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by Jane Birnbaum
Behind the yellow smiley-face of the
all-American Wal-Mart myth is a company that is the largest foreign
importer in the nation, where workplace policies may mean workers need
two jobs and depend upon public support to get by.
Betty Fought loved her job as a Wal-Mart
greeter, one of the smiling employees who welcome shoppers in the nearly
3,000 U.S. stores of the world's largest retailer. Working full-time
again at 60 after strokes disabled her husband Edward, an electrician,
Fought twice stopped suspected shoplifters at the Aberdeen, Wash.,
store. She personally supplied and washed the towels she used to wipe
carts in which some customers had carelessly diapered their babies.
But when Fought fell while pushing carts
and became disabled, managers for Wal-Mart—the nation's largest private
employer, founded in 1962 in Rogers, Ark., by retailing titan Sam
Walton—stopped being so friendly. The Foughts waited so long for
workers' compensation they had to take out a second mortgage which,
along with other bills, at one point left them living on $18 a month.
"It was a surprise the way they treated
me," 66-year-old Fought says today. She had to go to court to win
workers' compensation. Then, according to her lawyer, Wayne Lieb—a
leader among Washington State workers' compensation lawyers—Wal-Mart
arbitrarily stopped payments more than three months before her state
pension kicked in this year, again leaving the couple without income.
"You see how Wal-Mart advertises care and concern for people," Fought
says. "But the minute I needed disability, there was a fight. They were
hypocritical—treating people the way they treated me is not Wal-Mart's
image."
Experiences like Fought's led Washington
State last December to take the unprecedented step of decertifying
Wal-Mart's self-insured workers' compensation program. (Wal-Mart has
appealed the ruling and is managing its program with state supervision.)
As a greeter, Fought personified Wal-Mart's caring image—yet her actual
experience is just one of many events illuminating the distance between
Wal-Mart's image and what it really means to work for Wal-Mart, shop at
it and live near it.
In 1999 and 2000, a Cone Inc./Roper Poll
survey rated Wal-Mart as the nation's top "good corporate citizen"—more
a testament to savvy marketing than actual fact, says Robert Ross,
sociology professor at Clark University. "People hold Wal-Mart in high
regard because of its advertising that it delivers convenience and low
prices," he says. "The happy face bounces around and they have this
great gimmick of smiling retirees as you walk in and you can buy cheaper
stuff there. Some consumers don't know the facts about Wal-Mart, and
it's hard for the facts to get through, because people don't like paying
attention to uncomfortable facts. And people who know just focus on the
lower prices."
For those who care about "uncomfortable"
facts, here are some about Wal-Mart.
All-American foreign importer?
"We must make Wal-Mart respect workers
and obey the law."
—UFCW President Douglas Dority
Wal-Mart stores often are festooned with
red, white and blue bunting. Until 1998, store signs urged shoppers to
"Buy American." But in 1999, Wal-Mart was the nation's largest importer,
according to the Journal of Commerce, with 53
percent of its clothing coming from China, according to a New York Times
story last year.
Kathie Lee Gifford, who has lent her name
to Wal-Mart's "Kathie Lee" line of women's apparel, acknowledged in 1996
that pieces of her line had been made in a Honduran sweatshop by teenage
girls. That same year, she pledged to have independent monitors inspect
the factories where "Kathie Lee" goods were made.
However, in 1997, her goods were found being manufactured in a New York
sweatshop in which Chinese immigrants toiled 60 to 80 hours a week, some
without pay. And Wal-Mart was found buying "Kathie Lee" handbags made in
a sweatshop in China using forced labor as late as 1999, according to a
Business Week investigation after a report from the National Labor
Committee, a workers' rights group.
With more than $193 billion in worldwide
sales in 2000—52,100 pairs of women's jeans sold daily and 19,750 pairs
of shoes hourly, according to The New York Times—Wal-Mart is the
nation's largest American company—and a leader in corporate
scorched-earth practices, according to Charles Kernaghan, NLC executive
director. "Wal-Mart is driving the race to the bottom by multinational
corporations roaming the globe for lower labor costs," he says.
United Food and Commercial Workers
President Douglas Dority agrees. "You have Wal-Mart, this mammoth
retailer, lowering living standards worldwide by busting union efforts,
intimidating workers, driving down wages and disobeying worker
protection laws," he says. "We must make Wal-Mart respect workers and
obey the law, or the company will lower living standards for all
workers."
Not made in USA: Family members hand food
to workers at the Chentex plant in Nicaragua, where workers are locked
behind enclosures throughout their workday.
The NLC found and the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel reported last year that in Managua, Nicaragua, Wal-Mart has
been among retailers using the Chentex sweatshop to manufacture
private-label goods. While Wal-Mart says it has a code of conduct
guaranteeing workers' rights for anyone sewing Wal-Mart garments around
the world, Chentex's Taiwanese owners fired in
2000 union leaders asking for raises for workers making less than $5.30
a day for a 10-hour day, or less than 53 cents an hour.
With President George W. Bush promising
on the campaign trail to "look South" and Congress last year enacting
the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act, which extends to Caribbean
and Central American nations no-tariff benefits similar to those under
the North American Free Trade Agreement, this region is poised for an
explosion of garment sweatshops, says Clark University's Ross. Central
America is extremely convenient for retailers and it offers lower
shipping costs than Asia.
But the region also is where union
leaders, often women, routinely are threatened by employers, according
to the Support Team International for Textileras, a network of women
community and union organizers. Only such factory clients as Wal-Mart
and the Bush administration, which the Walton family backed with huge
campaign donations, can ensure workers are protected, Ross adds. (In the
2000 election cycle, Republican Party committees received $100,000 from
John Walton, $81,000 from Jim Walton and $10,000 from Alice Walton, the
children of the deceased Sam Walton, while reaping another $75,000 from
the company and $384,000 from other board members, according to Federal
Election Commission filings.)
"With Caribbean Basin parity," Ross says,
"the danger is that by using China as a whip, labor standards in Mexico
and Central America will be driven even further down by sweatshop owners
competing with business from the big private-label retailers led by
Wal-Mart."
Does Wal-Mart enjoy corporate welfare?
Wal-Mart styles itself as deeply generous
toward U.S. communities and families and in 2001, the Wal-Mart
Foundation plans to give $190 million in charitable contributions. Yet
Sam Walton's widow and four children—who control nearly 40 percent of
Wal-Mart stock, while son S. Robson Walton chairs and son John Walton
sits on Wal-Mart's board—approve the actions of Wal-Mart's executives
that set employee pay. But the wages approved by the Waltons—each of
whom ties with Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer as the seventh wealthiest
Americans with assets of $17 billion apiece, according to Forbes
magazine—do not enable Wal-Mart's million-plus U.S. workers to support
themselves, according to Marlene Richter. Richter is executive director
of the Las Vegas chapter of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker
Justice, which supports efforts by UFCW Local 711 to help Wal-Mart
workers organize in Las Vegas. (Wal-Mart workers in Las Vegas maintain
their own website.)
Twelve years ago, Arkansas state Rep. Jay
Bradford, then a state senator, was asked by a constituent if he
realized how many Wal-Mart workers were using Medicaid and other
taxpayer-financed public assistance programs. "I brought that up in a
speech, and it shot right up in the media that this little state senator
challenged Wal-Mart on its compensation," Bradford recalls. "Now, it's
common for retailers to employ part-timers with no benefits, but people
were not accustomed to this back then, and Wal-Mart led the no-benefit
scenario."
Today, through company manipulation of
employees' work schedules and high costs of employee participation,
approximately 60 percent of Wal-Mart's employees
are not covered by the chain's health package,
according to UFCW. In contrast, the national average for wholesale and
retail workers ages 18 to 64 not covered by their employers' health
insurance plans is 53 percent, according to the research group the
Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Instead, Wal-Mart sends its bill to
taxpayers, says David Blitzstein, UFCW negotiated benefits director.
"During health care reform six years ago, we shared a study with
Congress in which we found the cost-shift from Wal-Mart alone to other
employers was $1 billion a year."
A bad neighbor?
Living near a Wal-Mart can be dirty
business. Software engineer Kimsey Fowler Jr. maintains a website
detailing the trials of his father, Kimsey Fowler Sr., a retired utility
marketing manager, Wal-Mart shopper and shareholder.
In 1988, a contractor for Wal-Mart chopped down a row of
mature oak trees on private property between a new Wal-Mart lot and the
elder Fowler's backyard in Dublin, Ga. After the
store was built, neighbors had to protest before the contractor put up a
chainlink fence to stop trash from Wal-Mart's parking lot from blowing
into the subdivision and to deter the friends and family members of
Wal-Mart shoppers from walking dogs in neighbors' gardens. But when the
fence blew over, the contractor refused to replace it—and Wal-Mart
wouldn't get involved.
"Wal-Mart managers just never answered
me," says Fowler Sr. "I think a company should help out when they can,
especially if they can afford it," he adds.
Says Fowler Jr.: "I believe Wal-Mart once
was an honorable company when Sam Walton was alive, but since his death,
a corporate attitude of greed has turned Wal-Mart into a bad neighbor
who seems content to trash communities for the sake of fat profits."
Customer care?
Wal-Mart's "associates"—the term the
company uses to describe the store's clerks, stockers, cashiers and
others—are told to greet customers who are within 10 feet of them. But
when customers are physically assaulted in Wal-Mart parking lots, or are
seriously injured and even killed by falling merchandise stocked high on
Wal-Mart shelves, they or their families can wind up fighting Wal-Mart
lawyers in long litigation battles to get compensation for medical care
and other damages. At first, loyal shoppers can't understand what's
happening. "They all say, ‘I can't believe
Wal-Mart would do this to me,'" says Denver lawyer Jeffrey Hyman, who
calls Wal-Mart "the most difficult corporate entity I've ever faced."
In January, CBS's "60 Minutes" reported
on the bad behavior by Wal-Mart's lawyers. On the broadcast, Houston
Judge Sharolyn Wood said Wal-Mart lawyers didn't play by the rules and
"also hid and conducted themselves in a way to disguise and hide anyone
getting at the truth." Wood sanctioned Wal-Mart
for concealing evidence and being intentionally misleading, and the case
quickly was settled. Another judge was quoted as
saying, "Rarely has this court seen such a pattern of deliberate
obfuscation, delay, misrepresentation and downright lying."
To level the playing field, Lewis Laska, a Nashville, Tenn., attorney
and legal publisher, maintains the website http://www.wal-martlitigation.com/,
where lawyers can purchase and share information specifically about
Wal-Mart. "I'm trying to help small-town lawyers seek justice for their
clients against a large corporation," Laska says.
Wal-Mart workers: No voice at work
"In state after state, Wal-Mart has used
every trick in the book to prevent workers from having a voice on the
job," says UFCW organizer Harold Embry. "They do everything that's
within the law, and some things that are not."
Coincidence? After meat cutters in a
Texas Wal-Mart won a voice at work with UFCW last year, the chain
chopped back the number of meat cutters it employs in stores, prompting
UFCW to file ULP charges.
Wal-Mart has made every effort to prevent
UFCW organizers from contacting workers on the job, says UFCW attorney
George Wiszynski. "Wal-Mart has consistently maintained policies saying
they welcome outside groups," Wiszynski says. "But last summer, they put
out a policy that says if a union shows up, you move them away." After
the success of meat cutters in a Jacksonville, Texas, Wal-Mart in
getting a voice at work with UFCW last year, the chain drastically
reduced the number of meat cutters it employs in stores. Although saying
"there is no serious dispute that Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization,"
and citing a 56-page Wal-Mart "Manager's Toolbox to Remaining Union
Free," the NLRB's General Council office dismissed
in March UFCW charges that Wal-Mart switched to pre-packaged meat in
response to the union's effort to organize meat department workers. The
UFCW is appealing.
At the same time, Fortune magazine—edited
by John Huey, who co-wrote Sam Walton's 1992 best-selling autobiography,
"Sam Walton: Made in America, My Story"—named Wal-Mart 80th of the
country's 100 best companies for employees last year. It is an award
that Wal-Mart "associates" find less than believable.
"The managers always are bragging about
how much money Wal-Mart makes and now that Wal-Mart made the Fortune
list of best places to work, they brag about that," says Valerie
Gonzales, 33, who works in the infant department of a Las Vegas
Wal-Mart. "But if Wal-Mart is going to brag so much, it should have the
decency to pay us so we don't have to work two jobs and can afford
health insurance."
Living wage? Valerie Gonzales needs food
stamps and emergency room health care to support her family while making
$7.79 an hour at Wal-Mart.
After nine months on the job, Gonzales
makes $7.79 an hour for a 35-hour week, a schedule the company cut back
from 40 hours. Supporting five children while her fiancé undergoes job
training, Gonzales had to forgo Wal-Mart health coverage after learning
her share of the monthly premium was nearly $200, with a $350 annual
deductible each for her and her children. If Gonzales or the children
need care, they visit emergency rooms. To get by, she is applying for
food stamps.
Gonzales supports efforts by UFCW Local
711 to organize the Las Vegas Wal-Marts because a union would be "an
improvement," she says. The UFCW organizing effort in Las Vegas is part
of a broad community coalition led by the local chapter of the NICWJ,
which has created a code of conduct asking Wal-Mart managers to allow
workers to organize, provide them with affordable health care and treat
them with dignity.
"The reason we support the union drive
becomes more urgent every day," says NICWJ director Richter. "If
Wal-Mart is going to pay substandard wages and benefits, then there's
not going to be a reason for other retailers and grocery chains to keep
union contracts if they can get away with lowering wages. We'll have a
lower standard of living across the board in Las Vegas, and lose those
good wages and benefits that allow workers to raise their families."
Standing in front of a Wal-Mart recently,
Richter says she marveled that "people of all backgrounds poured into
the store at 9 a.m."
"I was thinking, ‘Do you have any idea what is
going on behind those doors?'"
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