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Health & SafetyUS campaign for affordable health care insurance launched
Wal-Mart, the US retailer, and three other large US companies have formed an unlikely alliance with union leaders to call for “quality, affordable” health care insurance for every American by 2012.
The campaign intends to hold a summit by May and lobby business, labour, government and non-profit leaders to sign on to four “common sense principles” and form a coalition. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart chief executive, said government alone cannot fix a broken healthcare system which leaves too many people uninsured.
This announcement met with an enthusiastic response from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). Last year the ICCR submitted a shareholder proposal on universal healthcare policy to seven companies, including Wal-Mart. Margaret Weber, Basilian Fathers of Toronto corporate responsibility director, praised the company for not challenging this proposal, but working with unions, business and shareholders to develop these new principles.
However, Wal-Mart’s commitment was elsewhere met with some scepticism, not least by Joseph Hansen, United Food and Commercial Workers Union president. Wal-Mart, said Hansen, is the largest corporation that provides the least healthcare to employees.
While the company may be changing its public posture, argued Hansen, it needs to change its actual corporate practices, starting with taking responsibility for providing affordable healthcare to its own workers.
Campaign group WakeUpWalMart was no more impressed, labelling Wal-Mart’s announcement “disingenuous” and challenging the company to immediately provide universal healthcare for all of its uninsured employees and their families.
Meanwhile, the US court of appeal had given the go-ahead to a massive sex discrimination case against Wal-Mart. The editorial in the Financial Times (FT, 8 February) said the rest of corporate American is quite right to get the jitters when the world’s largest retailer is hit with the world’s largest employment lawsuit. However, said the FT, class action lawsuits such as this – which involves over 2m former and current female Wal-Mart employees - are unfair to all concerned: plaintiffs may not get a fair deal, it being unlikely all members of the class were harmed equally; and such suits place extortionate pressure on big companies to settle rather than risk a damage award running to billions of dollars.
LinksWal-MartInterfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility United Food and Commercial Workers Union
March 2007 |
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