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.
Help Support The Shank Family
Posted by Eric Bull
Today Wal-Mart Watch officially launches its fundraising drive for former Wal-Mart employee Deborah Shank and her family, and pledges to match all funds raised dollar-for-dollar. Click here to do what Wal-Mart won’t and support the Shanks.
“Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott’s decision to take away the money that Mrs. Shank would use for her medical expenses represents the kind of failure of moral leadership that we have sadly come to expect from him,” said David Nassar, Wal-Mart Watch Executive Director. “The Shanks are a hard-working American family - the kind that Lee Scott currently claims Wal-Mart helps to ‘save money and live better.’ Unfortunately, the Shank family is doing neither.”
Donate to the Shank Family today.
For more information, the story was profiled in the Wall Street Journal last week, and Jim and Chris Shank told their story yesterday on “The Morning Show With Mike and Juliet.”
Nominate Lee Scott as “Grinch of the Year”
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
Wal-Mart consistently puts profits before people, and it’s hurting America’s communities. Wal-Mart’s business practices harm not only its own employees, but also many other Americans who work in an economy of low wages and lower benefits. Wal-Mart harms our communities by frequently shirking tax responsibilities, taking much-needed money away from public schools and civil works. And Wal-Mart harms its own customers - the working families of America - by failing to take the necessary steps to ensure the safety of its own products, and by standing in the way of other agencies to do so.
Nominate Wal-Mart’s CEO Lee Scott for “Grinch of the Year.” Go to Jobs with Justice to submit your nomination. Your nomination will make it clear that working families will not tolerate Wal-Mart’s stingy employment practices, unethical environmental policy, unfair treatment of suppliers and, most of all, lack of consideration for the safety of America’s consumers.
Cleveland, OH. Fighting Over the Scraps of a Once-Robust Economy
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
For Cleveland, OH., Wal-Mart is a curse packaged up as a blessing. The retailer has heralded its new store in the city as a boon to the local economy, but Wal-Mart damages the communities it sells to in a number of ways. Most relevant to this story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the company lowers median wages, reduces the overall number of jobs in a community by putting local stores out of business and frequently violates labor laws, both domestically and abroad. Wal-Mart claims to help working class Americans, but by paying low wages, exporting jobs overseas, failing to provide adequate health care for its employees and bilking the communities it sells in, Wal-Mart is helping create the poverty-related problems that are now damaging its sales. For more information, click on our Labor Relations or Community Impact page.
Wal-Mart draws huge crowd - of applicants [Cleveland Plain Dealer]
As the world’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart is used to being greeted by large numbers of applicants almost every time it opens a new store.
But the 6,000-plus people who applied for jobs at the new Supercenter in Cleveland’s Steelyard Commons took everyone, even Wal-Mart, by surprise.
“We had to recount [the applications] three times,” said Mia Masten, Wal-Mart’s director of corporate affairs, Midwest division.
When thousands of people compete for a few hundred ordinary jobs, trend watchers say it’s an indication not only of a less-than-stellar economy but also of a workforce short on marketable skills.
The huge number of applicants wouldn’t have caught anyone’s eye had these been skilled, high-paying jobs, the types of positions that thousands of people always seek.
Read the rest of this story ...
OSHA Investigates Wal-Mart
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
Chalace Lowry was worried that her boss, Mona Williams, was doing some insider trading. Chalace, being an upstanding citizen, reported her concerns to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, being a company consumed by corporate corruption, screwed Chalace over. That didn’t stop her from continuing to work at the company. But it also didn’t stop the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from investigating Wal-Mart for its actions. The full story from BusinessWeek:
OSHA’s Wal-Mart Investigation [BusinessWeek]
The Labor Dept.’s Occupational Safety & Health Administration has opened an investigation into a whistleblower complaint against Wal-Mart Stores. OSHA sent a letter to Chalace Epley Lowry, the employee involved, saying the agency is “notifying the party named in the complaint about the filing of the complaint” and “conducting an investigation into your allegations,” according to a copy of the letter reviewed by BusinessWeek.
BusinessWeek wrote in June about Lowry (BusinessWeek.com, 6/13/07), an administrative assistant in the company’s communications department, after she reported what she believed could have been insider trading by a senior executive. The executive was quickly cleared. But in the process, Lowry’s identity was revealed to the executive. This resulted in her having to look for another position within the company, with no guarantee that she would get one.
Read the rest of this story ...
Wal-Mart’s Holiday Message: “We’re Not Scrooge-Like at All!”
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
Wal-Mart’s trying to shed it’s mantle of the cheap, heartless price-slasher, but cheap products are all Wal-Mart knows. As this article explains, the company is attempting to forge emotional bonds with its customers, but only comes off as hypocritical. Years of employee abuse, sweatshop sourcing and corporate greed can’t be wished away: if Wal-Mart wants its customers’ trust, it had better start making substantive changes to its business practices.
Wal-Mart Wants to Carry Its Christmas Ads Beyond Price [New York Times]
The possibility that consumers will hesitate to spend for the holidays is worrying retailers as the Christmas shopping season gets under way. Wal-Mart, the nation’s No. 1 merchant, is starting its big holiday advertising campaign today with an upbeat appeal that seeks to elevate saving money from a necessity to a virtue.
The goal of the campaign, by the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, is to promote low prices as a means rather than an end — less Scrooge and more Tiny Tim.
For instance, in one commercial, the question, “What will you do with your savings?” is answered by showing a grinning boy riding a bicycle with a big red gift bow atop the handlebars.
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Chinese Suppliers to Wal-Mart: Quit Bullying Us
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
This post from BloggingStocks comes on the heels of the Chinese government’s announcement that it plans to raise environmental standards for exporters. From the Wall Street Journal:
“The products are shipped abroad, but the pollution is left in China,” said Chen Guanglong, a senior official in the ministry. “Export prices don’t reflect the true costs, which is one of the reasons for our unreasonable trade surplus.”
This all may be a sign that China is finally standing up for itself, but what it really illuminates is how desperately Wal-Mart needs lax environmental laws and unfair labor condition to keep its prices low. If China were to start taking care of its environment and its workers, Wal-Mart would be up the creek without a paddle.
For a better translation of the article BloggingStocks discusses below, click here.
Wal-Mart prices too low, say Chinese suppliers [BloggingStocks]
You might be surprised to hear Chinese suppliers complaining that the prices at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. are too low, but that is just what this translated article appears to be saying. The complaint is related to the retailer’s classic fallback position of slashing prices across the board in order to boost sales whenever revenue performance is lagging.
Although Wal-Mart has tried to increase profits by recruiting a different kind of customer—one who is interested in more fashionable clothes and name-brand products and has the money to buy them—its classic price chops continue to serve as an old, reliable crutch. In other words, it will likely never recover from the “always low prices” mantra it has built for itself.
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New Video Examines Wal-Mart’s Ties to China
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt
WakeUpWalMart.com today released the second ad in its series investigating the “ultimate joint venture” between Wal-Mart and China. The ad will begin airing this week in 30 media markets around the country.
Click here to read more about Wal-Mart’s complex relationship with China, both as a major retailer in the country and as one of the largest buyer of Chinese products.
Rolling Back Property Tax Payments
Posted by Media Team
A new report from Good Jobs First exposes one of Wal-Mart’s most deceptive cost-cutting policies: consistent attempts to pay low taxes on its properties. By denying local communities their rightful dues, Wal-Mart sucks money away from public schools, local services and civic development. From GJF’s release:
The first-ever investigation of Wal-Mart’s local property tax records finds that the retail giant systematically seeks to minimize its payment of taxes that support public schools and other vital government services. That is the key finding of Rolling Back Property Tax Payments, a report released today by Good Jobs First, a non-profit, nonpartisan research center in Washington, DC. The full text is at http://www.goodjobsfirst.org.
“Wal-Mart, a company with $350 billion in annual revenues and $11 billion in profits, drains vitally needed funds from communities by regularly challenging the valuation put on its properties by public officials,” said Philip Mattera, research director of Good Jobs First and principal author of the report. “When the company succeeds in one of these challenges, it diminishes the funds available to pay for education, police and fire protection, and other essential services provided by local governments.”
Based on a large national sample of Wal-Mart stores and a review of all of its distribution centers open as of the beginning of 2005, Good Jobs First concludes that Wal-Mart has filed assessment challenges at more than one-third of its facilities around the country. At many facilities there have been appeals in multiple years. Overall, Good Jobs First estimates that the company has filed more than 2,100 property tax challenges nationwide.