As if it wasn’t hard enough to make a living at Wal-Mart, the nice people running the Beast of Bentonville have decided that people make too much money working at their stores–and that the lives of the workers are just too darn focused on things other than Wal-Mart.

The New York Times today has a front-page story reporting that Wal-Mart is “pusing to create a cheaper, more flexible work force by capping wages, using more part-time workers and scheduling more workers on nights and weekends.” From the Beast’s point of view, the company believes it is just serving its customers. Uh-huh.

Here’s what workers think:

Current and former Wal-Mart workers say some managers have insisted that they make themselves available around the clock, and assert that the company is making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make way for lower-wage part-time employees.

In others words, work for less and work when we want you to work no matter the hour. Didn’t we fight that battle back in the early part of the 20th Century? Here’s all you need to read:

But some workplace experts point to the downside of the policies. Susan J. Lambert, a professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago who has written several research papers on retail workers, called it a burden for employees to cope with constant schedule changes.

“You have to set up child care for every day just in case you have to work,” she said, “and this makes it hard to establish routines like reading to your kids at night or having dinner together as a family.”

The adoption of wage caps has also been difficult for many workers to swallow. Workers will never receive annual raises if their pay is at or above the cap, unless they move to a higher-paying job category. Wal-Mart says the caps will encourage workers to seek higher-paying jobs with more responsibility.

To compensate for lost future wages under the new system, Wal-Mart made one-time payments of $200 to $400 to workers whose pay was near or over the caps. Several workers described that as “hush money.”

Ramiro Gonzalez, who works in the produce department of a Wal-Mart in El Paso, said that many longtime workers were fuming about the caps.

No matter how hard people work, “we won’t get anything else out of it,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who earns $11.18 an hour, or about $23,000 a year, after six years with Wal-Mart. “The message is, if I don’t like it, there is the door. They are trying to hit people who have the most experience so they can leave.”

The thought that occurs to me has to do with the November elections. If Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate, will they be willing to confront head-on the intentional impoverishing, as a matter of corporate policy, of the people? Or will Rep. Steny Hoyer’s promise to business lobbyists that the Democrats won’t engage in “corporate bashing” be the order of the day?