Battleangel

Last year, US vice president Dick Cheney was quoted as saying that “The story of Wal-Mart exemplifies some of the very best qualities in our country — hard work, the spirit of enterprise, fair dealing, and integrity.”
Not everyone seems happy with their practises. Recently the sanctimonious image of Wal-Mart as an all-American business and the canonizing of its business practises have come under greater scrutiny.
What are those American qualities anyway? Poverty level wages? Embrace of globalization? Sweatshop and child labor? Discrimination against women and minorities?
In a sense, Cheney was so correct he probably didn’t even know it himself.

Alternet - This is our nation’s largest private employer, where from their first day on the job employees are lectured in the evil of “time theft” (spending a second doing something besides work, like tying your shoes or going to the bathroom) and the evil of collective bargaining, where the mere mention of the word “union” will within hours bring the arrival of a union-busting strike team flown from corporate headquarters on a private jet.

Cheney no doubt stands in awe of Wal-Mart’s reach. Because of its enormous size — it is America’s largest company, with 1.2 million employees and nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in sales last year — Wal-Mart’s practices affect not only the entire retail sector but the entire American economy, putting downward pressure on wages and benefits. When you add in the thousands of suppliers whose businesses depend on Wal-Mart — and who are constantly pressured to reduce the price of their goods — there are millions more employees whose wages and benefits are directly pushed down by Wal-Mart.

Well, this year comes a new controversial documentary that is bound to rattle some cages in wholesome, brainwashed America.

WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price - NYT review - Robert Greenwald’s “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” is not “Fahrenheit 9/11.” There are no goofy takeoffs of old television series. You won’t see H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of Wal-Mart, the largest retailer on the planet, practicing his golf swing or making revealing comments on camera.

He doesn’t have to. Mr. Greenwald’s film features plenty of star witnesses, many of them former employees. Weldon Nicholson, a store-manager trainer for 17 years, says that when Wal-Mart came into a new town, management people would scan the stores along Main Street and make a game of predicting how long it would take each business to close.

Wal-Mart’s record on sex and race discrimination is also addressed. One training coordinator recalls being made to clean the bathroom on a regular basis because she was the only woman in the department. A black man recalls racial epithets and lynching jokes.

In China, a young factory employee talks about working conditions. (”I’m sitting there, dripping with sweat all day long,” she says.) Employees in China say they are housed in dismal dormitories; they may choose to live elsewhere, but still have to pay the dorm rent. In Bangladesh, the documentary says, working hours are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, for 13 to 17 cents an hour.

There is also a brutally honest Wake-up Wal-Mart campaign with a long list of disturbing facts. Perhaps the most disturbing fact is that Wal-Mart is but the biggest and on the top of the list of corporations that use contemporary trends in economics and government to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else. Employees, taxpayers, competitors, producers and customers.
Indeed, like Karl Marx once pointed out, this is the creed for the capitalist. Always pay the lowest wages possible. But since you need consumers who are able to acquire your goods or services, and as much of them as possible, you need everyone else to pay the highest wages possible.