sales until Friday. Kofinis said the Bowie protest in particular generated some of the most positive feedback from customers than in most other protests.