My name is Josh Smith and I am 23 years old, born and raised 30 minutes from here in the town of Mt. Vernon. After graduating from Stonehill College in Massachusetts I participated in a year of community service on the west coast before deciding to return home. And over the past several months I have worked just three miles from here at the Augusta Wal-Mart Supercenter.
I was hired as a cashier making $7.40 per hour with no benefits. It is very difficult to live off this wage since I was limited to 33 hours per week as a part-time associate, intentionally prevented by management from achieving full-time status. As a result of this, I would have had to wait over two years before ever becoming eligible for Wal-Mart’s health insurance.
So I cannot tell you about my own personal experience with Wal-Mart’s health care plan since I did not qualify for coverage during my tenure at the store. However, my being uninsured actually makes me the perfect person to discuss this issue since the vast majority of my co-workers also did not receive the company’s health insurance. Many were ineligible like myself, but others simply could not afford the coverage.
Much has been made of Wal-Mart’s new Value Plan, but the lower monthly premium that the company quotes is only available to certain employees in select markets. More importantly, this supposedly cheaper plan carries a $1,000 deductible, which, when added to the lower premium, can still consume up to 25% of an associates total income, or 40% for family coverage. This high cost does not represent a good value at all, since the plan has shaky coverage and is unduly loaded toward catastrophic care.
Ultimately, the Value Plan represents mere cosmetic surgery from preexisting options since the same basic flaws remain. The slick marketing did not fool associates in my store, and I do not know of a single co-worker who enrolled in the new plan. Until Wal-Mart addresses the real problems with its insurance – strict eligibility requirements and prohibitively high deductibles – 57% of its workers will remain uncovered by the company’s health insurance.
This is a statistic that I saw play out every day in my store when hearing the stories and watching the struggles of hundreds of my fellow associates. When I breached the topic with co-workers of whether they were covered by the company’s insurance, the question was shrugged off as absurd since they too were ineligible or could not afford the plan. Those who did receive coverage were well aware of the problems with the insurance, but did not have any other option.
The four months that I worked at the Augusta Supercenter showed me that whenever possible Wal-Mart will shift its costs onto other parties, in this case Maine’s taxpayers. In my mind it is utterly inappropriate for the largest corporation in the world to not pay their employees enough to live on, instead relying on the state to subsidize their low wages and poor benefits.
There is no doubt in my mind that Wal-Mart’s poor compensation forces many of their employees to turn to public programs like MaineCare. However, we must collect this data in order to gain a clearer picture of the scale of this problem. I ask that you please pass LD 1927 for all of my 450 friends down the road who continue to work and struggle everyday at Wal-Mart.
More Wal-Mart Worker Stories:
A. G. White
Bettie Madsen
Cindy Starns
Cynthia Murray
Dana Razaie
Diane Muthig
Five Workers From New York
Greg Pierce
Josh Smith
Kristen Bonardi Rapp
Lance Hindman
Mona Curtis
Ollie & Patricia Wells
Rosetta Brown
