The American Enterprise Institute has published yet another predictable piece of schlock entitled, The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy. It demonstrates that the only use these so-called conservative “think” tanks have for intellectual inquiry is the use of a couple ethically-challenged PhDs to lend credence to whatever strenuous distortions and selective interpretations of reality best serve their pathologically selfish, ultra-wealthy, anti-government donors. National Review Online interviewed one of the authors, Richard Vedder (who has contributed to such illustrious projects as tobacco industry junk-science, similar to his also ethically-compromised co-author Wendell Cox).

Vedder goes beyond defending the corporation – with his effusive, gushing praise, he clearly likens the advent of Wal-Mart to something on par with the second coming. Though Wal-Mart has joined the Center for American Progress in a coalition advocating universal healthcare, this coincidence of interests in no way absolves the corporation of its other questionable practices, and certainly doesn’t prevent us from being critical of it.

Vedder begins by claiming that by lowering the cost of goods “Wal-Mart has done more to help poor people than probably any bloated government bureaucracy or any other private institution.” Of course, enabling people to consume more goods for cheaper improves their welfare in only the most narrowly economistic sense. It says nothing of the (nonexistent) prospects for upward mobility in a high-turnover, sub-living wage occupation.

Asked how the corporation is received overseas, Vedder actually uses the corporate slogan in defending its appeal! (“But I can’t see how ‘every day low prices’ and greater consumer choice will resonate badly with European consumers…”). He says that the company pays generous salaries with ample benefits, by citing an average wage of over $10 that must include managers and/or executives, since the average store worker takes less than $250 home each week and makes a below-industry-average $7.50 an hour. He claims the workplace being union-free is because, like most of the labor market, its happy workers have resisted unionization, when the company’s anti-union stance has caused complaints of worker intimidation, misinformation, and led to complaints being filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

Just as I finished reading the good news that Wal-Mart has joined a pro-universal health care coalition including the SEIU, AT&T, Intel, and my employer, the Center for American Progress, I clicked to another screen and learned that an immense class-action lawsuit alleging widespread sex discrmination at Wal-Mart stores moved forward yesterday. Over 2 million female Wal-Mart workers are elligible to join the suit, making it the largest sex discrimination suit ever filed in the United States. The lead plaintiff, 56-year old Betty Dukes, claims pay and promotion discrimination. It took Dukes three years to advance from cashier to customer service representative, even though men hired after her were promoted in as little as 90 days. Two-thirds of Wal-Mart workers are women, but only one-third of managers.

All of which begs the question: How should progressives engage with a corporation with so many widely-publicized labor abuses (including locking workers inside stores and denying them overtime), an arguably disasterous footprint on the American urban and suburban landscape, and yet a realistic, even pathbreaking, attitude about the health care crisis? When I interviewed SEIU president Andy Stern in November, he said, "We applaud good behavior and we hold people accountable for bad behavior."

It seems like public relations fiascos are just about the only criticisms Wal-Mart responds to. It's good news that they've joined the SEIU and CAP to make progress on health care, but it can't cover up Wal-Mart's despicable record on labor. I hope that as Wal-Mart works in the new coalition, they find themselves embarassed enough by their labor abuses to make some serious changes. Because how can you support a worker's right to health insurance but deny them time off to visit the doctor? How can you want to insure a single mother's child, but "mommy track" that worker, cheating her out of raises and promotions? We should expect better from the nation's largest employer.