The Daily Background

Newsweek reports on Wal-Mart’s highly immoral and legally questionable decision not to pay child workers at its Mexico stores, who get only tips that customers give them for bagging their purchases:

Wal-Mart is Mexico’s largest private-sector employer in the nation today, with nearly 150,000 local residents on its payroll. An additional 19,000 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 work after school in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores, mostly as grocery baggers, throughout Mexico—and none of them receives a red cent in wages or fringe benefits. The company doesn’t try to conceal this practice: its 62 Superama supermarkets display blue signs with white letters that tell shoppers: OUR VOLUNTEER PACKERS COLLECT NO SALARY, ONLY THE GRATUITY THAT YOU GIVE THEM. SUPERAMA THANKS YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

The use of unsalaried youths is legal in Mexico because the kids are said to be “volunteering” their services to Wal-Mart and are therefore not subject to the requirements and regulations that would otherwise apply under the country’s labor laws. But some officials south of the U.S. border nonetheless view the practice as regrettable, if not downright exploitative. “These kids should receive a salary,” says Labor Undersecretary Patricia Espinosa Torres. “If you ask me, I don’t think these kids should be working, but there are cultural and social circumstances [in Mexico] rooted in poverty and scarcity.”

Wal-Mart’s Mexico division made $280 in profits in the second quarter of 2006, 7% more than the year before that. They’d easily be able to pay these kids the minimum wage if they wanted to (it’s less than $5 a day), but they don’t want to. There are legal questions over whether or not Wal-Mart’s practice violates Mexico’s own laws, and this is clearly immoral.

“Then again, things could be a lot worse,” Newsweek says in closing. “In February 2005, Wal-Mart agreed to pay the U.S. Labor Department $135,540 in civil money penalties to settle charges of 24 child-labor violations.”

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