[Shadow_Group] How Wal-Mart Is Remaking Our World: Walmart Slavery

Fri Nov 5 00:34:11 PST 2004

How Wal-Mart Is Remaking Our World 
Wal Mart a tool in NWO Slavery 
By Jim Hightower 

The Hightower Lowdown AlterNet.org 
4-26-2002

FROM: http://www.geocities.com/osram007/walmart.htm<http://www.geocities.com/osram007/walmart.htm>
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 todays
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 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). 

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 (Â£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'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. 
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% 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% a year, with many stores having to
replace 100% of their employees each year, and some
reaching as high as a 300% 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-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 monopoly control over the
market. 

But, say apologists for these Big-Box mega-stores, 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. 

More of Jim Hightower's writing can be found in his
monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. For more
information, see www.jimhightower.com<http://www.jimhightower.com/>. 

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