Thanks to Carolyn Hileman at American Conservative Daily, we can see exactly what Edelman’s Marshall Manson sent his blog buddies yesterday about Wal-Mart’s overtime settlement. She posted Manson’s entire e-mail! [On one level, this is exactly what Edelman wants her to do, but Carolyn, like Claude Rains, Marshall prefers to remain invisible.] Here are the key parts of his argument:

Wal-Mart discovered the issue and reported it to the Department of Labor. The issue has been resolved and DOL is not asking Wal-Mart to pay any fines or penalties.

Luckily, with a day’s perspective and extra analysis from many quarters it is now easier than ever to explain why Manson is serving up pure spin for willing Wal-Mart water carriers.

Take that Manson quote above fines and penalties. As James Peters
at the California Employee Rights Blog explains:

A case where an employer admits they broke the law and turns themselves in for it would usually be an easy case to win.

In other words, Wal-Mart threw themselves on the mercy of the Bush Labor Department and got exactly what it expected: much more mercy than it deserved. The lack of penalties tells us much more about Republicans than it does about Wal-Mart.

Manson again:

Wal-Mart is committed to its associates and apologizes to them for this error.

From the NYT this morning:

In the consent decree filed in Federal District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in Fort Smith, Wal-Mart, as it often does, denied any liability for the accusations in the lawsuit. It denied “any wrongdoing and liability whatsoever” under the fair labor act “or any other law.” It also denied that “any of the facts” that the federal government alleged “or could have alleged are true.”

Sounds like Wal-Mart is really sorry, huh?

Manson again:

Everyone who is owed money is being paid with interest, and Wal-Mart is not seeking repayment from people who were overpaid.

Wal-Mart is correcting any underpayments for the last five years, even though the law requires only two years.

Additionally, Wal-Mart is correcting underpayments of as little as a penny, with interest, while the DOL only requires payment to associates who are underpaid by more than $20.

Here’s the Wake-Up Wal-Mart press release on this subject:

And to top it off, it appears Wal-Mart and the most anti-worker Administration in recent history negotiated this ‘secret settlement’ without any outside legal representation for the workers affected. Not surprisingly, the $33 million award is significantly below the amounts awarded to workers where the workers had legal representation of their own and the power of a courtroom.

And here’s Peters again:

[F]ederal law allows courts to double the amount of overtime wages due as a penalty for not paying those wages in the first place. It looks as though these employees are actually receiving less than half of what they are owed.

Sure makes those pennies Marshall is bragging about seem like . . . pennies.

Manson again:

Finally, Wal-Mart has added safeguards to its processes to help make sure these types of errors don’t happen again.

I covered that yesterday.

Why is Marshall telling them this?:

We expect that the Wal-Mart attack groups will react in their usual way to this story, so I hope this information is useful in understanding it.

I guess he means “their usual way” is pointing out irrefutable specific factual information that makes Wal-Mart’s actions look greedy and sinister rather than charitable. Perhaps this explains why Marshall Manson never sends me e-mail.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 1047 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under Edelman, Employment, Public Relations, Walmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.