As the economy continues its downfall with over 250,000 jobs lost since January the quality of available jobs are also on the decline.

Arizona like many other States is having a hard time producing moderate income level jobs that pay over the National Minimum for Family Assistance. While many employers don’t even come near the national minimum standard of $18hr or $35,000 a year.

Walmart which is the States largest single employer provides approximately 32,000 jobs with average hourly pay ranging between $6.50 and $8.50 an hour which has left its employees without health care since the monthly cost for basic HMO coverage can be more then a weeks pay for an individual and much higher to cover other family members.

Walmart has reported that of their more then 1 million employees that only about 10% of their staff can afford insurance and purchase it from their plan. For the most part that means Supervisors and Store Managers are the only employees other then their back-end and corporate staff that actually have health care with the company.

However even though Walmart is the States largest employer they do not employ a vast percentage of all workers in the State. This means although it is easy to point out the problem by their example walmart is not alone when it comes to exploiting labor.