Wal-Mart Cares More for Profits Than Its Employees Company Sues Family of Injured Worker
By Aditya Rajagopalan ’09
News Staff Writer
Seven years ago, Debbie Shank was the proud mother of three children, the devout wife of Jim Shank, and a dutiful shelf-stocker at her local Wal-Mart. Working a night shift so that she could spend more time with her family, Debbie lived an otherwise normal life. This completely changed, however, when a semi-truck plowed into Debbie’s minivan in May of 2000, damaging Debbie’s brain irreparably and robbing her of all of her short-term memory. Debbie has since lived in a nursing home. Thankfully, Debbie had the protection of the Wal-Mart Health and Benefits Plan to cover her ballooning health costs. Or so she thought.
Two years after the accident, the Shank family won approximately $1 million in a lawsuit with the trucking company responsible for the accident. The sum came out to $417,000 after legal fees; the money was to be put into a trust to help pay for Debbie’s care, though Debbie’s husband would still have to work two jobs to help offset the costs of caring for Debbie. Nevertheless, it seemed that Debbie’s family would be able to survive, until in 2005 Wal-Mart sued Debbie’s family for $470,000.
The fine print in Debbie’s healthcare contract stipulated that Wal-Mart had the right to recover healthcare money paid out to those who had received damages in court; however, the spirit of such a clause was to prevent those who won multi-million dollar suits from taking advantage of the healthcare system. Therefore, when Debbie was sued for more money than she had left in her trust fund, the Shank family was rightfully appalled. Wal-Mart went on to win their lawsuit, placing the already desperate Shank family in a worse situation. Jim Shank was so desperate for funds for his wife that he legally divorced her, to increase her Medicare benefits. Furthermore, the Shank family is unsure if it will be able to send its children to college at this point, because Wal-Mart robbed the family of any buffer it had against Debbie’s enormous medical burden.
Yes, Wal-Mart has the legal right to sue for the $470,000 it contributed to its former employee’s care. But does a company that netted $90 billion in sales in the past quarter need to deprive a mentally challenged woman of money she desperately needs? $470,000 is negligible to Wal-Mart—pocket change to the Walton family. The same sum of money could keep a woman alive, and keep her family from falling into the depths of poverty. If Wal-Mart “believes in a philosophy of operating globally and giving back locally,” then it should swallow its pride, and return Debbie’s money to her trust fund, whether it is through Wal-Mart’s charitable organizations or through the healthcare plan that was supposed to back Debbie.
Wal-Mart, however, claims that it is “bound by very specific rules. ... We wish it could be more flexible in Mrs. Shank’s case since her circumstances are clearly extraordinary, but this is done out of fairness to all associates who contribute to, and benefit from, the plan.” Wal-Mart essentially has claimed that it somehow needs to sue Debbie for its employees’ and stockholders’ sake; however, will robbing Debbie actually help the company? Incidentally, Wal-Mart’s greed has blinded it to the fact that with this lawsuit come extensive negative publicity and inevitable customer backlash. Many protests have already been organized on popular networking website facebook.com in response to the Debbie Shank atrocity, and the number of people vowing never to shop at Wal-Mart grows by the minute. The result could be the loss of far more than the $470,000 Wal-Mart seeks. And so it should be.
Every time we shop at Wal-Mart, we are simply pumping money into the machine that cares more for its own profits than its fellow people. Every purchase at Wal-Mart inherently condones the this mistreatment of Debbie Shank and her family and Wal-Mart’s proven blindness to the needs of humanity. But what can we do?
If we are the ones empowering Wal-Mart, let us stand by the Shank family, and denounce the vultures who value money over life and wealth over humanity. Whether it be through donations to the Shank family or the absolute repudiation of Wal-Mart, let us help a woman in need, a woman victimized for the sake of a $378 billion dollar company. Let us act in the name of humanity, in the name of charity, in the name of Debbie.
