Walmart's food drive for its own employees isn't as heartless as it seems

The optics, as they say, are terrible: A Walmart store in Canton, Ohio, is holding a Thanksgiving food drive, encouraging its hourly workers to contribute some of their hard-earned wages to help...other hourly employees at the store.

The inference is obvious. The nation's largest private employer doesn't even pay its workers enough to buy a frozen turkey and a bag of potatoes.

An unamused employee took these photos of the bins — displayed in an employees-only area — and gave them to the labor group Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). And after The Cleveland Plain Dealer took notice, the story went national. It elicited the kind of response you'd expect from a story about Walmart and the working poor.

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It's bad enough that the retail giant doesn't pay its employees a living wage, says Laura Clawson at Daily Kos. "But Walmart putting the burden of helping on its own workers at the same moment it's acknowledging many of them need help putting Thanksgiving dinner on the table (if they're not being forced to come in to work that day, anyway) is an added touch of gross callousness to the effects of Walmart's own low pay and part-time jobs."

The outrage has spread beyond the lefty confines of Daily Kos, with everyone from the liberal-leaning BillMoyers.com to Alex Jones' libertarian-right site Infowars touting the employee food drive as evidence of a broken economy. Here's Henry Blodget at Business Insider, who wields charts to make his point:

That's a pretty large burden to place on the shoulders of a single company, even one as large as Walmart. In September, a Walmart executive said that 475,000 of the store's 1.4 million U.S. "associates" earn at least $25,000, and the company says that "the average, full-time hourly wage is $12.83." OUR Walmart puts the average salary at between $8 and $10 an hour in the U.S., or $15,000 to $20,000 a year.

But back to the Canton food drive. Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg is taking the lead in defending the company, and these are his points:

• This is a decision by the Canton store, not a company-wide policy.
• They've held similar Thanksgiving food drives for the past several years, with no controversy.
• But Walmart does have a national Associates in Critical Need Trust, funded by employee contributions, that acts as a sort of social insurance policy, with workers eligible for up to $1,500 if they hit hard times, like major illness, homelessness, or onerous car repairs. The fund has paid out $80 million since 2001.
• Rather than showing company callousness, Lundberg tells the Plain Dealer, "this is part of the company's culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships."
• After speaking to Canton Walmart employees, "from management to hourly," he tells NBC's Today, they are all "expressing the same outrage" over how their charitable endeavor is being covered in the news. "They're telling me they are angry, frustrated, and disappointed to see something they do like this, in terms of taking care of people, being twisted and misrepresented into something that it's not."

There are some fair arguments there. Retail is pretty much low-wage across the board, and people do hit unexpected hard times. If a Walmart "associate" doesn't have much money in the savings account, that hardly makes him or her unique in America. In fact, a reader points out to The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann, even better-paying stores like Lowes have emergency funds for employees in need.

Weissmann also makes some fair points. "Whoever set up those orange and purple bins clearly had their heart in the right place, and I don't want to demean anyone's effort to help their fellow employees," he writes. And "it's nice that Walmart has set up a charity so that its workers can lend a hand to their homeless colleagues."

Still, he adds, "it'd be nicer if the company paid enough to make sure that wasn't a concern in the first place."

I'll give the final word to Fortune's Stephen Gandel, who dismisses as "silly" the argument that Walmart has a moral obligation to give some of its $17 billion in annual profits to employees. "Public companies have to make enough money to satisfy shareholders, or else their stocks tank and executives end up getting canned," he notes. But Walmart would be smart to up its hourly pay, anyway.

Read Gandel's article for his math. But it seems pretty clear that if Walmart raised wages 50 percent, even the lowliest shelf-stocker could probably spring for a turkey next week.

Until that happens, the Canton store's upper management could at least spread the wealth by dropping a bird into every bin.