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Date Posted: 11:50:06 10/04/03 Sat
Author: Adilbrand
Subject: Wal-Mart is an evil, evil empire
In reply to: Fyrestryke 's message, "Re: Errol Flynn" on 15:54:37 10/03/03 Fri

I refuse to shop at Wal~Mart unless I have no other choice.

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 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 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 percent 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 United States, 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 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."

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!


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 United States 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, 7 feet by 7 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.


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 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 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).

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.


Below is an excellent article by Wayne Hicks:

"A friend observed today that some of my better articles may well have come from my temper, as in when I've lost it over some example of tyranny. After the events that inspired this particular rant, I guess she was right. And, while I've been hearing for years the quiet rumblings about the mega-corp known as Wal-Mart, I've got to say that. this time, they've just gone too far.

Picture this: Having noticed that the family mini-van has a flat tire, I calmly jack it up and remove the tire so that I can take it to be repaired, toss it in the back of DOT (Dad's Old Truck), and head for the Wal-Mart Tire and Lube Center to get it plugged. This scenario is reenacted probably five hundred times a day across the nation, so there's certainly nothing sinister about it, right?

Well, this morning I would have agreed with that statement, but not now. You see, when I got there, and unloaded the tire and carried it to the guy who would fix it, another fellow came out to me and began asking questions. He asked for my telephone number, and I gave it to him, understanding that this is how they track their customers. Then he asked my name, since I was not in their database. Then he wanted my address, and although I sighed in frustration, I gave it to him.

Then he asked for the color of my van, and its tag number, and alarm bells went off in my head. I can think of no reason for Wal-Mart to need that information, and I said so. The clerk replied that he needed it "for the warranty", and that if I did not provide it, then Wal-Mart could not work on my vehicle.

"You're not working on my vehicle," I replied, "my vehicle is at home! You're plugging a hole in a tire I carried in, why do you need all that information in order to plug a tire?"

He reiterated that if I did not provide the information then they could not proceed with repairing the tire, and I agreed. "Then tell the guy to just stop, and I'll take it somewhere else! I am NOT going to give you my license number just to get a tire repaired!" The mechanic stopped what he was doing, and handed me my tire. now off the rim. and when told why I was refusing to let them complete the repair, he said, "Well, man, I'm sorry you feel that way."

"No," I answered him, "I'm the one who's sorry that you DON'T feel that way!"

This was a minor incident, but it brought to a head something that's been bothering me for some time now, namely Wal-Mart's increasing control over the lives and freedom of its customers. In many ways, the encroachment is even more insidious than that of our government, since their goal is merely the restriction of our liberties; Wal-Mart has a much loftier goal, as evidenced by such things as the scene described above.

Did you know, for instance, that Wal-Mart now averages nearly a billion dollars a day in sales? That it has put more than a hundred thousand long-established local stores out of business by undercutting prices until they control the market?

Did you know that in various cities, Wal-mart is experimenting with new forms of marketing, and new products never sold in retail stores before?

Let me give you some examples.

In Dallas, Texas, starting soon if not already in progress, Wal-Mart will be selling new cars of various brands. That's right, rather than go to the nearest Ford dealer, you need only drop by your friendly neighborhood Wally World and pick your new Taurus "off the shelf". No test drives needed. after all, they're all alike and Wal-Mart has that wonderful exchange policy, so if you don't like the one you get, no big deal, just come back and exchange it for another one.

In another large city, each item in the store carries an electronic tag, and if you're one of many customers who have registered their Visa or MasterCard with Wal-Mart and received the little electronic keychain tag or wallet card, you can simply load up your cart and breeze right on out of the store between two special upright scanners. Your purchases are automatically totaled, charged to your card, and stored in their database where government employees of some alphabet agency can see exactly what you bought and what you paid for it. I'm told there's even going to be a self-service bagging station, so you can bag up your goodies if you like.

How about "lifestyle-appropriate marketing"? This term is being kept under wraps, and no one seems to want to explain it to me, but it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what it could easily mean. Care to step over to the Gay & Lesbian Department for some of our latest new products for your alternative lifestyle?

And how about those Wal-Mart Gift Cards, the ones you load money onto at the register and use as gifts? You'll soon be able to use them just about anywhere in the world, and even take some of your cash back off of them at most ATM machines. Since Wal-Mart will cash your paycheck, why not just go completely cashless and let them credit your pay to your Wal-Mart card? If you need some of that old fashioned green stuff, you can always drop by the 24 Hour Teller, but since everything you need can be bought at Wal-mart. what's the point?

Wal-mart has long been known for coming into a community and ruthlessly cutting out the local merchants that were already established there, the local merchants who can't make billion dollar purchases and get $20 blue jeans for less than five bucks each! Sam Walton's dream of having a store that everyone could shop at has turned into America's nightmare, as Wal-Mart comes closer to its goal of being the only place to get what you want or need. because there won't be anywhere else to buy it. The company is now so large, and so powerful, that congress rolls over to its demands as fast as your local chamber of commerce, and recently passed legislation that would allow Wal-Mart to offer services that were formerly reserved only for banks!

Now, with the advent of "customer-tracking policies" that require you to be identified every time you make a purchase, this behemoth of commerce has become the eyes and ears of Big Brother, in a country where it is nearly impossible to do your regular weekly shopping without making at least one stop at a Wal-mart store!

And, as a Wal-mart employee asked me this morning: "What are you gonna do about it?" If Wal-mart is necessary to your daily life, as it is for most Americans today, then there is little you can do. The lower prices will keep you shopping there even though you know it is hastening the day when you can no longer move from your own home without being watched by some arm of the government every moment, because the other stores in town can't supply your needs as cheaply.

On the other hand, have you paid attention to Wal-mart's quality lately? Of the things that my family has bought from Wal-mart in the past two years, fully a third of them have been defective or imperfect when purchased. The electronics department has become a standard joke; "The stereo doesn't work, it musta come from Wal-mart."

Where is the Wal-mart that sought out American manufacturers, and made sure that their products were available in the stores? Where is the Wal-mart that put its neighbors first? All I can find is the one that caters to illegal aliens and disregards the will of its customers unless those views are in line with what Wal-mart envisions for the future, with products made in countries where what we call a day's wage buys a week or more of labor from those desperate to eek out a bare living.

Not surprisingly, several of the corporation's directors are also connected to the Council on Foreign Relations. I say not surprisingly since Wal-mart is now poised to be the "state store" of a socialist state, the very goal of the CFR, and with its now international marketplace, it is difficult to see how any such goal can be attained worldwide without Wal-mart's full and complete cooperation.

As for the clerk's question, "What are you gonna do about it?". I have a suggestion.

Boycott. Every dollar, in fact every red penny we spend at Wal-mart is now considered a vote FOR the policies they implement, since spending at Wal-mart can be easily interpreted as supporting them in their business decisions! Let's take our votes elsewhere, and even if it means we pay a bit more, let's let Wal-mart and the elected leaders who bow to them know that we are sick of it! Let's let them know that we will not be herded like sheep, we will not be tracked, and we will not have our privacy so invaded that any Wal-mart employee can look up any detail he wishes to know about you and your private life! Do you read the Christian books that Wal-mart sells? Or do you go for the cult-films in the video section? And whose damn business is it if you do?

I don't have anything against computers, and I know firsthand what a boon they can be to business. but there is a limit to their usefulness, and when they become a tool of tyranny, even in the hands of a private business, then that limit has been reached and passed!

I call now upon every American to let your local Wal-mart know that this has gone far enough, that when we are subjected to such tracking and privacy invasions then we are more than willing to forego a few dollars in savings in order to protect our liberty and privacy!"

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