Spin Dry

This is related to New York's brief transit strike, and nice to see that a jury of their peers decided the right thing -- but Wal-Mart was just bitch-slapped for treating their employees like cattle, ordered to pay $172 million for violating the law and screwing their workers out of lunch breaks.

The law on this is clear: employees who work more than six hours are entitled to a half-hour, unpaid lunch break. (I'm not so happy with that unpaid-part, since they're most likely still going to be stuck on company property in that short a time, but whatever.) Anyway, if said employees don't get that half hour, then they get paid for an extra hour of work. Yes, there's a "waive their rights" clause in the law, but you can bet employees were intimidated and browbeaten into the "accept the waiver or lose your job, asswipe" option.

Y'know what? Here's the money paragraph, and why I hope that Wal-Mart loses every single one of the many labor lawsuits they're facing:

The class-action lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court is one of about 40 nationwide alleging workplace violations by Wal-Mart, and the first to go to trial. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer, which earned $10 billion last year, settled a similar lawsuit in Colorado for $50 million.

Hm. Earned $10 billion. And to whom did that money go? Sam Walton and the stockholders and board members of Wal-Mart. And who did all the work that earned that money? Not Sam Walton, nor the stockholders nor board members of Wal-Mart. Nope. That money was earned by the underpaid employees who bothered to show their asses up at the big box stores every day, fake their smiles for the customers and keep everything running... all the while selling products produced by under-age slave laborers in Asia.

Perspective, folks. Ten billion annual profit is $27,397,260.27 per day. Meaning that the jury award above will cost the fuckers who hold the strings just under a week worth of filthy lucre. Screwing employees out of a half hour lunch means that, assuming a five day week, every Wal-Mart employee lost 3 1/4 weeks of wages. Meaning that the jury award should have been at least triple what it was.

It gets back to the modern robber-baron theory: the sense of entitlement that the owners have, the ones who make all their money for doing nothing but sitting back and racking in the beans. No, worse. They make all their money by figuring out ways to fuck over the workers while protecting their stock options and bonuses and golden parachutes -- and having arranged with the powers that be a much lower tax bracket for interest income (i.e., money for nothing) than for wage income.

Sigh. I really don't know what keeps the American people from revolting, and putting their corporate leaders' heads on pitchforks. We need a Robspiere. We need a guillotine in the public square -- and very few capitalists would redeem themselves. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet might get off because of their charitable acts (men who took Andrew Carnegie's words to heart: a man should spend the first half of his life earning his fortune, and the second half giving it away.) But the rest of these assholes in suits? Hang them from the highest gibbet, kick the shit out of their corpses, and split up the profit equally. Perspective: WalMart employs 1.1 million people -- meaning that every single staffer should get a bonus of about $9,000, were things divided up equitably.

But, if you're working for WalMart, I'll bet that your bonus was not getting laid off on December 24th. And not being fired for daring to mention to your supervisor something as trivial as Federal employment law.

Fuck Wal-Mart. I won't shop there. I'd hope that more and more people would wake up and realize that trafficking with them is worse than buying crack. After all, paying money to your local crack dealer at least feeds someone. Paying it to Wal-Mart just makes Sam Walton and his cronies richer and richer.

Damn, I'd love to lock then in a room and drop their annual profits on them -- in pennies. Slowly. Laughing all the while. That's a trillion pennies. I'm not sure what a penny weights, but a trillion of anything has got to weigh... well, a lot.

And Sam Walton and Company deserve to die under the weight of that blood money.