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Editorial: Wal-Mart's accounts

A Cap Times editorial
February 9, 2006

But no more.

The Wal-Mart model for doing business a model that, with its constant clawing for excessive profit and monopoly, breaks every precept of the social contract is becoming more and more dominant. Businesses of all sizes and shapes are being taught that the only way to succeed is by caring about nothing but the bottom line.

They are also being taught to raid the public treasury.

Wisconsin taxpayers paid $2.7 million in 2004 to provide BadgerCare coverage to 1,251 Wal-Mart employees and their dependents. BadgerCare is the insurance program designed to serve the working poor, not the employees of one of the largest and most profitable corporations on the planet.

Wal-Mart isn't going to do the right thing on its own. This is a circumstance where government has to act. And a model for that action has been developed.

The state of Maryland last month enacted a law that requires Wal-Mart and other companies with more than 10,000 workers in the state to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on employee health care or pay the difference to the state's Medicaid fund.

In Wisconsin, state Rep. Terese Berceau, D-Madison, and state Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay, have developed an even better proposal, which would require Wal-Mart and any other corporation with more than 10,000 full- and part-time employees in the state to either cover at least 80 percent of the cost of insurance coverage for those workers or repay the state for the cost created for Medicaid, BadgerCare and other state programs.

Wal-Mart's allies are fighting back. Legislative Republicans used a committee session to trash the bill after Gov. Doyle endorsed it.

Critics of Wal-Mart should not back off.

Wal-Mart is creating a model of irresponsibility. Maryland has begun the process of creating an alternative, and better, model.

Wisconsin should embrace and expand upon that model.