Wal-Mart says it will fire illegal workers

LITTLE ROCK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc., stung by allegations that it knew contract cleaning services were using illegal workers, said Friday it would review all of its 1.1 million U.S. workers and fire any that aren’t legally employed.

The move came a day after federal agents arrested 245 illegal workers in a 21-state sweep of 60 Wal-Mart stores and the company’s headquarters.

Law enforcement officials said they gathered recordings from wiretaps that indicate Wal-Mart executives knew the company’s subcontractors were using illegal workers.

Although contract crews were the focus of the sweep, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said Friday that about 10 Wal-Mart associates in Arizona and Kentucky were among those arrested.

"These are people who used to be part of the outside cleaning crew, and when we took that in-house, these folks were simply hired on as employees," Williams said. "They got caught up in the immigration sweep."

Wal-Mart began moving toward using its own workers to clean floors at its stores about a year ago.

John Shewairy, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington, D.C., would not reveal the names of the companies that contracted with Wal-Mart. Williams, citing privacy issues, said Wal-Mart would not name the companies, either.

Shewairy did say the workers came from 18 nations and included 90 people from Mexico, 35 from the Czech Republic, 22 from Mongolia and 20 from Brazil. The government initially said it had arrested about 300 people, but Shewairy said Friday the number turned out to be lower.

Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the United States, pledged to cooperate with investigators.

The company instructed store managers Thursday to preserve all relevant documents in case immigration agents want to review them. Agents left with several boxes after searching the office of a midlevel executive at Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters.

Williams said Friday that Wal-Mart has still not heard from the government that it is a target of an investigation. "No one at Wal-Mart has been subpoenaed," she said.

"We are doing a very thorough investigation with our own stores so we understand what happened and make sure that if we need to take pro-active, corrective steps, we will do that," she said. "If we find workers that are undocumented, we would terminate them immediately."

The law enforcement sources said the investigation grew out of earlier probes of Wal-Mart cleaning contractors in 1998 and 2001.

Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s largest retailer, uses more than 100 third-party contractors to clean more than 700 stores nationwide, Williams said.

Maria Stephenson, an immigration lawyer in New Orleans, said a company hiring a subcontractor would not likely be held responsible if the subcontractor hired illegal aliens. She also said a company does not have to verify a prospective worker’s documents.