Low-Wage Villain of the Week: Rob Walton

So Rob has become the 14th richest person on the planet, despite the fact that the furthest he has gone from working for his dad’s company was working for a law firm that…did legal work for Walmart. 

But, you might wonder, is he doing good work as chairman? His wealth increased by $305 million last year. But before you say he earned it, no…he really, really didn’t. While the overall Standard & Poor’s 500 index has gained 15% in the past year, Walmart shares fell 2.2%. In the first quarter of 2014, stocks were down 3% and customer traffic declined 1.4%. Second quarter projections don’t show these trends changing. Advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. gave Walmart an 8 (on a 10-point scale, with 10 being the highest level of risk) and said that shareholders should vote against the company’s executive compensation plan, Chairman Walton and director Michael Duke. And the company is dealing with numerous legal problems, including a $21 million settlement for wage theft, which isn’t its first such settlement in recent years, and is being sued for illegally firing workers for union organizing.

So the company isn’t exactly being run well, but Chairman Walton is very well compensated. Does Rob share that wealth? No, the employees in the company are some of the lowest paid of any large employer in the country. Walmart brags that its U.S. workforce averages pay of $12.78 an hour, but that number leaves out more than half of the company’s workforce, such as part-time and temporary workers, and includes some managerial staff. The company admits that 500,000 of its workers earn less than $10 an hour. Numerous job websites report the average pay for Walmart employees to be less than $10, ranging from $8.63 (Glassdoor) to $9.64 (PayScale). 

In any event, the wages are low enough that many of the company’s workers receive government benefits designed to help the poor. It is estimated that Walmart employees received $6.2 billion in public assistance last year.

For getting rich off of his father, and staying rich by impoverishing and mistreating his workers rather than hard or innovative work, Rob Walton is our Low-Wage Villain of the Week.

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This has been reposted from the AFL-CIO.