Current and former Walmart workers are using Occupy Wall Street camps to voice their frustration over recent benefit cuts and to show how Walmart heirs are the faces of the "1 percent."
Walmart recently announced that all new part-time employees who work less than 24 hours per week would be ineligible for health care coverage. Part-time employees who work enough hours to qualify will be required to wait at least a year before being able to join the plan. At the same time, employees currently covered were informed that their premiums will rise by as much as 60 percent.
Angered by this decision, Walmart workers and associates are holding teach-ins at encampments across the country. They hope the events will illustrate how the Walton family – inheritors of the Walmart fortune – has gotten extraordinarily wealthy while Walmart workers continue to largely make poverty-level wages.
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According to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) the Walton family and Walmart have donated money to open the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art while cutting health insurance for full-time and part-time employees.
The museum, which cost $1.2 billion, is scheduled to open Monday in Bentonville, Ark.
The Walton family owns 48 percent of the company and dominates the Board of Directors.
"This is another outrageous example of the 1%—the Walton family—making decisions that negatively affect the rest of us," says Sandy Carpenter, a former Walmart department manager who led a teach-in on Friday. "The company claims it can't afford to provide decent health care coverage, but the family who has made their fortune from the work of Walmart employees spends huge sums of money on things like the Crystal Bridges museum. It's incredibly disrespectful."
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