A month ago I found a press release in my mailbox citing a report that says American working women won't reach pay equity with American men until after the year 2050, when our granddaughters are in the work- force. In other words, as I informed a bemused male colleague, "I will die without having earned as much as you!"

I kept the press release, knowing that at some point it would be useful in this column. And now it is. This week, the lawyers for past and present female employees of Wal-Mart filed an amended complaint in a federal lawsuit against the retail store chain. The documents describe the workings of an old-boys'-style management that pays women lower wages and promotes them less than their male equals, steers them into "female" departments, requires them to fetch coffee for their male counterparts and demotes them if they dare complain about their unequal treatment.

The lawyers are asking that the lawsuit be certified as a class action on behalf of more than 1 million women, including the 700,000 currently working at Wal-Mart's more than 3,000 stores.

Wal-Mart has a warm, fuzzy image, its stores portrayed in television commercials as places where Americans love to shop and the employees love to work. Its stock is soaring, even with the market in a slump. Moreover, it's the largest private employer in the nation, second only to the federal government in total number of employees.

But court papers reveal a different side of Wal-Mart, especially when it comes to its treatment of women. Umi Jean Minor, a single mother of four, went to work as a sales clerk in a Selma, Ala., store in 1990, making $3.85 a hour, and eight years later was earning only $7.32 an hour. Despite repeated requests for training and promotions, and watching male colleagues being promoted all around her, it took Minor seven years to get a management job, where she then often worked 10- to 18-hour days. Her annual pay increases ranged from 10 cents to 35 cents an hour.

Ramona Scott worked in a Pinellas Park, Fla., Wal-Mart, where when she asked her boss why male employees doing similar work earned more than she did was told that men came there to make careers - and housewives just needed to earn spending money.

While working as a store manager in Decatur, Ind., Melissa Howard was required to attend management meetings at a Hooter's Restaurant, where the waitresses are notoriously scantily clad. While en route to another managers' meeting, she was forced by several male managers to stop at strip clubs, where the male managers paid for lap dancers.

These accounts - culled from more than 100 women who worked at Wal-Marts in 30 states, including New York - reminded me of a passage from Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent book, "Nickel and Dimed," her first-hand account of trying to make a living in four working-class jobs in four cities, one of them a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis. One of Ehrenreich's co-workers at the store constantly checked the price of a T-shirt, the kind Wal-Mart required its employees to wear, to see if it was on sale. She couldn't afford to buy a Wal-Mart shirt on a Wal-Mart salary.

This is the face of working-class America, where jobs as waitresses, maids and Wal-Mart sales associates are about all there are for a woman without a college degree. A recent court decision found that K-mart regularly forced its already low-paid employees to work overtime without overtime pay.

Remember how welfare reform was going to force those lazy welfare mothers to go to work, where they would learn discipline, self-respect and be empowered to live independent lives? Underpaid, underpromoted, harassed women at stores like Wal-Mart are the real face of welfare reform.

Even as he's proposing huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the best this president has done for welfare moms is propose that they be required to work more hours. If they're lucky, they'll get what author Ehrenreich considers in her book some of the better jobs - those at Wal-Marts.

If this is the best that many women can do, it's no wonder that I won't live to see the wage gap closed.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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