Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest company, has been taken to court by a group of former immigrant employees who have accused the US supermarket chain of conspiring with cleaning contractors to employ them in conditions that were ”one step away from slavery”, the workers’ lawyers said yesterday.
The case comes less than three weeks after 60 Wal-Mart supermarkets in 21 US states were raided simultaneously by federal agents and 250 cleaners were detained on suspicion of being illegal immigrants. Since then, foreign workers have told of working seven-night, 56-hour weeks at the budget stores for as little $325, well below the national minimum hourly wage.
James Linsey, one of the lawyers involved in the class action in New Jersey, said the case had been filed in the name of nine plaintiffs, all Mexicans, but that thousands more from Latin America and Eastern Europe were expected to join it.
”This is really the big fish eating the little fish,” Linsey said. ”It’s the most powerful and richest company in the world taking obscene advantage of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.”
He said Wal-Mart had violated a law that is normally applied to organised crime. The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organisations Act (Rico) was applied because it is alleged that the company entered into a conspiracy with subcontractors who hired the workers from around the world and transported them to Wal-Mart stores in the US.
”Wal-Mart was systematically defrauding people of the minimum wage, social security protection, and workers’ compensation,” the New York lawyer said. ”If they were injured on the job, they were told to go to the hospital on their own. It’s obscene, and one step away from slavery.”
Wal-Mart and its contractors are also accused of failing to make required workers’ compensation and social security payments, failing to withhold federal payroll taxes, mail fraud, wire fraud, bringing in and harbouring illegal immigrants and allegedly engaging in a ”pattern of racketeering activity” to prevent officials from enforcing wage and immigration laws.
Sharon Weber, a company spokesperson at Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Arkansas, said: ”We do not feel there is merit to the plaintiffs’ case and we will quickly move for dismissal of the class action suit.”
She refused to discuss the action further, but company officials have denied knowing that illegal immigrants were working in their branches. They said the cleaning contractors had assured them they used only legal labour.
The court documents in the class action case reject the claim that Wal-Mart was unaware of the workers’ conditions as ”an effort to disguise Wal-Mart’s role as a joint employer of its janitors”.
The documents allege: ”Wal-Mart purposefully contracts maintenance and janitorial services through the contractor defendants, who are ostensibly independent entities, in an effort to shield itself from the systematic labour law and immigration violations.
”Wal-Mart is, and was, fully aware of and acted to aid and abet the rampant violation of federal and state law by the contractor defendants.”
Wal-Mart is the country’s biggest employer, accounting for 2.3% of America’s gross national product. It sells $1,25-billion worth of goods on an average day through nearly 4,500 stores. It has become the cut-price, low-wage keystone of the economy.
In the UK, it owns the Asda chain of supermarkets.
Wal-Mart is now the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry into its hiring practices. It is also the target of another class action on behalf of 100 000 workers in California, whose lawyers claim were not given full rest and meal breaks or proper overtime payments. – Guardian Unlimited Â