Immediate Release
Contact: Laura Tatum 202-466-1533

Statement by WakeUpWalMart.com On Wal-Mart Hiring Assistant U.S. Health Secretary John Agwunobi

The following is attributable to Laura Tatum, spokeswoman for WakeUpWalMart.com:

“It is outrageous that CEO Lee Scott would attempt to distract the nation by hiring right-wing Republican cronies from George Bush’s failing administration, rather than taking real, substantive steps to address Wal-Mart’s own health care crisis.

Wal-Mart and CEO Lee Scott should be ashamed to continue playing PR games with one of the most important issues in America - health care. No other company has done more to feed our nation’s health care crisis than Wal-Mart. Even with $12 billion in profits, Wal-Mart chooses to look the other way as it cruelly and needlessly leaves over 775,000 Wal-Mart workers and their families without company health care.

The facts speak for themselves: Wal-Mart leaves over 53 percent of its workers without company health care; 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart’s employees are either uninsured or on public health care assistance; and, Wal-Mart costs taxpayers an estimated $1.3 billion every year because so many uninsured Wal-Mart workers are forced onto public health care.

The time has come for Wal-Mart to stop its PR stunts, to end its empty rhetoric, and instead, to lead by example - by providing universal health care to the hundreds of thousands of its own employees who have no company health care now!”