LISSA’S: ’Cheap and convenient come at a cost’ By H. Mallick

By: Heather Mallick

Last night I dreamt I went to Wal-Mart again. And I was happy there.

This worried me because the day before, I had gone to a Wal-Mart for the first time in my life, my real life, and I was badly frightened. I was checking out the store — sorry, industrial hangar exoskeleton — because developers want to build a Wal-Mart near my sort of cute, ramshackle, little-shops Toronto neighbourhood and I was there to see my future.

As it turned out, my future was my past. This Wal-Mart, a "Supercentre" the size of the Bermuda Triangle in a dire area called Scarborough, had flung me back in time to my youth.

Wal-Mart is a place I know in my soul. It is every Zellers in every small town I ever lived in; it is Woolworths in Kapuskasing writ large. (Note: the Woolworths in Kap is now a Wal-Mart.) I was thrilled to shop in cheap stores for tarty ratty clothes when I was young — I can still remember every polyester garment I ever purchased in Reitman's — but that's the joy of being a teenager in a small town. Everything is thrilling by definition. On weekends, we'd gulp homemade Harvey Wallbangers and vomit in a snowbank; that was our idea of a night out.

But the fact that something is pleasing to you says more about you than the thing itself. The fact that Wal-Mart is cheap ("Save money, live better!") and convenient (18,000 parking spaces! Free!) are two puny words against the torrent of invective I and any other Canadian interested in airy concepts like "quality of life" could instantly pour upon Wal-Mart.

I am not alone in this: over the years many Canadians, from Halifax to Vancouver, have been vocal about which neighbourhoods do and don't want to plant a Wal-Mart.

The price of cheapness

Wal-Mart is a giant American corporation (2006 revenue of $315 billion) run out of Arkansas that devastates every town and neighbourhood in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Britain where it plants a store. I urge you to watch Robert Greenwald's famed 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price to understand why cheap and convenient are adjectives of condemnation, not praise.

Yes, Wal-Mart is cheap. CEO Lee Scott's statement in the 2008 annual report is so obsessive about prices that he sounds like Howard Hughes on germs or Lou Dobbs on Mexicans. Here's a sampling of his phrases: "affordable, money-saving, price-leading, price-reduced, dollar-saving, budget-stretching, ends-meeting, driving down costs, reducing costs, saving money, spending less, low prices, price-leading, reduce prices, less money, save money, on par with price, lower costs." That's not cheap, that's psychotic.

I love to shop and I do shop carefully. But as I wander around Wal-Mart, it becomes apparent that their prices are low because much of their merchandise is — cheap. Whatever happened to "well-made" or "worthwhile"? Their own-brand clothing, curiously called "George," is made of thin fabric harsh on my fingertips, badly shaped and sewn, and style-free. Gap and H&M sell cheap clothes too, but they aren't this badly constructed, and those two chains make an effort at rendering the customer physically appealing to fellow human beings. George clothing actively works in the other direction.

Disposable goods

I balk at buying cut flowers, which are farmed overseas under dreadful conditions. I buy silk fakes instead. In Wal-Mart, the artificial flowers are stunning, so amateurish that they don't resemble flowers, more like polyester extrusions. Their colours are previously unknown to humanity and the petals feel like starched toilet paper. But my god, they are cheap. When was the last time you saw a store sign blaring "98 cents"? Ask your parents.

Wal-Mart's name-brand goods may well be slightly cheaper than in other chains. Their style is pressuring manufacturers and squeezing smaller companies dry — why? because they can — but pinching blood from a pebble doesn't always pay off.

These goods are still designed as disposable. I've owned more toasters than I have toes. This is why we have a garbage crisis: repair shops no longer exist and we blow far more money buying repeat goods than one well-crafted product that will last for decades.

Of course Wal-Mart is cheap. Its ethos is to sell the lowest priced, not the most durable, goods. So we can change our descriptors to "convenient but temporary."

A cynic, Oscar Wilde said, is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Coming from a genius who was worth kingdoms but died penniless in exile, it's a quote for our times.

In convenience

I don't find it convenient to have a 1,700-space parking lot near Lake Ontario, I find it repellent. It would be lovely to have picnic grounds or dog runs, restaurants, stores or something lively in an area where, magically, we can actually live well without owning cars. We have great public transit here. Why build a car magnet when gas is set to hit $2.25 a litre in four years? Wal-Mart, purely designed for car owners, will lure thousands of polluting vehicles to a new paved parking lot in an area that already has so little open ground that when it rains, the earth can't absorb the water. Local basements annually fill with raw sewage runoff in a repeated horror that I will not describe.

I'm surprised that only 300 people showed up at recent protest against the planned big box power centre containing Wal-Mart — we'll call it Lubyanka for short. Passivity has infected every citizen.

So instead of walking down to main street for a shovel, nail gun, ice cream, prescriptions, head of lettuce, shrubbery, can of paint or pair of deck shoes, everyone will drive to Wal-Mart and come back with disposable things bought for next to nothing from dingy foreign factories. We will do this at a hidden cost to clean air, precious fuel, neighbours' basements, owners and employees of smaller stores, wages (Wal-Mart pays rock-bottom and keeps people part-time for years), the view of Lake Ontario, tax revenue, Canadian-owned manufacturers, esthetics and fitness.

I believe Wal-Mart is evil. But sometimes there's payback. The last time I saw Scott, he was on video patting the buttocks of pale male Wal-Mart executives dressed as big ugly women screaming and dancing at a corporate function. That video wouldn't be public had Wal-Mart not for decades hired Flagler Productions to record its corporate events. When the retail giant dumped Flagler in 2006, putting it out of business, Wal-Mart wouldn't negotiate a price for the video archive. So Flagler offered the videos to the free market, which now has amazing footage being pored over by wrongful death lawyers, etc.

I have to leave aside the viciousness of the company laid out in Greenwald's documentary: its blockade of the promotion of female employees, the murders, rapes and kidnappings in its cheapskate unguarded parking lots, its abuse of part-timers and non-white employees, outrages that include suing an employee brain-injured in a car crash for her private insurance payout, its secret altering of employee records to avoid paying wages, its notoriously lax environmental safety … none of my sentences about Wal-Mart ends happily. They just build, like Wal-Mart itself.

LISSA’S: ’Reassigned’: A Common Practice in Wal-Mart

In 2002, 21-year old Patrick Brady, who suffers from cerebral palsy, was hired by Wal-Mart as a sales associate in the pharmacy department. After one day in the pharmacy, he was reassigned to other responsibilities, including collecting garbage and shopping carts from the parking lot. A Long Island jury found that Wal-Mart discriminated against Brady when he was transferred and asked impermissible pre-employment questions about his disability. The jury awarded Brady $7.5 million in damages and a judge ultimately awarded $2.8 million to Brady.

source: Associated Press, Newsday, New York Law Journal

LISSA’S: A Company In Need Of Change

Wal-Mart's dirty laundry is getting more global exposure today just a week after the Debbie Shank story. It has not been a good month for Wal-Mart public relations. To use a sports term, these are turnovers, and they expose the weaknesses of Wal-Mart's high priced image.

Undeniably, over the past three years Wal-Mart has gotten better at hiding the truth from us and from the media usually by obfuscating rather than clarifying the real issues. Their so-called health care reform is just one example. And thanks to the millions they are spending on Edelman Public Relations, they have received some good coverage in the media.

Occasionally though, they fumble the ball and we get to see clearly what is behind the façade. The video of Wal-Mart managers dressed in drag aired on NBC Nightly News last night (April 9, 2008) is a great example.

From Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the largest class-action employment discrimination case in American history, we know that at Wal-Mart, women make up only 37% of Assistant Managers, 21% of Co-Managers, and 15% of Store Managers. In 2001, those women who did become salaried Wal-Mart managers earned about $14,500 less than men per year. So it is no surprise that a gathering of Wal-Mart managers would be rife with sexist undertones.

Wal-Mart might suggest that the performances featured in the footage from this 1995 meeting intended to be funny, but either they value women or they do not and discriminating against women is no joking matter.

http://action.walmartwatch.com/DoAsWeSay

Debbie Shank is another good example of why public relations is not enough to fix Wal-Mart's fundamental problems. Every day Wal-Mart refuses to put enough money forward to adequately fund their employees health care, and associates pay the price. Obviously Debbie Shank is a particularly tragic story but if you talk to Wal-Mart employees, as we do every day, you realize that there are many sad stories of people who have not received the medical care they need because the plan that they can afford from Wal-Mart provides minimalist coverage and the better plans are just too expensive.

Wal-Mart change to its business practices is in the best interest of its employees, its customers, its bottom line and our country. Wal-Mart has pushed back suggesting that our critiques are at best unnecessary and at worst unfair. The videos and the Debbie Shank story have exposed that the leadership of Wal-Mart allows and even encourages a corporate culture of negligence and discrimination. It is not in anyone's best interests for such a culture to continue. Wal-Mart needs to change.

source: The Huffington Post

LISSA’S: Wal-Mart Workers Say They Need a Fair Shake at the Workplace

Chances are, you know someone who works at Wal-Mart. Not only is Wal-Mart not a good neighbor, its corporate practices are less than friendly. In fact, millions of current and former Wal-Mart workers currently are seeking to win back their rights in court.

Current and former female Wal-Mart workers say the company has discriminated against them in pay and promotion policies because of their gender. In 2004, a U.S. District Court in San Francisco gave class-action status to their lawsuit against Wal-Mart, making it the largest class-action lawsuit in U.S. history representing 1.6 million women who have worked at Wal-Mart since 1998.

For the same job classification, women earn from 5 percent to 15 percent less than men, according to a February 2003 report by Richard Drogin, professor emeritus of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001, this equated to nearly 40 cents less per hour for hourly workers or nearly $5,000 less annually for female managers, according to Drogin.
Wal-Mart balks at paying even the poverty-level wages workers have earned: In April 2004, the California Supreme Court declined to block class certification in a lawsuit alleging Wal-Mart Stores Inc. required some 250,000 employees to work off the clock. Workers say managers required employees to finish their work before going home and that Wal-Mart understaffed stores to make off-the-clock work mandatory for all practical purposes.

In June 2003, a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge found Wal-Mart violated federal labor laws in 2000 by refusing to bargain over job changes it imposed on meat cutters in a Jacksonville, Texas, store after they voted for a voice at work with the United Food and Commercial Workers. After they sought to join a union, the skilled meat cutters were suddenly demoted to "sales associates" and all Wal-Mart stores eventually shifted to selling pre-cut meat.

When Wal-Mart interferes with its workers' freedom to form unions in order to keep wages and benefits down, it encourages other employers to follow suit. Such efforts have real and significant consequences. According to a report prepared for the city of Los Angeles, grocery chains cited "the labor polices of nonunion superstore retailers" as a factor in their demanding wage and benefit cuts from UFCW grocery workers who struck and were locked out in 2003 . And according to a 2002 report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, unionized workers in the retail food industry make more than 30 percent more in hourly wages than their nonunion counterparts.

Undocumented workers have been exploited at Wal-Mart. On Oct. 23, 2003, federal agents raided 61 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states and arrested 245 nightshift janitors who were undocumented workers employed by cleaning contractors. In an Oct. 25, 2003, New York Times story, one undocumented janitor said he had worked every night except Christmas and New Year's Eve for 16 months and made approximately $6.25 an hour with no benefits. Following the October raids, nine Mexican immigrants who worked as janitors in New Jersey sued Wal-Mart alleging that it, as well as the contractors, failed to pay overtime, withhold taxes and make required workers' compensation contributions. No federal charges were filed against Wal-Mart, but the company agreed to pay $11 million to settle claims stemming from the federal investigation. The settlement, announced March 18, 2005, also calls for $4 million in criminal forfeitures by 12 firms the retail giant hired to provide janitorial services.

source: aflcio.org