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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Activists against the behemoth think this is their year: Two new national campaigns, a critical upcoming documentary and more stores thwarted. But can they force America's largest private employer to change its ways?
Aug 2, 2005 | Firing whistleblowers. Discriminating against women (and, most recently, black truck drivers). Violating child labor laws. Locking workers into stores overnight. Mooching off taxpayers. Disregarding local zoning laws. Mistreating immigrant janitors. Abusing young Bangladeshi women. Paying poverty-level wages in the United States. Destroying small-town America. If you read any newspapers -- or even watch "The Daily Show" -- you can probably guess which company has been grabbing headlines for these and countless other charges and offenses.
It's Wal-Mart, of course. The largest and most profitable retailer in the world -- and in the United States, with 1.3 million workers, the largest private employer -- is becoming nearly as infamous as Enron or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The bad publicity may be well deserved, but it's also the calculated result of a coordinated effort by company critics, what Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott recently called "one of the most organized, most sophisticated, most expensive corporate campaigns ever launched against a single company."
Years of citizen outrage -- on a slow, under-the-radar boil -- has this year exploded in a highly visible public education effort, backed by a powerful and in many ways united set of forces: two new national efforts, hundreds of community groups, unions, women's rights groups, environmental activists and mad-as-hell individuals. What's more, this November will mark the launch of a documentary film about the company, directed by Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed"). Greenwald says he expects his movie, which will be promoted in a grass-roots manner suited to its subject -- through screenings at house parties, union halls and churches -- to contribute to an anti-Wal-Mart "echo chamber."
The aim, the activists agree, is to change the company's entire business model. What Wal-Mart's abuses have in common, they say, is a disregard for the public interest in a single-minded pursuit of the bottom line. Low labor costs and a disregard for the law have been central to the company's way of doing business. A Wal-Mart that paid its employees generously, offered decent worker healthcare and was considerate of its community neighbors -- the critics' major demands -- would not be Wal-Mart: It would be, essentially, a bunch of stores. Other than unionized workers, it is possible that no one has ever put such concerted pressure on a single American company, let alone one so large, to so fundamentally change its operations.
This Wal-Mart moment has been decades in the making. In the retailer's early years, beginning with its 1961 founding in Arkansas, unions mostly ignored its expansion. After all, many of the stores were in the South, where restrictive laws -- and a tradition of labor exploitation as extreme sport, dating back, of course, to slavery -- have historically kept unions weak. (Sam Walton's original five-and-dime store, in Bentonville, Ark., sits on a town square overlooking a monument to fallen Confederates.)
Nationally, much of the retail industry, then as now, was not organized. But when Wal-Mart, in the late 1980s, began opening its Supercenters -- supersized supermarkets, open 24 hours, with a full line of groceries -- the unions took notice because these new entities competed with unionized supermarkets, threatening their own members' decent and hard-won standard of living. With its low-wage model, Wal-Mart began, through competitive pressure, to exert downward pressure on the entire grocery industry.
The union that represents grocery workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, did try to organize Wal-Mart workers. But because of a combination of factors -- the union's own ineptness, the weakness of the larger labor movement, the uselessness of the government bodies that are supposed to enforce labor laws, the effectiveness of Wal-Mart's union-busting, the company's willingness to deploy illegal tactics when legal ones fail, and the sheer difficulty of facing down an opponent as large and determined as Wal-Mart -- the effort did not work, and not a single Wal-Mart worker in the United States belongs to a union. This year, the UFCW, having decided to give up for now on organizing the workers, decided instead to try to pressure Wal-Mart from the outside by taking its case to the public. In April, the union launched a new public relations campaign called Wake Up Wal-Mart.
"Wal-Mart has to respond to the American people," says Wake Up Wal-Mart's campaign director, Paul Blank, "because the American people are the customers." Wake Up Wal-Mart's intent is to hurt the company's sales by persuading customers to stop shopping there. Recognizing that so many low-income Americans desperately need Wal-Mart's low prices, Wake Up Wal-Mart's message is not strident or purist: The group is simply urging people to reduce their Wal-Mart shopping as much as they can. Focus group and survey research suggests this is, for many Americans, a reasonable request, and one that they will be inclined to take seriously when they learn more about the company's practices.
Blank, along with two other Wake Up Wal-Mart activists, emerged from the youthful enthusiasm of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, which used the Internet creatively and made activists of people who'd never before believed in the political process. (Another member of the Wake Up Wal-Mart team comes from the Draft Wesley Clark campaign, the Internet-based group that raised large sums of money for Clark before he'd even agreed to run in the 2004 presidential campaign.)
Wake Up Wal-Mart uses similar approaches. People can sign up on the campaign's Web site to "adopt" a local Wal-Mart and join local activities focusing on that store. They are then, MoveOn.org style, called upon by e-mail to participate in person, by attending pickets, throwing informational house parties, pressuring legislators or whatever the local groups deem strategic.
