Wal-Mart is fighting back against claims that the progressive magazine The Nation made that the superstore chain doesn’t pay its employees a fair wage.
Steven Restivo, a senior director of communication at Wal-Mart, sent an email out Wednesday morning obtained by The Daily Beast that not only rebuts the magazine’s charges but also calls it out for not properly paying its interns.
The Nation had previously published an open letter on its website calling on Walmart to give its employees a pay raise.
Restivo’s email reads:
“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.”
Even Restivo’s subject line – “people who live in glass houses” – suggests that The Nation was hypocritical in its attack of the Arkansas-based company. Quoting from The New York Post, Restivo concluded his sarcastic email with “Every so often, some enterprising soul points to the gap between what our esteemed champions of social justice preach for others and what they practice themselves.”
Restivo has a fair point. For being so staunchly against the wages made by Wal-Mart employees, The Nation is clearly failing to live up to the standards its preaching. Until recently, The Nation interns were only paid $150 per week by The Nation Institute. Moreover, while The Nation was calling on Wal-Mart to raise their wages, the magazine’s own interns were begging to be paid the minimum wage. In light of the recent war on intern wages, The Nation announced on August 1 that they would be paying their interns the $7.25 minimum wage for the first time in the program’s 30-year history.
Wal-Mart was also embroiled in a wage battle last month with the District of Columbia City Council, which passed an “anti-Wal-Mart” bill requiring the chain to pay its employees a living wage of $12.50 per hour. The superstore chain subsequently scrapped its plans to build three new stores in the nation’s capital as a response.
Disclaimer: This article was written by a former paid summer intern.
