WAL-MART

Take Action Now: Tell your Governor to Quarantine Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is the poster child of corporate greed. They have grown to become the world’s largest retailer and the largest private employer in the United States. Despite billions of dollars in profits their treatment of their workers and the communities where their stores are located leaves much to be desired.

Wal-Mart’s problems include:

• LACK OF AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE
  Wal-Mart fails to provide health insurance for more than half pf their employees. Who pays for it? We all do. Wal-Mart workers top Medicaid rolls in at least 16 states.
• POVERTY WAGES
  The average pay for a Wal-Mart sales associate is $1,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. Wal-Mart employees are rarely given opportunities for advancement; more than half leave the company each year.
• DEVASTATION OF LOCAL ECONOMIES
  For every new Supercenter that Wal-Mart opens, two local supermarkets will close. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has received more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies from state and local communities.
• UNION BUSTING
  Wal-Mart is infamous for its efforts to block union organizing efforts, sometimes in blatant violation of federal labor law.
• GENDER DISCRIMINATION
  Wal-Mart is the subject of the largest class action lawsuit in history by current and former female employees who were paid and promoted at significantly lower rates than their male co-workers.
• ENVIRONMENTAL ABUSES
  Wal-Mart's record of environmental abuses was described by one top law enforcement official as "widespread, systematic, repeated" and has incurred millions in fines from state and federal agencies.
• GLOBAL EXPLOITATION
  Wal-Mart has led the global attack on labor standards, outsourcing thousands of jobs to overseas factories where workers are paid penny wages and their rights are routinely violated.
• UNSHARED PROFITS
  While inflicting devastation on local communities, Wal-Mart topped the Fortune 500 list of America's largest corporations for the fourth year in a row, with an annual revenue of $250 billion. The Walton family itself is worth about $102 billion.

On June 2, 2006, the day of Wal-Mart’s shareholders’ meeting, Jobs with Justice activists and allies came together for a day of creative, attention-grabbing action. Working with the Ruckus Society, we convened the “Board of Worker Health” and put Wal-Marts across the country under quarantine. Activists in hazmat suits and masks surrounded stores with yellow caution tape and handed out flyers explaining how hazardous the retail giant is to the health of the communities it infects. Activists in Arkansas directly confronted shareholders, asking them to reform the company’s harmful labor and environmental practices. In Ohio, Wal-Mart workers thanked the “Board of Worker Health” for their efforts; in Tennessee, JwJ activists were actually cheered by a crowd which included several dozen workers. I’m writing to ask you to add your voice to those cheers by supporting Jobs with Justice’s efforts to hold corporations accountable.

These actions were excellent attention-getters—even if you’re in a hurry to finish your shopping, you’re going to be curious about a bunch of people in hazmat suits (check out pictures of the actions around the country at www.quarantinewalmart.com). But the ideas behind the protests get right to the heart of the real problem with Wal-Mart.

Last September, we held a National Workers’ Rights Board Hearing on Wal-Mart’s impact on working families and communities. Wal-Mart workers, union organizers, environmentalists, and community leaders spoke about their experiences with the company and their concerns about its harmful practices. We heard from Rosetta Brown, who had worked for Wal-Mart for seven years, and had struggled for six years to receive lawful workers’ compensation insurance for an injury she received while locked in the store overnight. Brenda Houle spoke about her firsthand experience with the company’s widespread pattern of discrimination against women—during her five years with the company she was repeatedly passed over for promotion, and ultimately had to leave her job when her husband became seriously ill and she was denied a leave of absence to care for him. She started at $5.75 an hour; after five years on the job, she was making $8.32 an hour. Meanwhile, men with less experience were making more.

We put Wal-Mart under “quarantine” because its poverty wages and inadequate health care put workers at risk. Wal-Mart fails to provide health insurance to more than half of its employees, and taxpayers often pick up the check—Wal-Mart workers top Medicaid rolls in at least sixteen states. Average pay for the company’s “associates” is below the federal poverty line—and we all know how far the poverty line is from a truly livable wage. As the stories I just shared demonstrate, the company goes to great lengths to cut wages and benefits right to the bone. They have a history of locking employees in their stores overnight; they fight hard to evade legal responsibilities like workers’ compensation; they encourage a culture in which more than half of all employees leave the company each year; they do anything they can to avoid paying a fair, family-sustaining wage.

These unfair business practices don’t just hurt workers at Wal-Marts, they hurt workers everywhere. For every new Supercenter that opens, two local supermarkets close. When Wal-Mart moves into a community, wages go down (as businesses try to compete with Wal-Mart’s ruthless business model) and total employment goes down as businesses close and jobs are lost. We put Wal-Mart under “quarantine” because it puts entire communities at risk.

There are those who argue that any development is good development, that Wal-Mart creates jobs and people should always be happy to have jobs, right? But in a growing number of communities across the country, working families are deciding that they don’t want jobs at any price—they want not just jobs, but jobs with justice.

Jobs with Justice has been leading a number of “site fights” in communities throughout the country that are concerned about the negative impact of a new Wal-Mart. Jobs with Justice activists in Bend, Oregon had been working to publicize Wal-Mart’s outrageously low wages and predatory business practices since 2004. Early last year, Wal-Mart announced plans to build a new Supercenter in Bend—and Jobs with Justice kicked the campaign into high gear with a new “Our Community First” task force to coordinate opposition to the new store. They’ve collected almost 6,000 signatures of local citizens opposed to a new Wal-Mart, which is more than 10% of Bend’s population. What’s more, with the help of a land-use attorney and a traffic specialist, they have defeated Wal-Mart’s proposal for the new store. Of course, the company will appeal this decision, and we will keep the pressure on. Bend doesn’t want a Supercenter, and we will be there to make sure the community’s voice is heard.

Campaigns like this, like our Quarantine campaign, and other actions that help spread the word about Wal-Mart’s anti-worker policies have started to have a real impact. A recent internal report told Wal-Mart that 2-8% of consumers had stopped shopping at the store because of “negative press they have heard.” It’s obvious those numbers are making some folks in Bentonville pretty nervous. They know as well as we do that those consumers won’t go back to Wal-Mart until they see some real changes.

In response, the company has developed a PR “war-room” to try to spin away the facts—and they’ve even taken a few (small) steps to clean up their act. In an effort to defuse criticism of their abysmal environmental record, they’ve opened a couple of “green stores” (at least one of which has since been converted to a Supercenter) and announced a new “Acres for America” program which will buy and preserve wildlife habitats. They’ve also announced that they’re stepping up surprise inspections of their suppliers’ factories. In a particularly bizarre stunt, they’re now saying that their planned expansion in urban areas will be accompanied by investment in their competitors! They claim they’ll help local small businesses advertise and even run seminars on how to stay afloat with a Supercenter in town. They have even created a front group, Working Families for Wal-Mart, to promote their anti-worker agenda. None of these spin-doctor moves will change the fact that they lead the race to the bottom on wages and benefits here and around the globe—but it’s nice to see they’re starting to worry.

But the steps Wal-Mart has taken so far have been more spin than substance. In order to make real change at this corporation and in this country, we need to keep the pressure on. We need to keep embarrassing Wal-Mart by revealing the facts about their anti-worker policies. We need to keep educating communities about the job-killing juggernaut Wal-Mart brings to a neighborhood. We need to keep exercising our power, as consumers and as citizens, to hold Wal-Mart accountable.

Of course, the race to the bottom on wages and benefits is a global problem, and Wal-Mart is a leading global culprit, pressuring suppliers around the world to cut corners and drive down wages. But did you know that Sam’s Club is now one of the top three U.S. retailers of fair trade coffee? They’ve developed a relationship with a fair-trade certified farmers’ co-op in Brazil, and they appear to be considering making this brand of coffee available in some Wal-Mart stores, which could double the group’s sales overnight. Does this move into fair trade products mean that Wal-Mart has learned that there’s a floor beneath which prices cannot reasonably be slashed? Have they recognized the harm that their relentless downward pressure causes those who make the goods they buy?

Maybe, maybe not. The company is certainly looking to counteract some of the negative press we’ve been generating by offering some organic and fair-trade products. But they certainly haven’t changed their corporate philosophy overnight. One of the reasons they’re working with this particular co-op is that they’ve developed a relationship that allows them to bypass a traditional middleman, thus cutting prices far below the average for fair-trade coffee. Great news for the farmers—for now. But Wal-Mart is legendary for its intense pressure on its suppliers. Small suppliers have been driven out of business by the incessant demands to cut corners and drive prices down. And there’s always the danger that a small supplier that’s remade itself to fit the Wal-Mart model could suddenly lose the bulk of its business if the company finds an even cheaper way to buy its product. Ultimately, Wal-Mart’s business model may not be compatible with the core principles of sustainability that are the very heart of fair trade products.

The question is, will offering fair trade and organic products make Wal-Mart’s business model more sustainable, or will the pressure of working with Wal-Mart remake those markets in its own image?

The answer is up to us. Our victories in “site fights” across the country and our success in spreading the word about Wal-Mart’s anti-worker policies demonstrate that we do have the power to hold this corporation accountable to working families everywhere. We can keep job-killing Supercenters out of our communities and we can seek out companies that help provide a truly sustainable wage to their employees and to workers around the world.

It won’t be easy. As I’m sure you know, the obstacles facing working families today are daunting, to say the least. Wal-Mart is by no means the only company that pays poverty wages, fails to provide health care to its workers, contributes to suburban sprawl, or helps to drive the global race to the bottom. And our government is increasingly balancing its budgets on the backs of those who can least afford it—hard-working families struggling to get by—while the richest of the rich get a free pass. The only way to combat these attacks is to organize our communities to fight back.

We will need all our combined strength to stand up against the “Wal-Mart-ization” of our country and our world. Without it we’ll continue headlong in the race to the bottom, with workers around the globe competing for jobs that pay poverty wages, fail to provide health care, and could at any moment be outsourced to a contractor who’s willing to pay workers even less.