Wal-Mart must pay $200m to workers denied lunch breaks

The company has been fighting allegations for years, in and out of court, that it cuts corners to keep labour costs low. Yesterday's jury verdict in Oakland, near San Francisco, marked the first time that the company had been forced to go to trial and lost.

The suit was one of about 40 in the works nationwide alleging that the Arkansas-based retailer, which boasts a chain of mostly suburban superstores across the United States and beyond, routinely violates US labour laws - keeping workers off the clock so they are not credited for overtime, denying them lunch-breaks and other rests, and so on.

Wal-Mart is at the centre of a growing dispute over the economic desirability of the sort of superstore it has pioneered. While the chain, and others like it, provides affordable consumer goods and plentiful employment, especially in impoverished areas of the country that are badly in need of both, its critics complain that it earns its profits at the expense of both the communities where it takes up occupancy and its own underpaid employees.

While the surviving members of the founding Walton family are all multi-billionaires, almost half the children of company employees either have no health insurance or else rely on government-sponsored subsistence programmes to gain access to basic medical care, according to the company's own figures. An unknown number of employees relies on government food stamps to keep body and soul together month to month.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article334859.ece