Posted on 20-5-2003
How
Wal-Mart is Remaking our World
Jim Hightower www.theconversation.org/index.html
GeorgiaBullying people from your town to ChinaGeorgiaCorporations
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.
GeorgiaThe 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." GeorgiaThe 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? GeorgiaThe beast from BentonvilleGeorgiaWal-Mart
is now the world's biggest corporation, having passed ExxonMobil
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). GeorgiaWal-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.
GeorgiaDespite 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. GeorgiaOf the 10 richest people in the
world, five are Waltonsthe 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
. GeorgiaWal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned
wayby 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. GeorgiaWith
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 imagewhich is not pretty. GeorgiaYes, 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. Georgia 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're held to part-time work.
While the company brags that 70% 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. GeorgiaHealth-care benefits? Only
if you've been there two years; then the plan hits you with
such huge premiums that few can afford itonly 38% of Wal-Marters
are covered. GeorgiaThinking 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."GeorgiaWal-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.
GeorgiaThese 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.GeorgiaBut
the repressive company didn't stop there. As the Observer reports:
"Smith was fired for theftafter a manager 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."
GeorgiaWal-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."
GeorgiaLikewise, a national class-action suit reveals an astonishing
pattern of sexual discrimination at Wal-Mart (where 72% 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."GeorgiaWorkers' compensation
laws, child-labor laws (1,400 violations inMaine alone), surveillance
of employeesyou name it, this corporation is a repeat offender.
No wonder, then, that turnover in the stores is above 50% a
year, with many stores having to replace 100% of their employees
each year, and some reaching as high as a 300% turnover! GeorgiaWorldwide
wage-depressor
GeorgiaThen 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.
GeorgiaAs 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." GeorgiaWal-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.
GeorgiaKernaghan'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
buyGeorgiaNLC 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:left
* Georgia13- to 16-hour days molding, assembling, and spray-painting
toys - 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or even midnight, seven days a week,
with 20-hour shifts in peak season.
GeorgiaEven 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.
GeorgiaWorkers 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. * GeorgiaThe 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.
GeorgiaAs for Wal-Mart's highly vaunted "code of conduct,"
NLC could not find a single worker who had ever seen or heard
of it. GeorgiaThese 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."
GeorgiaThose "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.
GeorgiaThe Wal-Mart gospelGeorgiaWorse, 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."
GeorgiaOf 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 toChina"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.
GeorgiaUsing 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.
GeorgiaEven 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.
GeorgiaHow high 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. GeorgiaBy
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 monopoly
control over the market.
GeorgiaBut, 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 createsand a store full of part-time, poorly paid
employees hardly builds the family wealth necessary to sustain
a community's middle-class living standard.
GeorgiaIndeed, 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).
GeorgiaIt's our worldGeorgiaWhy 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.
Poofthere goes another local business. Poof - there goes our
middle-class wages.
Poofthere 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" goodsand if we actually had a chance to vote
.GeorgiaMuch 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.
GeorgiaWal-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.
Georgia<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12962
Jim Hightower's writing can be found in his monthly newletter,
The Hightower Lowdown. For more information,
see http://www.jimhightower.com.
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