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
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