Skirting wage laws

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, likes to spread the word that it is a good employer. On its Web site, the company says “it’s a place to develop your skills and build a career with competitive pay and health benefits for you and your family.”

The reality is that Wal-Mart faces more than 70 lawsuits over alleged violations of state wage laws. Many are class action cases. A court ruling in Minnesota last week represented the third multimillion-dollar case the company has lost since 2005, Bloomberg News reported.

The company has appealed judgments in the first two cases totaling $250 million. The ruling by a judge in Hastings, Minn., could cost Wal-Mart $2 billion because the company was found to have violated state labor laws more than 2 million times. A jury will determine in October whether each violation should carry the maximum $1,000 fine on top of the $6.5 million the judge ordered the retailer to give employees in back pay.

Wal-Mart was accused of requiring hourly employees to participate in company training on their own time and of refusing to give workers full rest or meal breaks. That does not sound like the message on its Web site.

Although many employers are accused of wage violations, the actions of Wal-Mart carry added weight because it is such a dominant retailer. Many other retailers, struggling to stay in business, certainly look up to Wal-Mart with envy and attempt to copy its financially successful business model.

But forcing employees to train for jobs on their own time and cutting short their rest and meal breaks is not the type of corporate image the company ought to be projecting.