3 Responses to “GO POUND COFFEE GROUNDS…”

1. Sam says:

   14 October 06 at 0536

   Wal-Mart purposely fails its injured workers. This story is hardly the first. What’s sad is the monster is still getting away with it. I don’t know if it will help but here’s the story of Wal-Mart in the State of Washington.

   This company absolutely destroys lives.

   Attention Wal-Mart workers: Please do not report injuries
   After repeated complaints, the state wants to take over the superstore’s workers’ comp.
   By Mark D. Fefer
   Seattle Weekly
   April 18, 2001

   Under the workers’ comp system adopted by most states a century ago, employers are required to cover the medical bills of people hurt on the job. If injured workers require time off, they are entitled to a portion of their lost wages. Those who suffer some kind of permanent damage can receive payments in perpetuity, depending on their loss of earning power. It’s a no-fault system—the employee gets paid regardless of what caused the accident; the employer, in turn, is free from the threat of lawsuits and off the hook for pain and suffering.

   In Washington, most employers pay premiums into a state fund and Labor and Industries pays out the claims. However, employers like Wal-Mart, Boeing, Microsoft, and others who have at least $5 million in assets are allowed to manage their own claims and pay them directly out-of-pocket. Big companies prefer this “self-insurance” method since it gives them much greater control over their costs.

   “They have a profit incentive to deny benefits,” argues workers’ comp attorney Wayne Lieb. “Every dollar they don’t pay out is a dollar they keep.”

   Regulators in Olympia contend that Wal-Mart has managed its program so badly, for so many years, that it should no longer be allowed to self-insure. L&I says the company “repeatedly failed” to respond to worker claims, or pay workers their benefits, in a timely way; that it prematurely cut off employees’ replacement wages or “miscalculated” them; that it has shown “consistently poor record keeping,” and has even failed to provide “adequate first aid facilities.”

   Among all the self-insured companies in Washington, Wal-Mart is “the worst, absolutely the worst,” claims Chris Stendal, paralegal at Knies & Allen, which specializes in workers’ comp.

   In some instances, L&I’s Gary Moore charges, Wal-Mart employees were not even given the chance to submit a workers’ comp claim. He says Wal-Mart personnel files show cases in which employees were hurt at a store, yet no accident report was ever sent to company headquarters—the first step in setting a claim in motion. “That’s disturbing,” says Moore.

   When Eileen Ocello tore her meniscus one night while descending a ladder with an armload of shampoo, she says managers “made no overtures to help me or explain the law. All I ever got was the runaround.” It wasn’t until a year later, when Ocello could no longer bend her knee, that a new manager arrived at the store and a formal injury report was sent to headquarters, and even then, Ocello says she had to chase after a Bentonville-bound truck and place it on there herself. Wal-Mart later paid for her surgery.

   Eileen’s story is nothing compared to the horror of the opening story in the article though.

   I hope Jeff that you’ll pass this on to your regular reader so hopefully she and her client won’t let the Beast get away with robbing yet another human for the almighty buck that will go in a Walton wallet with all those stolen others. As scary and embarrassing as it can seem, the more people who speak up the more that will come forward.

   Real people can also be quite accepting of those going through hard times.

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2. Jeff Hess says:

   14 October 06 at 0909

   Shalom Sam,

   First, thank you for stopping in, for reading and, most importantly, for taking the time to write a comment. It’s all about the conversation.

   I’ve passed the story along to my other reader. Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.

   One of the lessons we learned in the early days of the industrial age is that when a corporation assumes the internal care of its workers, it is seldom to the workers benefits.

   I think on a much less tragic level, Wal Mart’s campaign to gain banking control is similar. If I could trust Wal Mart to just use the access to process credit card charges and save paying a processing fee to someone else, I’d be OKwith that.

   But I don’t feel I can trust Wally World to do the right thing.

   B’shalom,

   Jeff

   Reply
3. Have Coffee Will Write » WAL MART WEDNESDAY… says:

   18 October 06 at 0658

   [...] GO POUND COFFEE GROUNDS… Every Wednesday I assemble a digest of my past week’s post here and publish them on my personal blog Have Coffee Will Write as Wal Mart Wednesday. This week one of my regular readers felt compelled to share a personal Wal Mart story. Keep reading… [...]

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