Have they bitten off more than they can chew?
Wal-Mart: Enemy of the people
By Milt Neidenberg
It could have become a city within a city.
Maybe they would have called it Walton, after the patriarch Sam
Walton--founding father of Wal-Mart, the largest retail
supermarket in the world. But it didn't happen.
Wal-Mart had tried to ram through a 71-page ballot
initiative that would have turned the city of Inglewood,
Calif., population 112,000, over to this global, predatory
behemoth, which has surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world's
biggest corporation. Wal-Mart wanted at least 60 acres of land,
the size of 17 football fields, to build a supercenter. The
voters--half Latin@, half Black and 20-percent
unemployed--rejected Wal-Mart's demands for broad exemptions
from environmental ordinances, zoning laws, public hearings and
state law.
It was truly a David vs. Goliath struggle. Wal-Mart spent
over $1 million on mailings, telephone calls, newspaper ads,
radio and television, and door-to-door can vassing. The
campaign cost the company about $100 a vote, yet the referendum
was rejected by 61 percent of the voters--an astonishing feat
for a coalition of labor, community groups and churches pitted
against a transnational corporation with $250 billion in sales
and a captive workforce of 1.3 million. For the moment,
Wal-Mart's plan to build 40 supercenters in California has
suffered a setback.
From megastores to supercenters
Wal-Mart's supercenters have generated huge profits. The
stores offer groceries and general merchandise. By placing more
than 100,000 products in one location, the company can entice
those people who frequently come in and buy cheap groceries to
also roam the store for many other products. According to CEO
H. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart studies 300 sites for each of the 200
supercenters it plans to build. As the supercenters try to grab
land and resources within city limits, they will face
repetitions of the Inglewood struggle.
During a four-month bitter strike/lockout that pitted 70,000
grocery workers against four grocery chains in Southern
California, one of the four, the union-buster Safeway, donated
$300,000 to the campaign to beat back Wal-Mart's efforts to
build the supercenter in Inglewood. It was not out of
generosity, but self-interest. Two of these large grocery chain
stores close for every new supercenter that opens.
Wal-Mart has led a technological revolution in retailing,
installing computerized ordering and distribution. It has so
streamlined its on-time deliveries that pro ducts are often
sold at retail even before the wholesale distributor gets paid
for them. The company has also lowered wages and benefits by
almost 6 percent compared to its competitors.
Wal-Mart has topped the Fortune 500 list for the last three
years. Five of the 10 richest people in the world in 2002 were
members of the ruling Walton family of this vast retailing
empire, according to For bes magazine. With a total of more
than $100 billion in personal assets, the infamous five have
become the beneficiaries of a global structure and a primary
leader in the drive to lower wages and benefits.
In the five weeks ending April 3, Wal-Mart sales exceeded
$20 billion, far greater than the combined total of the next 10
largest retail giants.
Wal-Mart views the Inglewood setback as short-lived. It
wields enormous economic and political power in Washington.
Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry, while he
publicly denounces Wal-Mart's labor practices as "disgraceful,"
holds an undisclosed amount of stock in the company. (Arkansas
Democrat Gazette, March 7)
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a
non-partisan organization that tracks political funding,
Wal-Mart's Political Action Committee has become the
second-largest donor of political handouts. Over 80 percent of
Wal-Mart's checks have been sent to the Bush election campaign.
Nearly 20 percent of its 60,000 "domestic managers" have been
intimidated to finance the PAC through payroll deductions of at
least $8.60 a month.
Don't call them workers!
From the moment the workers--called "associates" and
primarily women--clock in, they are at the mercy of their
bosses. Their time sheets are often manipulated by Wal-Mart
managers to cut down what are already poverty wages. They begin
their day with a pep rally. Managers, acting as cheer leaders,
begin the chants: "Gimme a W." The "associates" must respond
enthusiastically. "Gimme an A," shout the cheerleaders. And so
it goes until Wal-Mart is spelled out. They rush to their work
stations and their "happy" stressful day begins and ends under
the strong-arm tactics of management.
The average "associate" is rewarded with an annual salary of
$13,861 for full-time work, according to a February 2004 report
from Rep. George Miller of Cali fornia. But about 70 percent of
the "full-time" workers average only 28 hours a week, making
their gross average wage less than $11,000 a year. The national
poverty-level wage for a family of three is around $16,000. It
is clear that the workers can't live on what they earn, leading
to a turnover that has reached 150 percent in many of the
megastores.
According to the United Food and Com mercial Workers, the
majority of Wal- Mart employees don't have healthcare coverage,
which would cost them 20 percent of their wages. Family
coverage would cost more than twice that. The Univ ersity of
California at Berkeley reported that California taxpayers
subsidize Wal-Mart employees by a total of $20.5 million a year
in healthcare costs.
Wal-Mart's power goes far beyond its domination of the
retailing industry. It has intervened in the public school
crisis to recruit candidates for its low wages. It withdrew $20
billion from the tax-free Walton Family Foundation to bankroll
a program to privatize the public school system through school
vouchers. It has joined with the infamous Bradley Foundation of
Milwaukee, which first introduced the slave-labor workfare
programs, to broad en the voucher program.
Wal-Mart has begun to dominate the retailing industries of
other countries. In Mexico, its practice mirrors the U.S.
takeover of Mexico's trade infrastructure. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
accounts for more than half of all Mexican supermarket sales.
(Wall Street Journal, March 31) According to the World Trade
Organi zation, Wal-Mart has negotiated with Chinese government
officials to increase its megastores in China to 35, with plans
to build more. And it continues to comb the globe for areas
where U.S. capital has created the most favorable climate for
exploiting the working poor and oppres sed. This is
globalization in the hands of predators like Wal-Mart.
Biting off more than it can chew?
Is spreading their supercenters nationally and
internationally potentially too ambitious, and too far
reaching? Michael Exstein, a retail equity analyst for the Wall
Street brokerage house of Credit Suisse First Boston, stated in
a March 3 report that the "corporate landscape is littered with
companies that have mistaken leading market shares for dominant
market share. ... Wal-Mart may well be at one of those
inflection points. ... The end result for shareholders could be
a stock that may not reflect near-term economic performance but
... focuses on an increasingly hostile public environment."
In "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," Frederick Engels
clarified the bankruptcy of capitalism on this critical issue.
Writing about capitalist crises, he said they "demon strate the
incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern
productive forces ... [and] show how unnecessary the
bourgeoisie are for that purpose."
Wal-Mart has harnessed and usurped the high-tech revolution
in retailing in a way that serves only to deepen the exploit
ation of the masses. It is only under socialism that the forces
of production, appropriation and exchange can be har moni zed
with the socialized character of labor so that the vast
production of goods and services worldwide can serve all
humanity.
Labor opens up the struggle
Since the late 1990s, the United Food and Commercial Workers
have stepped up efforts to organize Wal-Mart workers. They help
employees file complaints on issues such as the company's
violations of overtime, refusal to pay for healthcare and its
discriminatory practices against women. Dozens of class-action
suits have been filed.
If Wal-Mart is to be organized, the UFCW can't do it alone.
It will have to marshal forces that include the Black and
Latin@ communities, other oppressed nationalities, youth,
seniors, women's groups and the lesbian, gay, bi and trans
movement. To change the relationship of class forces, there
must also be unity with the movements of immigrants, of
environmentalists, against globalization and the ever-growing
anti-war movement to foster the growth of an independent
classwide movement. It will take shape only from the bottom
up.
Wal-Mart represents all that is endemic to monopoly
capitalism--private ownership by a few of all the productive
forces, and the insatiable appetite for amassing profits.
Cycles of imperialist wars and economic depressions are always
at the expense of the workers here and the poor and oppressed
abroad. Internationalism will flourish as fierce battles break
out between labor and capital.
The Inglewood victory could be a tick, a turning of the
clock toward a long and protracted war against Wal-Mart and
everything the predatory retailing giant stands for.
Reprinted from the April 22, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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