Handshake With Sam
While Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, steered his company’s growth over its first thirty years, he never let anyone forget that with such tremendous success come certain moral responsibilities. He led by example, and he did business with a handshake.
Today’s Wal-Mart has lost Sam’s way. That’s why we’ve proposed a new contract with Wal-Mart’s current leadership—to help Wal-Mart take its place as a responsible business leader for the new century.
Wal-Mart and China’s Retail Unions
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
In the third post in this week’s series on Wal-Mart and China, we turn our attention to Wal-Mart recently-unionzed stores in China. While working conditions in many of China’s industrial factories remain abysmal, workers at Wal-Mart’s stores across China are bargaining collectively and China holds the title of being the only country with a unionized Wal-Mart store. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart employees in North America continue to face anti-union intimidation from supervisors, or, as in the case of several employees in Canada, actual union-busting by the company.
Wal-Mart’s decision to allow unions at its stores in China is less a sign of compassion for its employees and more an indicator of Wal-Mart’s intense desire to expand in China. As the company reaches saturation in the United States - and meets increasingly difficult opposition as it tries to expand - Wal-Mart has come to rely on its international stores for a larger and larger percent of its profits. To build with more efficiency internationally, the retailer has made a number of exceptions to its normally unchanging business model. Some of those changes have been smaller store formats, some have been unions at its stores.
Ideally, Wal-Mart would allow unions at its stores in countries without dictatorial, totalitarian governments. The fact that Wal-Mart’s stores in China - where the government has enormous say in business dealings - are the only ones to unionize is a sad characterization of the company’s labor policies. Its actions imply Wal-Mart will only allow unions when forced to. Without the aid of strong government-backed support for workers (where could we find something like that...) how will Wal-Mart’s employees ever manage to stand up for their rights?
Wal-Mart: Save Money, Bust Unions
Posted by Research Team
Today’s story in the Montreal Gazette reported Wal-Mart is likely to close a Tire and Lube Shop in Canada which is on the verge of unionizing. Wal-Mart has pulled this same move twice before: once with the meat-cutters department at a Texas store and in another instance, at a store in Jonquière, Quebec. As is evidenced by these three cases, Wal-Mart would rather close an entire store than see it unionized.
Friday’s story in the Wall Street Journal further exposes Wal-Mart’s fear of unions in North America. The company’s attempt to intimidate employees with threats of lost jobs and less power show how critical low wages are to Wal-Mart’s business model, and how far the company will go to prevent unions at its stores.
Yet despite the company’s vehement opposition to unions in North America, Wal-Mart is currently signing collective bargaining agreements with employees at its retail stores in China. This additional chapter to Wal-Mart’s long, contentious history with labor activists and union members adds a new facet to the Wal-Mart unionization debate. Read more about these instances and more in our new fact sheet:
Click here to download “Wal-Mart: Save Money, Bust Unions” (PDF)
Wal-Mart Likely to Close Tire and Lube Shop on the Verge of Unionizing in Canada
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
Fresh on the heels of anti-union propagandizing at the company comes news from Canada that Wal-Mart is on the verge of closing a Tire and Lube shop which is about to unionize. This isn’t the first time that Wal-Mart has closed a store rather than see it unionize: the company outsourced meatpacking when its butchers unionized, and shuttered a store in Jonquiere, Quebec after the employees there voted for a union. Despite the fact that experts expect all 206 of Wal-Mart’s stores in China to sign collective bargaining agreements in the next month, it seems the retailer is still dead set against allowing unions to form in its North America stores.
Read more on the Battle-Mart blog >>>
Decision looms for Wal-Mart [Montreal Gazette]
Union leaders say they expect Wal-Mart Canada Corp. to shut down a garage it operates in Gatineau after workers are presented with their first collective agreement.
Guy Chénier, president of the union local representing garage workers, said Wal-Mart has already hinted it will close the shop. In 2005, Wal-Mart came under fire for closing a store in Jonquière after workers won union accreditation.
In Gatineau, across the river from Ottawa, Wal-Mart garage workers have been unionized since 2005, and are now waiting for their first collective agreement following binding arbitration that ended in June.
It’s not clear when the contract will be imposed, but the union says it expects it to be soon.
Read the rest of this story ...
Wal-Mart and China’s Pollution Problems
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
As Beijing prepares for the opening ceremonies of the Olympic summer games later this week, more and more attention is being drawn to China’s pollution problems. The country is notorious for smog-filled air and chemically tainted waterways. While cleaning crews struggle to clear up algae-strangled rivers, many athletes are planning to compete with face masks because the air quality is so poor.
China recently became the world’s largest CO2 producer, producing one quarter of the world’s carbon emissions. A post on Treehugger today points out that 33% of those emissions are from export manufacturing.
Wal-Mart is an integral part of this problem. As we mentioned in yesterday’s post on China’s human rights violations, Wal-Mart isn’t the cause of China’s pollution problems, but it certainly has a vested interested in keeping China’s environmental standards low. Were China to improve environmental regulation, manufacturers looking to source as cheaply as Wal-Mart demands would inevitably be forced to other countries and China would loose billions.
The Olympics are only highlighting a problem that has been going on for decades: companies like Wal-Mart force countries like China to sacrifice environmental integrity for production profits. It’s a critical aspect of corporate social responsibility that Wal-Mart glibly passes-over in its sustainability reports, but China’s carbon production is everyone’s affair. As the Olympics have revealed, China’s people are suffering from these practices and shouldn’t be made to bear the world’s burden.
It’s Not You, It’s Me: 33% of China’s CO2 Emissions From Export Manufacturing [TreeHugger]
33% of China’s carbon footprint blamed on exports [New Scientist]
Global CO2 emissions: increase continued in 2007 [Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency]
Wal-Mart All Star Collectible Cards: Leslie Dach
Posted by Media Team
In the wake of Wal-Mart’s massive anti-union political scandal that broke late last week, we decided to release a new Wal-Mart All Star Collectible card: Leslie Dach, Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Government Relations.
As Jeffrey Goldberg points out, Dach was hired by Wal-Mart to convince Democrats to like the company. Wal-Mart, the born-and-raised red state company, has traditionally had a hard time with liberals, and Dach was brought in to win them over.
Leslie came to Wal-Mart from Edelman Public Relations, the company still responsible for most of Wal-Mart’s PR work. While there, “he led the Washington D.C. office, the company’s research, advertising, and corporate social responsibility consulting divisions and its global public affairs, crisis, technology, and healthcare practices.” He can spin with the best of them, but more important than his ability to doublespeak, Leslie Dach has serious Democrat cred. From Wal-Mart’s website:
Leslie has been active as a strategist in Democratic politics and worked in senior positions in a number of presidential campaigns, including as a senior advisor for communications for the Democratic National Committee in 2004 and managing the program at the 2000 Democratic Convention. He served the Clinton administration in a variety of project capacities, including special advisor to the National Security Advisor during the Kosovo conflict. Leslie was also a lobbyist for the National Audubon Society and Environmental Defense, and the special assistant to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee.
If Wal-Mart really wants to win over Democratic consumers, maybe the company should stop badmouthing Democratic candidates to its entire workforce. What does Wal-Mart’s recent Obama-bashing mean for Mr. Dach? Will his work appealing to sentimental liberals get flushed down the drain by the retailer’s political bullying? How can a self-proclaimed Democrat work for a company so blatantly un-Democratic? And what will it take for Democrats to look past the hype?
Wal-Mart All Star Collectible Trading Cards: Collect them all!
Mike Duke, Vice Chairman, International Division
Tom Schoewe, CFO
Susan Chambers, Executive Vice President, People Division
Wal-Mart and China’s Human Rights Abuses
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
Amnesty International has taken the 2008 Beijing Olympics as an opportunity to highlight China’s legacy of human rights violations, and to call on the country to change its practices. The Olympics may stand for all that is strong and vibrant in the human spirit, but the Chinese government’s policies of forced labor, censorship, arbitrary police detentions, and unjust executions fall miserably short of these lofty goals.
Wal-Mart sources more than 70% of its products from China, and relies on this atmosphere of abuse and oppression to keep production costs low. The issues Amnesty International raises are precisely why Chinese factories can manufacture products for so little: most workers are too afraid to stand up for better working conditions, and understandably so. Without these intimidating working conditions, Wal-Mart would have a much tougher time keeping its prices so low.
Wal-Mart might be in a joint venture with China, but Wal-Mart’s heart lies with exploitative working conditions, not the Chinese people. Surely once China’s labor standards improve far enough, the retailer will move on to a country where working conditions remain medieval and workers’ rights are nonexistent.
China’s Olympic Legacy [Amnesty International]
American Rights at Work: Ask the FEC to Investigate Wal-Mart’s Electioneering
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
American Rights at Work is joining the coalition of labor rights advocates calling on Wal-Mart to stop its anti-union worker intimidation. Below is the group’s call for signatures on a petition to the FEC, calling for a formal investigation of Wal-Mart’s tactics:
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart has been threatening employees to not vote for pro-worker candidates like Barack Obama in November because they support the Employee Free Choice Act. If passed, the bill would make it easier to form unions in stores like Wal-Mart.
Telling employees how to vote in a U.S. election is not only morally reprehensible, it’s potentially illegal.
We’re starting a petition to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), asking for an investigation into Wal-Mart’s electioneering to see if any laws were violated. Can you sign on?
Ask the Federal Election Commission to investigate Wal-Mart.
Read the rest of this story ...
Change to Win on Wal-Mart’s Political Intimidation
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
Change to Win is a coalition of unions and union members committed to restoring the American Dream for a new generation of workers – wages that can support a family, affordable health care, a secure retirement, and the opportunity for the future. They are calling on Wal-Mart to stop its shameful practice of worker intimidation.
Wal-Mart: Playing Politics, Playing Workers [Change to Win Press Release]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A Wall Street Journal article today exposed that Wal-Mart is using mandatory meetings with its employees in seven states to tout its political message, warning them not to vote for Democrats in the November elections for fear of new legislation that would make it easier for workers to organize unions. The WSJ reported that according to those who attended these meetings, the message was that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in. The following is a statement from Change to Win executive director Chris Chafe in response.
“In an election season driven by the desire for change and a demand by working families for better jobs, better wages, pension security and health care for all Americans, it should come as no surprise that Wal-Mart is weighing-in heavily – and possibly illegally – with its employees over the choices they face this November. Wal-Mart’s tactics are designed to intimidate their employees and discourage them from considering choices that would strengthen their voices on the job and bring tangible change for all American workers.
“Wal-Mart’s track record is clear. When workers try to organize a union, they are met with internal intimidation campaigns and illegal firings. Where workers succeed in gaining a voice on job, their departments are eliminated or their stores are permanently closed. It should be no surprise that Wal-Mart would stretch the limits of the law in an attempt to deny their workers’ rights and kill the Employee Free Choice Act. The company knows what all union workers know: workers in unions earn 29 percent higher wages on average, are 62 percent more likely to have employer health coverage, and four times more likely to have a pension.
“Shame on Wal-Mart. The industry leader’s attempts to skirt the law, and use scare tactics to alter the outcome of the election is nothing less than disgraceful.”