It would be a mistake, however, to think of this simply as a clash over one company. Rather, it's symptomatic of forces Wal-Mart helped set in motion and now shape our economy in fundamental way. It's about big box retail's refusal to pay a decent wage. It's about the way we've stacked the deck against unions. And it's about the choices we make as consumers.

Wal-Mart's Bad, But the Competition Isn't Much Better

As Harold Meyerson noted recently in The American Prospect, whereas Ford and General Motors paid their factory workers enough to buy the cars they built, Wal-Mart rose up by paying "its workers so little they had to shop at discount stores like Wal-Mart."

But by now, that low-price, low-wage model has become the industry standard among discount retailers, or at least close to it. The median retail worker for a large chain earns $14.42 an hour, but at big box stores, the pay is significantly lower (the notable exception being Costco, which commendably pays its employees a living wage).* Walmart, for instance, says it pays full time sales associates $11.75 an hour on average. But independent analysis pegs the figure much lower, closer to $9. According to IBISWorld, that puts it a bit behind companies like Home Depot and Lowes, but ahead of its nearest competitor, Target, which has managed to put a more fashionable face on the same abysmal pay for its workers.

To put these figures in perspective, the federal poverty line for a family of three is $19,090. You would have to work 40 hours a week, every week of the year at Best Buy to clear that figure. Since about 42 percent of low-wage retail employees at large companies only work part time, according to a recent study by Demos, it's not a surprise that about a quarter of them live in or near full poverty.

The problem at Wal-Mart isn't simply that it's stingy with workers. The company has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims that it denied workers pay and benefits, for instance by forcing them to work through breaks. But we shouldn't pretend that it is a singularly malign influence anymore when it comes to wages.

We've Stacked the Deck Against Unions

There are many reasons why pay in retail is often paltry. Among them, it's a low-skill industry with high turnover and a lot young workers. But the sector's utter lack of of union presence certainly plays role. And for that, we can thank both Wal-Mart and Washington. From its earliest days, Wal-Mart has taken a fiercely antagonistic stance towards organized labor, keeping its stores union free by using every ounce of leverage Congress has given employers — so much so that, in 2007, Human Rights Watch called the company "'a case study in what is wrong with U.S. labor laws."

How so? Wal Mart is an expert at using the weeks before union votes to stoke fear among employees about what might happen to their jobs if they choose to support the union. And in cases where those efforts proved insufficient, the company has been willing to take extreme steps. When a group of Texas butchers voted to unionize in 2000, the company responded to the only successful U.S. union drive in its history by switching to selling pre-packaged meat company wide. No more butchers. Nothing anybody could do.