From: Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: PEN-L list <[email protected]>
May 13, 2005/New York TIMES Always Low Wages. Always. By PAUL KRUGMAN
... The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company's health care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.
True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today's dollars - and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.
Not that many of them will actually spend a lifetime at Wal-Mart: more than 40 percent of the company's workers leave every year. ...
[Bitch, bitch, bitch. What is Krugman, anti-culture or something? Clearly, Wal-Mart workers should think less about filling their stomachs and getting health care and more about refining their sensibilities.]
May 13, 2005
New York Public Library's Durand Painting Sold to Wal-Mart Heiress
By CAROL VOGEL
Alice L. Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress and one of the richest people in the world, bought an Asher B. Durand painting yesterday from the New York Public Library for what is said to be more than $35 million. She plans to exhibit it in a museum being built by her family's foundation that is scheduled to open in May 2009 in Bentonville, Ark., where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first retail store in 1951. ...
Over the last two or three years Ms. Walton has been a major buyer of American paintings at Sotheby's and Christie's, snapping up works by Winslow Homer, Martin Johnson Meade, Edward Hopper and other artists. But the Durand is expected to be a cornerstone of the new museum's collection. ...
According to the latest Forbes magazine ranking of the world's wealthiest people, released in March, Ms. Walton and her mother, Helen - the Wal-Mart founder's widow - tie at No. 13. Each is listed as having roughly $18 billion in assets, making them the richest women in the world. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/nyregion/13painting.html>
Carl
