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Wal-Mart to pay a special health tax in Maryland as a price for its social dumping
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Wal-Mart gets close to the
end of the road of its health care evasion Wal-Mart continues to be under intense pressure to improve its health care performance. As part of its social dumping, the Bentonville-based multinational has denied most of its U.S. workers affordable health care. This has forced many states to use welfare funds to finance urgent medical treatment of Wal-mart Workers and their children. The U.S. state of Maryland is now leading the way in getting to grips with this problem. A new piece of legislation - the Fair Share Health Care Act - was recently approved by legislators. This law is directly aimed at Wal-Mart, to force the multinational to remove its greedy hand from the tax-payers' pockets. It will force any employer with more than 10,000 workers in the state either to use at least 8 per cent of its payroll for health insurance, or pay the difference between this and their actual health care expenses to the state's Medicaid fund. Wal-Mart is the only company in Maryland, which corresponds to these criteria. Whether the law will be enacted now depends on the state's Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich - he has threatened to veto it. This is not all that surprising, taking into account the close relations between Wal-Mart and the George W. Bush administration, which was illustrated by their recent sweetheart deal to help the company hide violations of child labour legislation. A veto, however, would not make the law go away but only delay it until 2006 - there is apparently a strong enough majority of legislators to override the governor. Legislators in New Jersey are now picking up Maryland's initiative. Assemblyman Louis Greenwald has started to prepare a similar bill. Also another New Jersey legislator, Stephen Sweeney, has indicated that he is looking at the Maryland legislation and that he may be interested in sponsoring a similar initiative. Others are expected to follow, as a large number of states, one after another, have revealed that Wal-Mart tops their lists of companies that evade their health care responsibilities.
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