Clean up on aisle five: who pays when Wal-Mart keeps prices--and standards of living--low?

BEHIND EVERY GREAT FORTUNE IS A CRIME, WROTE Balzac. Sometimes they are big crimes--like selling I opium to Chinese peasants or war profiteering with Nazi industrialists--but just as often great family fortunes accumulate through the small, steady contributions of a whole mess of littler offenses.

In September, Forbes magazine's annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans included the usual suspects like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates (who, it turns out, actually do have more money than God), but an astonishing five of the top 10 came from within the membership of the real Sam's club, Sam Walton's widow and progeny. Inheritors of a fortune built on the backs of 1.4 million employees in 4,300 Wal-Mart stores worldwide, the Waltons were each worth $20.5 billion in 2003, comprising a total family fortune of $102 billion plus. Good night, John-boy!

Wal-Mart was again in the news soon after the list's release. Seems its executives were shocked, shocked to discover that a good chunk of their overnight cleaning crews were living illegally in the United States, having extended visits sans papers from faraway lands in Eastern Europe and Mexico.

Many of these undocumented workers--who, as illegal residents working night shifts, were doubly invisible to mainstream America--labored for months on end without a single day off, at extremely low wages, and with, naturally, no benefits. But unpleasant stories about the way Wal-Mart treats its employees is old news to clan Walton.

Rabidly anti-union, the Wal-Mart corporation currently faces scores of lawsuits and Labor Department investigations across the country. Ex-Wal-Marteers--they are legion--complain of sexual harassment or discrimination, being forced to work off the clock, and subsistence wages that drove them to public assistance.

What connects these abuses? The relative vulnerability of the company's workforce, primarily women with few employment opportunities, little education, and none of the power associated with unionized workers.

Americans have been taught to view griping about massive individual wealth as so much useless, leftist sour grapes, but vast disparities in personal wealth are a threat to a healthy democracy, and how Wal-Mart behaves as a corporate citizen does matter to the rest of us--even if we're never likely to don a blue smock. As the fifth largest corporation in America and the nation's largest single employer, Wal-Mart has the power to set industry labor and wage standards and affect American home and community life like few other large businesses.

Wal-Mart's low prices come at a real cost to all of us. It is not uncommon for full-time Wal-Mart employees to qualify for food stamps and Medicaid, and its community and job-swallowing superstores are often built with state and local tax write-offs. In effect, U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing one of the most successful businesses in the world--one with more than $8 billion in profit last year alone--while further enriching the planet's wealthiest family.

Now gluttony and avarice are not, strictly speaking, illegal, so the Waltons don't face a court date because of their steely to wealth accumulation. It determination doesn't make them moral standouts, though, to be swimming in so much lucre while their full-time employees have to choose between paying rent or paying into Wal-Mart's prohibitively expensive health plan.

POPE LEO'S XIII RERUM NOVARUM IS PROPERLY REMEMBERED for its historic defense of the rights of working people, but much of the 1891 encyclical is actually devoted to detailing the responsibilities of labor to capital while defending the legitimacy of private property. But good Pope Leo doesn't stop there. Within a morally well-ordered economic system, owners of capital have responsibilities, too--among them: providing a just wage and enough free time from work for recreation, rejuvenation, and family life to their workers. Leo calls capitalists to not just preserve but to enhance the human dignity of the people who work for them.

With a 38-percent, controlling share of the Wal-Mart empire, the Waltons could put some decency where their gross profits are and offer, say, $1 more an hour to their million-plus employees. That gesture admittedly would come at some personal risk. At that level their generosity should exceed their 2003 net worth in just about 40 years.

By KEVIN CLARKE, contributing editor to U.S. CATHOLIC and managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications.