This is delicious

You may have heard about The Nation magazine urging its readers to sign an open letter to Walmart demanding that it pay its employees a minimum wage of $12 an hour.  Well, a company executive had a little fun with that.

But it looks like someone in Bentonville finally snapped: Steven Restivo, a Walmart senior director of communications, sent out a email yesterday with the subject line: “people who live in glass houses…”

The Nation—“America’s leading progressive print and online magazine”—recently encouraged its readers to sign an open letter demanding that Walmart increase wages to $12/hour and this article called our company one of the “biggest abusers of low-wage labor.”

In an ironic twist, ProPublica recently reported that starting this fall, “interns at the Nation Institute will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program.” As ProPublica noted, The Nation has been paying its full-time interns a weekly stipend of $150 per week—less than the current federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.

This is great.  I know people who try to make something ideological out of the fact of Walmart's existence.  I'm glad such folks are coming in for some spot-on tweaking.