Working Near Poverty at Wal-Mart

 By David K. Shipler

The Supreme Court’s decision that female employees of Wal-Mart did not have enough in common to be certified as a class in a discrimination lawsuit took me back some years, to conversations I had with Caroline Payne, who worked at Wal-Mart and elsewhere. Here is an excerpt from my book The Working Poor.

The new millennium arrived in a crescendo of American riches. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline Payne was not one of them. A few weeks after New Year’s Day, she sat at her kitchen table and reflected on her own history.