Wal-Mart cut itself a great deal with the government. Not only does it pay a puny $135,000 and change fine for 24 child labor violations, the Department of Labor has promised to give Wal-Mart a 15-day heads-up before it starts any future investigations. Enough time to get those paper shredders going and muddle the trail. Does anyone have a calculator to figure out what percentage that financial “penalty” represents to a company that had sales of $256 billion in 2003 or to the five Walton kids who are worth almost $100 billion? And, by the way, the damn fine is considered a business expense that Wal-Mart deducts from its taxes (unlike poor slobs like you and me who cannot deduct legal fines).

No one should be surprised by this wet-kiss from the Administration–to which Wal-Mart has donated a pile of cash over the past few years.

Crimes against people at work will never stop until we start putting corporate executives in jail, and not just for stock manipulation and accounting frauds. How fast do you think Wal-Mart would clean up its act–stop violating child labor laws, stop locking store cleaners inside the stores at great risk to their lives, stop illegally firing workers who try to unionize, stop discriminating against women–if Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott or maybe one of the Wal-Mart kid billionaires spent a few days, weeks or months (I won’t be so naive as to suggest years) in the pokey?