Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

at 11:00 10:45 EST this morning to announce support for a universal health care program. Other organizations are involved including the Communications Workers. Jeff Hess has the whole story at Writing on the Wal.

Register here to watch it live. Here’s the video.

Update: Here’s the Service Employees account of the press conference.

Here’s Wal-Mart’s.

Summary: “Some big corporations and a couple of big unions agree to work together for some kind of universal national health plan. This is really, really important. We don’t have a plan for this. We do have four “principles” and we’re going to have a national summit meeting about them in May. This is really, really important.”

It’s not reported whether Wal-Mart intends to invite any of its store employees to the summit and introduce them to its new labor movement partners.

Update: The United Food and Commercial Workers, SEIU’s partner in the Change To Win coalition, is not enthusiastic.

It’s not appropriate to take the stage with a company that refuses to remedy its mistreatment of workers, among other irresponsible practices. Wal-Mart is actually decreasing health care coverage to employees and facing the largest gender discrimination case in the history of this country…

Wal-Mart is the largest corporation that provides the least health care to employees. But suddenly the company has become a proponent of health care for everyone — apparently, though, as long as Wal-Mart doesn’t have to deal with the health care needs of its own employees.

Wal-Mart is changing its public posture, but it also needs to change its actual corporate practices. And that practice begins with taking responsibility for its own employees.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 6:28 am and is filed under Economics. 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.