To: The Walton Heirs
Walton Family: Use Your Influence to Give Walmart Workers a Decent Wage & Benefits This Black Friday
At the moment, Walmart employs 825,000 low-wage workers, the most in the country. As of last year, you now control a majority of Walmart stock. That means you can make a difference. Using your influence to improve Walmart employee pay is good for Walmart and its workers, good for the company's stock and good for the overall economy.
Why is this important?
For the second year in a row, Walmart employees have had to launch a food drive for themselves. That comes as Walmart’s most profitable day of the year, Black Friday (now Thanksgiving, too) is only days away.
The Walton family is the richest family in the world, and their company, Walmart, remains immensely profitable. But at the same time, they were paid $2.6 billion a year in stock buybacks from Walmart stock. A recent Demos report shows that not only do they deny that $2.6 billion to their own workers, but they use it to lobby against the interest of all workers, spending $7.3 million since 2000 to further their opposition to minimum wage increases, paid sick days, and workplace protections.
Walmart pioneered the low-wage, no-benefit model that is wrecking our economic system. But that model is short-sighted. Were Walmart to invest in its workforce, it would actually benefit its own bottom line and the economy overall. The go-it-alone, self-interested growth model the Walton family pioneered isn’t working for anyone in our economy, least of all their employees.
Rather than use their money to deny other workers decent benefits, demand the Waltons use their unprecedented fortune so their workers receive the $15 and full-time schedules the workers are asking for.