The lure of “falling prices” is occasionally too much for even the most committed of mom-and-poppers to resist. I must admit that once each year, when the weather has grown cold and a visit from St. Nick is days away, I pay a visit to Wal-Mart, the only place to beat the crowds and Christmas shop at 3 a.m.
The other 364 days of the year, I avoid the mutated leviathan. It has now grown into the largest American corporation, fueled by tactics ranging from questionable to downright exploitive.
The past six months, however, have not been a well-stocked tailgate party for the super-retailer. The company has seen an onslaught of press coverage, none of which is praising it for making things easier on its employees, suppliers or customers.
There were the December raids in 21 states, resulting in the arrest of over 250 illegal immigrants employed as Wal-Mart custodians. Many of those arrested also have filed subsequent lawsuits, accusing their former employer of conscious exploitation of their illegal status.
In addition to this new acquaintance with federal prosecutors, Wal-Mart is also facing almost 40 lawsuits from employees claiming forced overtime without compensation and is the target of a class-action suit alleging gender discrimination.
These legal matters aside, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a report Friday that gave a small glimpse into the realities of life as a Wal-Mart employee. The newspaper published some of the most damning evidence to date, documenting the droves of uninsured children in Georgia who call Wal-Mart workers “daddy” or “mom.”
Georgia’s Peachcare program was initiated by the state in 1998 to provide benefits to children whose parents could not afford or had no access to health care coverage. In September 2002, approximately 160,000 Georgia youngsters were covered under Peachcare’s umbrella.
Of that group, over 10,000 of those children had a parent who worked for Wal-Mart. Ten thousand.
The company next on the list was Publix, who employed the parents of only 734 uninsured youngsters. Wal-Mart is by the far the state’s largest employer, but even after the data was adjusted for percentage of kids in Peachtree per employee in Georgia, it still tops the list.
But it’s not just American workers getting shafted by Wal-Mart — they’ve also come under fire in China, where it now has 31 outlets and over 16,000 employees.
Since the retail giant arrived in the country, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has begun to speak out over Wal-Mart’s refusal to organize a union for Chinese employees.
The ACFTU’s main beef is that article ten of Chinese Trade Union law requires any enterprise with more than twenty-five workers to set up a union. Luckily for Wal-Mart, their enticement of economic expansion has thus far been a sufficient bribe to Chinese officials, who have overlooked article ten’s mandate.
The irony of opposing a trade union for your Chinese employees is difficult to ignore. The ACFTU, like all Chinese entities, ultimately answers to the government, and independent unions are still taboo on the mainland. The government has to date been able to suppress almost all labor activity that would result in improved working conditions or any change to the status quo — so Chinese labor unions are for “labor” in name only.
The largest private employer in America is already worldwide, and has no signs of stopping its exponential expansion anytime soon — despite its rejection of satisfactory worker wages/benefits, hostility to organized labor and total destruction of the retail economy in small-to-midsized American towns. We have a landscape of plate-glass and cracked, parking-lot asphalt that used to be middle America.
Wal-Mart provides an illuminating microcosm of the realities of what it now means to be an American worker. If our number one employer won’t pay its workers enough to allow them to care for their sick children, stiffs them on overtime and saves through illegal practices, is it any wonder our nation is addicted to — and damn near reliant on — their low prices?