• Missouri judge certifies lawsuit against Wal-Mart as class-action case
• Wal-Mart quick to correct Nitro error
• Wal-Mart Workers Are Finding a Voice Without a Union
• 2 ex-workers allege wage tampering by Wal-Mart
• More...

The latest reports indicate that Wal-Mart is fighting 44 different lawsuits filed by associates in 30 states, accusing the company of systematically forcing them to work long hours off the clock.

A lawsuit accusing Wal-Mart Stores of underpaying workers at its Missouri stores was certified as a class-action suit in 2005. The class action includes between 160,000 and 200,000 people who worked in Missouri at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores between August 15, 1996, and June 30, 2003. The suit, first filed in 2001, accuses Wal-Mart of forcing associates to work off the clock, failing to pay them overtime, and preventing them from taking rest and lunch breaks.

The company reportedly paid $50 million in 2001 to settle an off-the-clock lawsuit covering 69,000 workers in Colorado.

Wal-Mart reportedly paid $500,000 in 2001 to settle an off-the-clock lawsuit involving 120 workers in Gallup, N.M.

In 2003, A federal grand jury found Wal-Mart forced employees in Oregon to work unpaid overtime between 1994 and 1999. More than 400 employees from 24 of Wal-Mart's 27 Oregon stores sued the retailer.

Two class-action suits, filed in 1996 and 1997, involve 8,000 pharmacists alleging that Wal-Mart owes them $200 million in pay because of wage and hour violations. The suits are currently on appeal.

In 2002, the Kentucky state human rights commission ordered Wal-Mart to pay $40,000 to two people who claimed that Wal-Mart fired them because they were an interracial couple.

In 2002, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $140,000 and to provide its management with training on anti- discriminatory hiring practices in order to settle a retaliation lawsuit filed by the EEOC. The EEOC alleged that Wal-Mart removed an associate’s hiring authority from its Midlothian store in suburban Richmond, VA and essentially demoted her because she complained about hiring instructions that she believed were racially discriminatory.

In 2001, a customer service manager, age 22, a divorced mother of two, filed a complaint against Wal-Mart alleging discrimination against female workers by excluding contraceptive coverage from its health insurance plan.

In 2001, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $6.8 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in California. Wal-Mart was accused of discrimination against people with disabilities in a pre-employment screening, allegedly directing unlawful medical inquiries at people seeking jobs. The settlement reached includes 13 other similar lawsuits filed against Wal-Mart in 11 states which includes California, Ohio, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, New York, New Mexico, Arizona, Missouri and Texas.

A U.S. District in Arizona fined Wal-Mart $750,000 in 2001 for violating an agreement to improve treatment of deaf associates.

In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached a $55,000 settlement with Wal-Mart in an age discrimination and retaliation lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago against Wal-Mart on behalf of a 51-year old Cicero, Illinois woman.

In 2001, the EEOC filed its 16th federal lawsuit against Wal-Mart for unlawfully firing a disabled people greeter after Wal-Mart refused to let her sit while working.

In 2001, Wal-Mart was forced to relinquish control of its worker’s compensation system after after five audits between 1993 and 1999 showed the company failed to properly handle legitimate injured worker claims. It was the first time the state government was forced to take over a plan for a company that was not going bankrupt. Wal-Mart finally settled with the state government after failing to win a court challenge.

In 2000, a federal jury heard a suit brought by Tammy Williams, 36, who claimed she was sexually harassed by a supervisor. She reported the harassment to an assistant manager, who relayed the matter to Ray Rabbit, the district manager. Rabbit fired Williams a short time later without interviewing her and contrary to the “open door” policy. The jury found no evidence of sexual harassment, but awarded Williams $100,000 in damages for the retaliatory termination.

The class includes between 160,000 and 200,000 people who worked in Missouri at Wal-Mart Discount and Supercenters stores, as well as the company's Sam's Club stores, between Aug. 15, 1996, and June 30, 2003. Midkiff has not set a trial date.

The suit, first filed in 2001, accuses Wal-Mart of forcing hourly employees to work off the clock, failing to pay them overtime, and preventing them from taking rest and lunch breaks.

"One of the interesting things about the judge's opinion is that she bases it on the systematic policy and management direction out of Bentonville, Ark.," said Larry Ward, a Kansas City attorney representing the plaintiffs, referring to Wal-Mart's headquarters. "It's an overall policy designed to reduce labor costs by failing to pay employees for all of their breaks."

Messages that The Associated Press left with the company were not immediately returned.

Wal-Mart has said previously that because of its size the company has become an attractive target for law firms looking for settlements of what it has described as nuisance lawsuits.

The Missouri suit is among about 40 cases nationwide alleging workplace violations against the world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart, which earned $10 billion last year, agreed to pay $50 million in 2000 to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that 69,000 former and current Wal-Mart employees in Colorado had been forced to work off the clock.

In September, lawyers representing about 116,000 former and current Wal-Mart Stores employees in California told a jury that the retailer systematically and illegally denied workers lunch breaks. That case is the first of its kind to go to trial.

Last year an appeals court in Florida refused to reinstate class-action status for a lawsuit seeking to represent 230,000 Wal-Mart employees in that state, ruling that the employee group was too broad. An Ohio judge made a similar ruling in 2001, and judges in Texas, Louisiana and North Carolina have also denied class certification.

Shughart Thompson & Kilroy, the Kansas City and Denver firm which obtained the class settlment in the Colorado case and is pursuing the Missouri case, also has a suit with similar allegations pending in Wyandotte County, Kan. The judge in that case has not made a decision on whether it should be certified as a class-action lawsuit.

Steve Long, lead trial attorney with the firm, said in a statement that the Missouri case could be a breakthrough.

"What sets the Missouri case apart is that for the first time, Wal-Mart was forced by the court to provide outside access to its electronic database," Long said. "Based on Wal-Mart's own data, it's abundantly clear they're forcing employees collectively to work many thousands of hours each month without pay."

The Bentonville, Ark., headquarters lost no time in telling the manager of the Wal-Mart store in the Nitro Marketplace that he was off on the wrong foot with a new work schedule. It required employees to work any shift from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. any day of the week. Or be fired.

"It is unfortunate that our store manager incorrectly communicated a message that was not only inaccurate but also disruptive to our associates at the store," said Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman.

The turnabout was like music to the ears of associates such as single parents with responsibility for children at home. Day-care centers aren't open day and night, nor necessarily the helping hand of kin and friends.

Single parents make up a sizeable share of Wal-Mart employees. Others who enable the giant to straddle the commercial world include senior citizens, college students and people working to support the main breadwinner. The latter make up less than 10 percent of the total.

As for Wal-Mart wages, the company pays an average of $ 9.68 an hour. That's above the $ 5.15 federal minimum wage that Congress passed about eight years ago. Many workers and other responsible citizens feel that a raise in the minimum is overdue.

Wal-Mart management doubtless had recent high-level discussions about the labor side of the business. And it meant at least to one manager to tighten up on the work schedule for a better profit picture.

It brings to mind the old complaint by the late AFL-CIO President George Meany, who said, "There's always talk about cutting wages, but never about cutting profits."

His complaint goes to the heart of the standing question on the importance of labor, whether slave, cheap or free. In the American sense, workers are free under law to organize and bargain with representatives of their own choosing.

So it is in Europe, if not in China and other Asian countries, where Wal-Mart has a foothold. Wal-Mart maintains the company union of associates.

They are unlike the old-fashioned unions for workers who average five to six weeks of annual paid vacation in Europe and who have family insurance coverage.

Maybe that's why Old Europe is now a "has-been" in the view of American economists like Robert Samuelson and free-market fundamentalists who uphold Adam Smith's "invisible hand" in the global marketplace.

Whether it's because of the right hand or the left, or both, Europeans generally have better health care than Americans, according to most accounts. More than 40 million Americans have no health insurance at all, thousands of them in West Virginia.

Wal-Mart says about 30 percent of the newly hired among 1.5 million employees have no health coverage. Its policy makes a full-time worker eligible to join the company plan after six months on the job and a part-time worker eligible to join after two years.

The cost of the basic plan to the individual employee is $ 40 a month or $ 155 for a family. A $ 1,000 family deductible applies for medical and hospital service, but not for prescription drugs, as The New York Times reported May 6 on Wal-Mart's heath-care plan.

In the media, Wal-Mart chief Lee Scott says the nation has an insurance problem. He urges business, government and citizen representatives to get together and do something about it.

Surely, most Americans would benefit from a solution to the problem.

Tampa, FL - Having failed to unionize any Wal-Marts, American labor unions have helped form a new and unusual type of workers' association to press Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to improve its wages and working conditions.

With its first beachhead in Central Florida, the two-month-old group is already battling Wal-Mart, the nation's largest corporation, over what it says is the company's practice of reducing the hours that many employees work, often from 40 a week to 34, 30 or even fewer, jeopardizing some workers' health benefits.

Belva Whitt, a cashier who earns $7.40 an hour, said she had joined the new group, the Wal-Mart Workers Association, largely because she was unhappy with her wages and because her hours were reduced to part time from full time many weeks.

"I'm a single mother trying to raise my son, so not having that money makes it hard," said Ms. Whitt, 30. "Sometimes I have to decide, am I paying the rent or will I have food on the table?"

The association says it has nearly 200 current and former Wal-Mart workers and is growing by 30 workers a week. Members pay dues of $5 a month. In Florida, its membership includes workers from 30 stores in the Tampa, Orlando and St. Petersburg areas, and it is also seeking to enlist Wal-Mart employees in Texas.

The group's sponsors include the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union, and Acorn, an advocacy group for low-income people. It has also received support from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which helps low-income families, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which promotes social justice.

"We are building something that's never been seen; it's neither fish nor fowl," said Wade Rathke, a top Acorn official who is the chief organizer for the association. "We're focusing on Wal-Mart because it is the largest employer in the area - and in the whole nation - and is setting standards that affect communities and employment relations across the nation."

The association's workers, Mr. Rathke said, would seek to "aggressively engage the company on their rights and how they are treated."

The group is urging the State of Florida to grant unemployment benefits to workers whose hours have been cut back by Wal-Mart. It is arguing that workers who quit Wal-Mart because the reduced hours meant they were not earning enough to live on deserve jobless benefits. It also wants supplemental jobless benefits for workers with reduced hours who remain at Wal-Mart.

Dan Fogleman, a Wal-Mart spokesman, defended the company. "Our wages are competitive within the retail workplace," Mr. Fogleman said. "We work hard to make health care premiums affordable."

He said the company's associates, as Wal-Mart calls its workers, were free to form such an organization. But he said that Wal-Mart hoped employees would feel free to bring any concerns to upper management through what the company calls its open-door policy.

As for the reduction of hours, Mr. Fogleman said, "For years we have had a scheduling system in place that is designed to match associates' work schedules to projected customer flow to our stores."

Warren May, a spokesman for the Florida agency in charge of unemployment benefits, said Wal-Mart workers who remained on the job might qualify for unemployment compensation if their hours were cut sharply. Mr. May said those who quit their jobs because of a reduction in hours might have a harder time winning benefits.

Carl Jones, one of the leaders of the new group, said Wal-Mart's pay was too low, pointing to the $9.40 an hour he earns after five years as the lead shopping cart pusher at a Wal-Mart in Apopka, outside Orlando.

"It's really hard for me and my wife to make ends meet," Mr. Jones said. "They treat workers like we're just something there to be used and to get as much out of us as they can."

The association says Wal-Mart is betraying the desire of its founder, Sam Walton, to maintain a family-friendly company.

Ms. Whitt and several other members of the association say that Wal-Mart's health plan has such high premiums and deductibles that they cannot afford to join it. As a result, Ms. Whitt and thousands of other Wal-Mart workers receive health coverage through Medicaid.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation has granted $250,000 to an Acorn-backed project that is in turn giving much of that money to the new association.

"We want to broadly support economic justice," said Chantel L. Walker, the foundation's director of programs. "We believe that Wal-Mart could really make a difference because of the size of their work force and because of the leadership role they play."

The association is the latest attempt by labor and community groups to squeeze at Wal-Mart's pressure points. In the past month, the food and commercial workers have led an effort, joined by the nation's two big teachers unions, urging consumers not to purchase school supplies at Wal-Mart. Another group, Wal-Mart Watch, plans to announce a week of demonstrations and meetings nationwide in November to criticize Wal-Mart's wages and benefits.

Labor leaders say they support the nonunion Wal-Mart Workers Association because with the company fighting aggressively against unionization, they recognize that it will be extremely hard to unionize any Wal-Marts.

"This dovetails nicely with what we're doing," said William McDonough, organizing director of the food and commercial workers, which has sought unsuccessfully to unionize several Wal-Marts. "Our role is to help Wal-Mart workers get a voice on the job."

Mr. McDonough said his union hoped that Wal-Mart workers would grow so emboldened and that community support would grow so strong that unions could succeed at organizing some Wal-Marts in a few years.

The new association is not urging shoppers to boycott Wal-Mart.

"I like Wal-Mart, I enjoy working for them," Ms. Whitt said. "But what they're doing is wrong. They need to fix it."

The allegations come more than a year after news of suspected wage tampering at Wal-Mart first surfaced in a New York Times report, which also detailed similar practices at other large corporations.

Since then at least 40 similar class actions against Wal-Mart have been filed in other states, including New York, Washington and California. None have been resolved.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has consistently denied any wrongdoing. A spokeswoman declined to comment on the Hawaii suit yesterday, saying she had not seen it.

On its Web site to deal with community relations, www.walmartfacts.com, the retailer says its policy is to "pay hourly associates for every minute they work."

Wal-Mart also says that managers "doing the wrong thing ... would be disciplined and possibly even fired. Any manager who requires or tolerates 'off-the-clock' work would be violating policy and labor laws."

In a news conference yesterday, Honolulu attorneys Arthur Park and Wayne Parsons said Wal-Mart employees likely would not have noticed the alleged deductions to their paychecks because they were subtle, possibly as little as a few dollars a day.

"This has been hidden from the employees," said Park, adding that time-shaving was likely done manually and carried out by store managers under pressure to stay within payroll budgets. "We have solid evidence this has been done."

Park and Parsons filed the suit on behalf of two Big Island residents, Tammy L. Poha and Moke K. Palakiko. Both worked at the Wal-Mart in Hilo -- Poha from 1996 to 2000, and Palakiko for three years, from 1997 to 2000.

Park said the two came to him after he told some of his clients about the allegations of work-record tampering against Wal-Mart.

The suit does not provide numbers on how many employees might have been victims of time-shaving or how much they are allegedly due, but Parsons believes thousands could be eligible to join the class action.

According to Wal-Mart's Web site, the retailer employs 4,072 people in Hawaii.

In addition to the wages allegedly due the employees, the suit seeks punitive damages and attorneys' fees.

It accuses Wal-Mart of illegally cutting payroll costs in at least three ways:

• By altering records to make it appear that an employee's workday ended one minute after their scheduled lunch or dinner break, "denying employees their pay for the three or four hours of work they performed after their meal period."

  In the April 4, 2004, New York Times article, Wal-Mart admitted that the so-called "one-minute clock-out" was a common practice but was used only as a way of teaching employees to remember to clock back in after breaks.

  A Wal-Mart executive said store managers were instructed to stop the practice in 2003.

• With deliberate alterations to time records, which made it appear that employees took meal breaks when they had not.
• And by failing to pay for overtime work.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., has six stores in the islands. Its newest location opened a year ago on Keeaumoku Street, near Ala Moana Center.