[S]en. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., trained his sights on Walmart this week as the latest target in his campaign against large corporations that he says pay their executives too much and workers too little.
Sanders introduced a bill, titled “Stop Welfare for Any Large Monopoly Amassing Revenue from Taxpayers Act,” or Stop WALMART Act, on Thursday targeting the nation’s premier retail store.
The bill would ban companies from buying back their stocks — a practice that has increased since President Donald Trump’s tax cuts were enacted — unless their employees are paid at least $15 an hour and able to earn up to seven days of paid sick leave per year. It would also cap CEO pay at no more than 150 times the median pay of their employees.
The introduction of the Stop WALMART Act follows wage increases at Amazon and Disney after Sanders put public pressure on those two corporations.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced the Stop Walmart legislation with Sanders. Khanna praised Sanders in an interview with VTDigger Friday.
“A lot of Senator Sanders’ critics say he is impractical or unrealistic, but he is the only politician in the Democratic Party over the last two years who was actually effective in helping working families,” he said.
Walmart made more than $13 billion in profits last year while paying the median worker just $19,177 annually. Sanders said in the press release announcing the bill that four members of the Waltons, the company’s founding family, made $12.7 billion in one day.
“To make as much as those Waltons did in one day, it would take a Walmart worker working ‘full-time’ earning $11 an hour over 653,000 years,” Sanders said in the statement, referring to the company’s base wage for employees.
Walmart did not respond to a request for comment. But the company told CNN that it offers competitive wages and benefits and advancement opportunities.
“We have increased our starting wages by more than 50% in the last three years and currently have an average hourly total compensation of more than $17.50 an hour,” Walmart said in a statement to CNN. “At the same time, we’ve also added new benefits like paid time off, advanced job training, paid family leave and college for $1 a day.”
Khanna said that Walmart workers are becoming more productive than ever with technological advances. But he said their wages have stagnated.
“Economics 101 means as productivity increases, wages should increase,” he said. “Why are they stagnating at $11 an hour and not going to $15? The money that workers are earning is being taken and being given in stock buybacks to shareholders and executives.”
Walmart increased wages to $11 after the signing of the tax bill. But Sanders pushed back against Walmart’s plans to buy back around $20 billion in its stock instead of using those profits to increase worker wages.
Many companies made headlines by announcing wage increases for workers after the Republican tax bill was signed. But these companies are primarily using increased profits to enhance shareholders through share buybacks and dividend increases in lieu of new hiring and investment, Money magazine reported.
Khanna said that if Walmart took the $20 billion it was using for stock buybacks and put it into wages for workers, the company could increase hourly wages for each worker by around $6.
Amazon announced in October that it was increasing wages for all workers to $15 effective Nov. 1. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the time that the company was listening to its critics and urged other large companies to follow suit.
One of these prominent critics was Sanders, who introduced the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act” — or Stop BEZOS act — with Khanna.
The Stop BEZOS Act would have requires companies to either increase worker pay or pay taxes on employees using public assistance programs like Medicaid, food stamps and public housing. Sanders argued that low wages from large employers contributed to more government spending on those programs.
He cited a 2015 survey from the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center which found that low wages cost taxpayers $152.8 billion each year. In announcing the Stop WALMART Act, Sanders said taxpayers are paying $6.2 billion a year on public assistance for Walmart employees.
Neither bill has a clear path to passage with a Republican-controlled Senate and Trump in the White House. Khanna admitted that while passing either bill would be an uphill battle, many conservatives are sympathetic to the view that workers should be earning more.
The Stop BEZOS Bill was criticized as a symbolic gesture in Sanders’ larger campaign against large corporations. Vox’s Matt Yglesias described it as “unworkable nonsense” if taken literally.
Yglesias said that under the bill, it would be cheaper for companies to pay the tax than increase wages for workers, and would incentivize companies to hire married and childless workers over single workers and parents, as household size is a driving factor of qualifying for federal benefits.
Khanna pushed back on that line of criticism of the bill, saying it was a “red herring” and that the bill had stiff penalties against those who discriminated against single workers or parents.
“Most workers at Amazon don’t think this is symbolic, they have much more take home pay for the holidays thanks to this bill,” he said.
