An important story from Wal-Mart today

Carolyn Hileman* | January 25, 2007

Dear Carolyn,I wanted to give you an early heads up about a story that you will be hearing and reading about over the next day or two.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. today announced it has entered into a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor regarding the manner in which the company calculates overtime pay.

I don’t normally link to press releases, but this is a fairly complex story, and the release has key details: http://tinyurl.com/2gybyh

Here are the crucial points:

Wal-Mart discovered the issue and reported it to the Department of Labor. The issue has been resolved and DOL is not asking Wal-Mart to pay any fines or penalties.

Wal-Mart is committed to its associates and apologizes to them for this error.

Everyone who is owed money is being paid with interest, and Wal-Mart is not seeking repayment from people who were overpaid.

Wal-Mart is correcting any underpayments for the last five years, even though the law requires only two years.

Additionally, Wal-Mart is correcting underpayments of as little as a penny, with interest, while the DOL only requires payment to associates who are underpaid by more than $20.

Finally, Wal-Mart has added safeguards to its processes to help make sure these types of errors don’t happen again.

We expect that the Wal-Mart attack groups will react in their usual way to this story, so I hope this information is useful in understanding it.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I have some additional detail that I can provide if you have specific questions.

Have a great day.

The Voice

Contributor's website: http://www.thevoice.name

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