The grand patriarch of the Walton family, Sam Walton, grew up during the Great Depression. His father wasn’t a poor sharecropper or a displaced Okie — no, Thomas Walton was a bank agent who spent the 1920s and 1930s foreclosing on failing small family farms across the country at the beck and call of Metropolitan Life Insurance. It is upon these “humble” foundations that the Walton fortune would be built.
Sam Walton, of Walmart fame, was a U.S. army intelligence officer. In 1945, he took a $20,000 gift from his father and $5,000 of his own army intelligence pay, equivalent to roughly $500,000 in 2023, and bought himself a franchise store. In the 1960s Walton took the millions he was making as a franchisee and opened his first Walmart. He made it a point to open his large retail centers in small towns, not major cities. His strategy relied on an “economy of scale” — using his access to a massive distribution network, Walton’s early small-town Walmarts outcompeted locally owned businesses, financially ruined local small retailers, and conquered local retail monopolies.
During the 1950’s and 60’s, a process known as “white flight” began: the white labor aristocrats (highly paid skilled workers) and professionals “fled” apartments in the cities for homeownership in the suburbs. Overt racist discrimination and subtler “redlining” tactics, which are still employed today, maintained these suburban communities as white-only, and sometimes as white- and Asian-only, enclaves — “safe” from “urban” problems. Walton found in these settler enclaves new local markets ripe for expansion, and so Walmart grew with them. Soon, Walmart became the flagship retailer of white suburbia.
Jim Walton, Sam’s third child, was born in 1948. Since his childhood, his job has been assured: manage one of daddy Walton’s enormous, city-devouring corporations. His first position was in Walmart’s real estate division (what exactly his job was there, sources do not say), and later he transferred to Walton Enterprises, where daddy made him president. He was only there for a few months before he moved into the lucrative world of banking as the president, and later the CEO, of the Walton family’s megabank, Arvest. From September 2005 to 2016, he served on the Walmart board of directors. He also owned the newspaper firm Community Publishers, Inc. until its sale to another giant capitalist firm, Berkshire Hathaway (owned by another famous enemy of the people, Warren Buffet). Continuing this “family tradition” of nepotism, Jim’s son Steuart currently sits on the Walmart board of directors. The net worth of this archetypical heir of American nepotism is reported to be $66 billion USD — equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Costa Rica. Taken together, the Walton family (Jim and his siblings, and their heirs) are the wealthiest family in the world.
What about Walton’s politics? It should come as no surprise that Jim is a donor to the far-right reactionary arm of the Republican Party: the fascists-with-teeth who have, of late, vied with the “moderate” fascist old-guard for power. While Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon helped install president Trump with his donations and then went on to serve as a Trump regime advisor, Jim Walton was financing the GOP and its candidates to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars — $20,000 to the Republican Party of California in 2020 alone, $142,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and $33,600 to various individual Republican candidates.
The Walton family is powerful enough to create their own political enclaves throughout the country. For instance, Jim and his siblings have captured the politics in Colorado: tens of millions of Walton dollars poured into government agencies, schools, sports teams, media companies, and nonprofits over the course of 2022. We cannot measure the true impact of Jim and the Walton siblings in Colorado or anywhere in U.S. imperial politics because most of their donations are non-disclosable, but the Waltons’ various investments in Colorado surely total billions of dollars.
And what has this feckless capitalist to show for his labors? What critical services does Arvest banking group, for example, provide? “For six banks, overdraft revenues accounted for more than half their net income,” a Brookings Institute study showed in 2022, remarking that Arvest was merely a “check casher[] with a charter.” In fact, Arvest makes 62% of its income simply by charging poor working class people overdraft fees! This is typical capitalist predation on the working class. Those who rely on Jim’s vulture-bank Arvest to deposit their paychecks are those least able to afford the overdraft fees that plague them. Although all banks rely, to some extent, on this disgusting trick of “forgiving” fees for wealthy clients and ruthlessly prosecuting the poorest depositors, Arvest is especially depraved for deriving their primary source of income by driving working class people deeper into debt, slamming them with fees they can’t afford, and then selling that debt to collectors who will hound and harass working families for years.
But let’s not beat around the bush: what about the behemoth in the room? What about Walmart? It’s the largest private-sector employer in the United States. The average hourly worker in a Walmart store is reported in the news as having made $14.76 an hour in 2020 — roughly $25,000 for a full-time employee. That’s twice the 2020 federal poverty rate. Not bad, eh? Except that’s nothing more than a line from a corporate press release, and it’s the one that all the capitalist papers run with. We know that’s not true — Walmart cashiers kicking back on a cushy salary? Bullshit! We aren’t so simple as to be duped by an accounting trick. Because what’s the truth?
In fact, a 2022 working paper from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth indicates that the real average wage is actually $11/hour. Most of Walmart’s employees are replaced each year. Using data Walmart turned over in court cases, we can see the average annual turnover: 69%. In some stores, the yearly turnover of employees is higher than 90%. The core of the business model developed by Sam Walton and carried out by his heir Jim is strict emphasis on payroll control. The elder Walton designed store payroll expenses off a fixed dollar-number based on achieving that week’s sales plan. As ales rise above plan, the payroll expense budget remains fixed. Most companies allow their managers to increase their expenses when and if sales rise; not the Waltons. In fact, those court documents show that the average ‘tenured’ full-time hourly Walmart employee earned $16,882 in 2022 dollars, just barely above the federal poverty level.
Walmart’s hourly workers are almost never employed full-time. This is a common tactic used by the CEOs and enemies of the people, from men like Howard Schultz on down to line workers like your local barista. Taking care to make sure that employees never work 40 hours a week means they’ll never be eligible for federally-mandated health insurance and other perks that labor organizing “won” for the workers over the past century, while simultaneously tearing down attempts at those workers unionizing in the first place. What are the average yearly earnings for part-time Walmart workers? According to the study, a pitiful $7,877, far below $13,500 federal poverty line — in fact, almost half.
Jim Walton, CEO, longtime Walton family member and servant of the patriarch, is as responsible for these policies as anyone in the organization. Most Walmart workers have to rely, thanks to Jim, on government-funded Medicaid, food stamps, and poverty-reduction programs. He demands that the state use your tax dollars to cover his egregious theft. Walmart has been viciously anti-labor since its foundation, ensuring that organization of unions never happens in its stores.
You don’t have to rely on the numbers. You can hear it from the living, bleeding workers themselves:
“I skip a lot of breaks. They don’t tell you to skip them. They’ll give you so much to do that there’s no way you can take a break…. They make you feel guilty for taking breaks, i.e., ‘Why didn’t the work get done? I was on break.’” (Human Rights Watch interview with Jared West, July 17, 2005).
“What happens at Wal-Mart is that at the end of the shift before you leave the department, you have to ask your supervisor to check the department. You think your department is okay and clock out. They tell you to clock out after your shift. You wait ‘till the department manager says okay, but if he says you didn’t do certain things, you have to fix things before you leave. So, you do work off the clock. This happened every night…. That’s how they get [the] extra ten, twenty, thirty minutes every day. That adds up.” (Human Rights Watch interview with Diana Griego, 2005).
“There’s been times when I haven’t got lunch. They wouldn’t send anyone to give me coverage so I could take my lunch. It’s happened several times — over ten times…” (Human Rights Watch interview with Pat Quinn, 2005).
“I had fifty to fifty-one days when I worked without a lunch break.” (Norine Sorenson, 2005).
“You’d be given something to do that was impossible to finish on time. A lot of people would clock out and then finish.”(Liz Boyd, a department manager, 2005).
A former department manager told Human Rights Watch that managers would “take thirty minutes off my sheet [even] when I hadn’t taken lunch.”
Carol Anderson said “As customer service managers, we were instructed to ask cashiers to… skip breaks because there were not enough cashiers to keep lines down…. Higher managers would suggest having associates skip breaks…”
The Waltons were not content with merely stealing from their workers like all capitalists do. Walmart is at the bottom of the retail wage scale. Nor is Jim Walton happy to merely bleed his employees of an hour here or two hours there. No, he set up Arvest bank to steal overage fees from the very people he employs. He pays a king’s ransom every year to elect “business-friendly” ghouls to state and federal government. Jim Walton lurks in the shadows, watching his workers everywhere they go, and whenever he can he pounces and drains them of a little more of their lives. When they finally get used up, too angry to work, or just burned out, they’re fired.
This is where the Walton money comes from. Jim, like all his siblings, and like his father before him, is steeped in blood and cloaked in the stolen hours of his 2.1 million Walmart retail associates. If he steals just half an hour from each of his workers each day on top of the normal capitalist exploitation, he is taking one million, fifty thousand hours. That is 114 years stolen every day. Lives that will never be returned. Hours that he cannot even enjoy. All used to increase his power and deepen the exploitation he commands.
Jim Walton, like all the Waltons, is an enemy of the people.
