-Caveat Lector-
From the October 2002 Idaho Observer:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If Wal-Mart comes to your town, kill it
By Jim Hightower
Bullying people from your town to China
Corporations rule. No other institution comes close
to matching the power that the 500 biggest corporations have amassed over us.
The clout of all 535 members of Congress is nothing compared to the individual
and collective power of these predatory behemoths that now roam the globe,
working their will over all competing interests.
The aloof and pampered executives who run today's
autocratic and secretive corporate states have effectively become our
sovereigns. From who gets health care to who pays taxes, from what's on the news
to what's in our food, they have usurped the people's democratic authority and
now make these broad social decisions in private, based solely on the interests
of their corporations. Their attitude was forged back in 1882, when the
villainous old robber baron William Henry Vanderbilt spat out: “The public be
damned! I'm working for my stockholders.”
The media and politicians won't discuss this, for
obvious reasons, but we must if we're actually to be a self-governing people.
That's why the Lowdown is launching this occasional series of corporate
profiles. And why not start with the biggest and one of the worst actors?
The beast from Bentonville
Wal-Mart is now the world's biggest corporation,
having passed Exxon/Mobil for the top slot. It hauls off a stunning $220 billion
a year from We the People (more in revenues than the entire GDP of Israel and
Ireland combined).
Wal-Mart cultivates an aw-shucks,
we're-just-folks-from-Arkansas image of neighborly small-town shopkeepers trying
to sell stuff cheaply to you and yours. Behind its soft homespun ads, however,
is what one union leader calls “this devouring beast” of a corporation that
ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers.
Despite its claim that it slashes profits to the
bone in order to deliver “Always Low Prices,” Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a
year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet.
Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are
Waltons -- the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire. S. Robson Walton is ranked
by London's “Rich List 2001” as the wealthiest human on the planet, having
sacked up more than $65 billion (£45.3 billion) in personal wealth and topping
Bill Gates as No. 1.
Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the
old-fashioned way -- by roughing people up. The corporate ethos emanating from
the Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all managers:
extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime
from every supplier.
With more than one million employees (three times
more than General Motors), this far-flung retailer is the country's largest
private employer, and it intends to remake the image of the American workplace
in its image -- which is not pretty.
Yes, there is the happy-faced “greeter” who
welcomes shoppers into every store, and employees (or “associates,” as the
company grandiosely calls them) gather just before opening each morning for a
pep rally, where they are all required to join in the Wal-Mart cheer: “Gimme a
W!” shouts the cheerleader; “W!” the dutiful employees respond. “Gimme an A!”
And so on.
Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is
the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work.
Most are denied even this poverty income, for they are held to part-time work.
While the company brags that 70 percent of its workers are full-time, at
Wal-Mart “full time” is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a
year.
Health-care benefits? Only if you've been there two
years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it --
only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered.
Thinking union? Get outta here! “Wal-Mart is
opposed to unionization,” reads a company guidebook for supervisors. “You, as a
manager, are expected to support the company's position. . . . This may mean
walking a tightrope between legitimate campaigning and improper conduct.”
Wal-Mart is in fact rabidly anti-union, deploying
teams of union-busters from Bentonville to any spot where there's a whisper of
organizing activity. “While unions might be appropriate for other companies,
they have no place at Wal-Mart,” a spokeswoman told a Texas Observer reporter
who was covering an NLRB hearing on the company's manhandling of 11 meat-cutters
who worked at a Wal-Mart SuperCenter in Jacksonville, Texas.
These derring-do employees were sick of working
harder and longer for the same low pay. “We signed [union] cards, and all hell
broke loose,” says Sidney Smith, one of the Jacksonville meat-cutters who
established the first-ever Wal-Mart union in the U.S., voting in February 2000
to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Eleven days later, Wal-Mart
announced that it was closing the meat-cutting departments in all of its stores
and would henceforth buy prepackaged meat elsewhere.
But the repressive company didn't stop there. As
the Observer reports: “Smith was fired for 'theft' after a manger agreed to let
him buy a box of overripe bananas for 50 cents, Smith ate one banana before
paying for the box, and was judged to have stolen that banana.”
Wal-Mart is an unrepentant and recidivist violator
of employee rights, drawing repeated convictions, fines, and the ire of judges
from coast to coast. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
has had to file more suits against the Bentonville billionaires club for cases
of disability discrimination than any other corporation. A top EEOC lawyer told
Business Week, “I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law.”
Likewise, a national class-action suit reveals an
astonishing pattern of sexual discrimination at Wal-Mart (where 72 percent of
the salespeople are women), charging that there is “a harsh, anti-woman culture
in which complaints go unanswered and the women who make them are targeted for
retaliation.”
Workers' compensation laws, child-labor laws (1,400
violations in Maine alone), surveillance of employees -- you name it, this
corporation is a repeat offender. No wonder, then, that turnover in the stores
is above 50 percent a year, with many stores having to replace 100 percent of
their employees each year, and some reaching as high as a 300 percent turnover!
Worldwide wage-depressor
Then there's China. For years, Wal-Mart saturated
the airwaves with a “We Buy American” advertising campaign, but it was nothing
more than a red-white-and-blue sham. All along, the vast majority of the
products it sold were from cheap-labor hell-holes, especially China. In 1998,
after several exposes of this sham, the company finally dropped its “patriotism”
posture and by 2001 had even moved its worldwide purchasing headquarters to
China. Today, it is the largest importer of Chinese-made products in the world,
buying $10 billion worth of merchandise from several thousand Chinese factories.
As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor
Committee reports, “In country after country, factories that produce for
Wal-Mart are the worst,” adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one
corporation “is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and
benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the
arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions.”
Wal-Mart does not want the U.S. buying public to
know that its famous low prices are the product of human misery, so while it
loudly proclaims that its global suppliers must comply with a corporate “code of
conduct” to treat workers decently, it strictly prohibits the disclosure of any
factory names and addresses, hoping to keep independent sources from witnessing
the “code” in operation.
Kernaghan's NLC, acclaimed for its fact-packed
reports on global working conditions, found several Chinese factories that make
the toys Americans buy for their children at Wal-Mart. Seventy-one percent of
the toys sold in the U.S. come from China, and Wal-Mart now sells one out of
five of the toys we buy.
NLC interviewed workers in China's Guangdong
Province who toil in factories making popular action figures, dolls, and other
toys sold at Wal-Mart. In “Toys of Misery,” a shocking 58-page report that the
establishment media ignored, NLC describes:
13- to 16-hour days molding, assembling, and
spray-painting toys from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or even midnight, seven days a week,
with 20-hour shifts in peak season.
Even though China's minimum wage is 31 cents an
hour -- which doesn't begin to cover a person's basic subsistence-level needs --
these production workers are paid 13 cents an hour.
Workers typically live in squatter shacks, seven
feet by seven feet, or jammed in company dorms, with more than a dozen sharing a
cubicle costing $1.95 a week for rent. They pay about $5.50 a week for lousy
food. They also must pay for their own medical treatment and are fired if they
are too ill to work.
The work is literally sickening, since there's no
health and safety enforcement. Workers have constant headaches and nausea from
paint-dust hanging in the air; the indoor temperature tops 100 degrees;
protective clothing is a joke; repetitive stress disorders are rampant; and
there's no training on the health hazards of handling the plastics, glue, paint
thinners, and other solvents in which these workers are immersed every day.
As for Wal-Mart's highly vaunted “code of conduct,”
NLC could not find a single worker who had ever seen or heard of it.
These factories employ mostly young women and
teenage girls. Wal-Mart, renowned for knowing every detail of its global
business operations and for calculating every penny of a product's cost, knows
what goes on inside these places. Yet, when confronted with these facts,
corporate honchos claim ignorance and wash their hands of the exploitation:
“There will always be people who break the law,” says CEO Lee Scott. “It is an
issue of human greed among a few people.”
Those “few people” include him, other top managers,
and the Walton billionaires. Each of them not only knows about their company's
exploitation, but willingly prospers from a corporate culture that demands it.
“Get costs down” is Wal-Mart's mantra and modus operandi, and that translates
into a crusade to stamp down the folks who produce its goods and services,
shamelessly building its low-price strategy and profits on their backs.
The Wal-Mart gospel
Worse, Wal-Mart is on a messianic mission to extend
its exploitative ethos to the entire business world. More than 65,000 companies
supply the retailer with the stuff on its shelves, and it constantly hammers
each supplier about cutting their production costs deeper and deeper in order to
get cheaper wholesale prices. Some companies have to open their books so
Bentonville executives can red-pencil what CEO Scott terms “unnecessary costs.”
Of course, among the unnecessaries to him are the
use of union labor and producing goods in America, and Scott is unabashed about
pointing in the direction of China or other places for abysmally low production
costs. He doesn't even have to say “Move to China” -- his purchasing executives
demand such an impossible lowball price from suppliers that they can only meet
it if they follow Wal-Mart's labor example. With its dominance over its own 1.2
million workers and 65,000 suppliers, plus its alliances with ruthless labor
abusers abroad, this one company is the world's most powerful private force for
lowering labor standards and stifling the middle-class aspirations of workers
everywhere.
Using its sheer size, market clout, access to
capital, and massive advertising budget, the company also is squeezing out
competitors and forcing its remaining rivals to adopt its price-is-everything
approach.
Even the big boys like Toys R Us and Kroger are
daunted by the company's brutish power, saying they're compelled to slash wages
and search the globe for sweatshop suppliers in order to compete in the downward
race to match Wal-Mart's prices.
How high of a price are we willing to pay for
Wal-Mart's “low-price” model? This outfit operates with an avarice, arrogance,
and ambition that would make Enron blush. It hits a town or city neighborhood
like a retailing neutron bomb, sucking out the economic vitality and all of the
local character. And Wal-Mart's stores now have more kill-power than ever, with
its SuperCenters averaging 200,000 square feet -- the size of more than four
football fields under one roof! These things land splat on top of any
community's sense of itself and devour local business.
By slashing its retail prices way below cost when
it enters a community, Wal-Mart can crush our groceries, pharmacies, hardware
stores, and other retailers, then raise its prices once it has mono-poly control
over the market.
But, say apologists for these Big-Box megastores,
at least they're creating jobs. Wrong. By crushing local businesses, this giant
eliminates three decent jobs for every two Wal-Mart jobs that it “creates” and a
store full of part-time, poorly paid employees hardly builds the family wealth
necessary to sustain a community's middle-class living standard.
Indeed, Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth
extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the
money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering
yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by
the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas).
It's our world
Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our
communities, our economic destinies -- or theirs? Wal-Mart's radical remaking of
our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our
knowledge or consent. Poof -- there goes another local business. Poof -- there
goes our middle-class wages. Poof -- there goes another factory to China. No one
voted for this . . . but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily
assert that customers vote with their dollars, it's an election without a
campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public's “vote” might change if we knew
the real cost of Wal-Mart's “cheap” goods -- and if we actually had a chance to
vote.
Much to the corporation's consternation, more and
more communities are learning about this voracious powerhouse, and there's a
rising civic rebellion against it. Tremendous victories have already been won as
citizens from Maine to Arizona, from the Puget Sound to the Gulf of Mexico, have
organized locally and even statewide to thwart the expansionist march of the
Wal-Mart juggernaut.
Wal-Mart is huge, but it can be brought to heel by
an aroused and organized citizenry willing to confront it in their communities,
the workplace, the marketplace, the classrooms, the pulpits, the legislatures,
and the voting booths. Just as the Founders rose up against the mighty British
trading companies, so we can reassert our people's sovereignty and our
democratic principles over the autocratic ambitions of mighty Wal-Mart.
***
"A nation without borders is not a nation."
--President Reagan
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