One thing we have come to expect as the holiday shopping season approaches is protests at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) locations, where the company’s workers and supporters demonstrate in favor of higher wages, full-time jobs and freedom from retaliation for speaking out. On Thursday, two new studies were added to the arsenal of the protestors.

First is a study by Michele Simon at Eat Drink Politics titled “Walmart’s Hunger Games: How America’s Largest Employer and Richest Family Worsen the Hunger Crisis.” The central point of this study is clearly stated by Simon:

Walmart and the Walton family are at the center of a profit-building empire that allows them to build their wealth off of workers’ inability to afford food.

Simon’s study reveals that 88% of food bank clients have household incomes of less than $25,000 a year. According to Simon, as many as 825,000 of the company’s 1.4 million U.S. employees make less than $25,000 a year. The Walmart protesters have demanded that the company pay all its full-time workers at least that amount and that it change its employment policies to move part-time employees to full-time with fixed schedules.

ALSO READ: Big E-Commerce Spending Gains Forecast for the Holidays

A second study released Thursday, “How Walmart Is Dodging Billions in Taxes and Scheming to Avoid Billions More,” comes from Americans for Tax Fairness (AFT), which released a similar study in April of this year. The new study repeats some claims of the earlier one: Walmart dodges $1 billion a year in U.S. taxes through a variety of tax loopholes, and taxpayers subsidize Walmart’s low wages by an estimated $6.2 billion due to many employees’ reliance on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

The AFT report also claims that Walmart would avoid another $720 million in annual income taxes if the corporate tax rate is lowered from 35% to 25%, that the company is sitting on off-shore profits of $21.4 billion that are not subject to U.S. tax and that the company is playing a leading role in corporate efforts to reduce taxes and eliminate all taxes on off-shore profits.

When Walmart reported third-quarter results earlier this month, the company posted its first quarterly same-store sales gain in seven quarters. The gain, according to Walmart, was due to inflation and was constrained by what it called “SNAP headwinds.”

Federal funding for SNAP dropped from just over $76 billion in 2013 to an estimated $64.3 billion in fiscal year 2014. Walmart’s share of the SNAP market amounted to about $13.5 billion in 2013, according to the April AFT study, or 18% of the program total. Based on the 2014 estimate of SNAP spending and assuming the company retained its 18% share, Walmart’s total benefit from SNAP dropped by about $2 billion.

As the largest private employer in the United States, Walmart is a natural stand-in for Goliath in a fight with thousands of Davids. When AFT’s April report was released, we noted a takedown of some of its conclusions in an article from Forbes. The same arguments remain valid and, like it or not, must be considered and, if possible, refuted by the numbers.

ALSO READ: Shoppers Revving Up for Thanksgiving Weekend Rush

Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.