The Daily Beast reports that Walmart is a little tired of being criticized over how much it pays its employees, especially by news outlets that regularly use no-wage or low-wage interns. In an open letter to Walmart, the left-leaning Nation called on the nation’s largest private sector employer to raise the pay of its employees.
Wednesday, Steve Restivo, senior director of communications for Walmart, fired back.
In an email with the subject header, “people who live in glass houses…”, Restivo wrote:
The Nation–“America’s leading progressive print and online magazine”–recently encouraged its readers to sign an open letter demanding that Walmart increase wages to $12/hour and this article called our company one of the “biggest abusers of low-wage labor.”
In an ironic twist, ProPublica recently reported that starting this fall, “interns at the Nation Institute will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program.” As ProPublica noted, The Nation has been paying its full-time interns a weekly stipend of $150 per week–less than the current federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.
According to the Daily Beast, Walmart pays its store employees an average of $12 to $13 an hour, which works out to around $25,000 a year.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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