The Baltimore Business Journal reports Wal-Mart Watch launched a statewide campaign to override Gov. Bob Ehrlich’s (R) veto of the Maryland Fair Share Health Care Act.

Wal-Mart Watch, said it would mount “an aggressive public education drive coupled with field outreach to business leaders, activists and elected officials” to convince lawmakers to override the governor’s veto.

Passed by the Maryland General Assembly in April, the bill would tax for-profit companies with more than 10,000 employees that fail to spend 8 percent of their total payroll on health benefits.

Supporters of the bill argue that it would be good for businesses and other Maryland taxpayers because they would not have to subsidize companies that don’t pay their “fair share” for health care. Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens’ Health Care Initiative, said he is “cautiously optimistic” that the governor’s veto will be overridden.

Click here to read the release.

Click here for more information about the campaign. And click here to learn about Wal-Mart shifting employee health-care costs onto taxpayers.

Angry that Americans are rising up against Wal-Mart and winning numerous site fights, the Los Angeles Times reports Bentonville is leading the charge for World Trade Organization bureaucrats to make zoning and planning decisions in our communities instead of local elected officials.

Union leaders, politicians and anti-globalization activists have used the courts and zoning laws to keep big-box stores like Wal-Mart out of their neighborhoods. Now the Bentonville, Ark.-based retail giant and other major chains are hoping to counterattack with a powerful new weapon: the World Trade Organization. This week, those retailers will head to Hong Kong to try to persuade negotiators to fashion a trade pact that would make it more difficult for governments to restrict foreign-owned stores, banks and telecommunications companies.

These retailers say they are not making a back-door attempt to undo various countries’ laws. They say they are simply trying to get rid of protectionist barriers, such as size and geographic restrictions, that have unfairly hindered their growth, particularly in emerging markets such as China and India. “These are issues we oppose in the United States and we want to make sure abroad we don’t see the same types of issues,” said Jonathan Gold, vice president of global supply chain policy at the Retail Industry Leaders Assn., which represents Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Home Depot Inc., Target Corp. and other big-box retailers. “There should be fair hearings to decide whether or not companies operate, not just based on size alone.”

But critics, who include state Sen. Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont) and Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti, call the move a stealth attack on grass-roots democracy. They fear that the proposals to change the WTO’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services would make it easier to attack dozens of U.S. laws designed to restrict the growth of big-box retailers.

Some WTO critics are organizing educational campaigns, pressuring trade officials and taking their protests to Hong Kong for the WTO ministerial meeting, which runs Dec. 13-18. They will be handing out copies of a report due to be released today by Public Citizen, a Washington-based watchdog group that also opposes the changes.

Local merchants in Tunkhannock, Pa., are speaking out against a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter:

Horse-drawn buggies taking visitors on a tour of decorated homes, a holiday presentation in a refurbished, historic theater and Victorian tea in a rustic, 160-year-old hotel.

These scenes which highlighted the borough’s weekend celebration just don’t mesh with a Wal-Mart Supercenter, said Lori Bogedin, acting president of the Tunkhannock Business & Professional Association.

“The thing that makes us so wonderful is the small, hometown feel, the mountains, the fields,” she said. “We feel we will lose some of that quaintness if the supercenter is built. We don’t think the area needs a supercenter. We already have a Wal-Mart.”

The 50-member merchants’ group is rallying against the proposed construction of a supercenter along Route 29 in Eaton Township, just across the river from downtown Tunkhannock.

The association spent almost $500 for a half-page ad in the Wyoming County Press Examiner blasting the proposal and encouraging residents to join the fight by turning out at tomorrow’s board of supervisors meeting…

The ad, purchased by the merchants’ group through a donation by a local business, reads: “Save Our Hometown! Say ‘No’ to Super Wal-Mart.” It suggests a Wal-Mart expansion would threaten local businesses and cause traffic problems.

Supercenters are typically about 200,000 square feet, almost twice as large as discount stores. They offer full groceries and services such as tire and lube centers, and hair and nail salons. Most are open around the clock.

“Right now, local people own businesses that already provide those services,” Bogedin said. “What you get from a local business – the service and the fact that the person behind the counter actually cares how you feel when you leave that business – far outweighs what a superstore can bring to this area.”

Click here to read the full story in today’s Wilkes-Barre Times Leader.

When Wal-Mart targets a community for development, its PR machine cranks out stats about jobs and tax revenue for local politicians. If those numbers fall upon deaf ears, Wal-Mart increases the pressure and brings in lawyers looking for loopholes in the zoning codes. The residents of Helotes, Texas withstood the pressure and beat back Wal-Mart. With more Americans learning about Wal-Mart’s negative impact, a site fight victory isn’t uncommon. But what’s unique about this win is the way Wal-Mart retreated back to Bentonville, as noted in Sprawl-Busters.

Seeing the writing on the WAL, the giant retailer pulled out of Helotes, writing a letter to the “Citizens of Helotes.” But symbolic of how Wal-Mart deals with real people, the retailer did not even write its own letter, but used a public relation/advertising firm to write the letter. The “citizens” letter announcing Wal-Mart’s plan was actually signed by Steven Schauer, an Account Executive from KGBTexas, a PR firm based in San Antonio. In the letter, Schauer insists that “Helotes would have benefited from significant tax revenues and local jobs,” and says that Wal-Mart “met and/or exceeded all of the development and environmental requirements of the city, county and state.”

And then, just to make sure this withdrawal was not seen as a weak move, Schauer made a veiled threat: “Although Wal-Mart is confident that these actions could have been remedied in court, Wal-Mart is unwilling to force the City of Helotes into expensive litigation relative to this site.”

Thank you, Wal-Mart, for sparing Helotes from your wrath! Is this the harbinger of a new Wal-Mart policy: to renounce “expensive litigation” when they lose a battle? We certainly hope that Wal-Mart will continue to use Mr. Schauer’s firm, KGBTexas to write its letters, because we like this new policy of not forcing cities and towns into wasteful litigation. But was Wal-Mart, with an army of public relations experts gathered in a War Room in Bentonville, totally unable to write its own letter to the citizens of Helotes?

This isn’t the first time Wal-Mart has relied on spinmeisters to do its dirty work. Click here to read some of the talking points being fed to the media.

Peter Hart and Janine Jackson examine the question, “Does Wal-Mart’s money buy more than ads?” in the latest issue of Extra! Here are some excerpts from the article:

The media image of a beleaguered corporation at last responding to a “horde of critics” (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 4/6/05) raises at least one question: Just how tough has media scrutiny of Wal-Mart really been? “You’ve heard the firestorm of criticism about the company, about wages, benefits, union-busting, about locking employees in, about making them work overtime without paying them for it,” ABC’s Charlie Gibson said in introducing a Good Morning America interview with CEO Lee Scott (1/13/05). But how much have most people really heard about these issues?

There has without question been some hard-hitting investigative reporting on Wal-Mart’s controversial business practices, including a 2003 Los Angeles Times series (11/23–25/03) that nabbed a PBS’s Frontline, and a probing report on PBS’s Frontline (11/16/04).  More typical, however, are accounts like Time’s “Wal-Mart Nation” (6/27/05). Focusing on Wal-Mart’s Chinese enterprises, the article has an undeniably cheerleading theme: Wal-Mart is staging a “revolution” in China, in part by “spreading a management style that many of its young Chinese employees find liberating.”

Press accounts have frankly celebrated Wal-Mart’s reputed toughness on suppliers in the U.S. as well. A May 8, 2005 New York Times piece presents a company executive demonstrating how she might call a supplier on the carpet: “‘Hello. . . . Where are the bananas? We’re supposed to have 3 percent in this trail mix.’” “Quality control,” reported the Times, “is rigorous.” Such admiration-tinged anecdotes would sit strangely side by side with, for example, the company’s official contention that executives “knew nothing about” the hundreds of illegal immigrants being used to clean stores in 21 states, and that in any event it was contractors, not Wal-Mart, that were responsible for the janitors’ treatment (New York Times 3/19/05). The same presumably went for the child laborers Wal-Mart settled lawsuits about in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Arkansas.

Wal-Mart’s role as a premium advertiser is even more apparent on programming. The company’s ads air regularly on ABC’s World News Tonight, and Wal-Mart sponsors the program’s “Person of the Week” segment, as well as the “Only in America” series on ABC’s Good Morning America. (The company also entered into an exclusive perfume marketing deal with an ABC soap opera.) It’s only natural to wonder whether such close commercial ties affect ABC’s coverage of Wal-Mart. Some ABC reports have noted rather mundane Wal-Mart-related developments, like a Virginia store’s “singles night” mentioned on Good Morning America (7/14/05).

Click here to read the full article.

Each Friday, Wal-Mart sponsors a segment on ABC’s World News Tonight called Person of the Week honoring someone who, “for better or for worse” has an “unusual impact in other people’s lives.” In that spirit, we’re launched our own weekly feature, The Wal-Mart Watch Person of the Week, that profiles an individual or group that exemplifies our goal of making Wal-Mart a better employer, neighbor, and corporate citizen. We always welcome input from our readers, so please send your nominations and suggestions to us at .

Today we’ve chosen Ethan Berman, the founder and CEO of RiskMetrics Group, a 270 employee firm that helps institutions and corporations assess investment risk.

Last month Berman took the highly unusual step of sending his board of directors a memo that recommended that he receive no increase in salary and a reduced annual bonus from 2004. His story was outlined yesterday by Gretchen Morgenson, a business columnist for the New York Times.

“The banker J. P. Morgan once said that he would never lend money to a company where the highest-paid employee was paid more than 20 times the lowest-paid, as it was in his view unstable,” wrote Berman. He continued, “the firm’s stronger than expected performance was driven by a large number of employees in other roles, and therefore I would like to see the bulk of my direct reports, and in fact many of their direct reports, paid greater bonuses than I receive.

What if Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott held himself to Berman’s high standards? It’s unlikely that he’d receive any sort of bonus for 2005. Wal-Mart’s stock is down 9 percent for the year, and is down 29 percent from $65.13 a share when Scott took over on January 14, 2000.

And what would J.P. Morgan think about Wal-Mart’s wage structure? In 2004, Scott was paid $17,543,739—a far cry from Wal-Mart’s average hourly wage of $9.68. The average full-time (34 hours at Wal-Mart) employee would have to work 871 years to match Scott’s 2004 compensation. By comparison, Costco CEO (and former Wal-Mart Watch Person of the Week) Jim Sinegal is paid $350,000 annually.

Berman’s honest approach to executive compensation is refreshing, and his actions should serve as an example for CEOs around the country. We’re proud to make him our Wal-Mart Watch Person of the Week.

Additional resources:

• “The Boss Actually Said This: Pay Me Less” [New York Times, 12/18/05]
• “Institutional Investors Dissatisfied With U.S. Executive Pay System” [Watson Wyatt Worldwide, 12/13/05]
• “Wal-Mart’s Pay Gap” [Institute for Policy Studies, 4/15/05]

Maryland legislators speak out in support of the Fair Share Health Care bill:

This battle royal is not about politics, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. said.

‘‘It’s about divided government that the people created at the polling place. And the intransigence on the part of people new to Maryland, new conservatives coming from Capitol Hill who say, ‘Don’t compromise. Don’t engage in dialogue. ... Veto the bill, and help our corporate donor base,’” said Miller (D-Dist. 27) of Chesapeake Beach…

Miller’s counterpart in the House, Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Dist. 30) of Annapolis, said decisions on which bills to bring up for override votes would wait until lawmakers return to Annapolis next month.

On Monday, Miller spoke at a legislative breakfast in Baltimore and predicted lawmakers will override three vetoes: a requirement for large corporations to provide health care benefits for its employees, a $1 increase in the minimum wage and a bill that allows for voting on the Saturday before Election Day.

Ehrlich vetoed the health care measure, dubbed the Wal-Mart bill because it targets the retail giant, saying it set a bad precedent and threatened the opening of a Wal-Mart distribution center on the Eastern Shore. Opponents fear the bill’s benchmarks — companies with 10,000 employees that spend less than 8 percent of payroll on health benefits — will be changed in future years to envelop more and more companies…

Three Democratic senators who supported the Wal-Mart bill have been named as potential targets: Sens. Roy P. Dyson (D-Dist. 29) of Great Mills, James Brochin (D-Dist. 42) of Towson and Katherine A. Klausmeier (D-Dist. 8) of Baltimore.

Dyson said he would brush off any threats, particularly over the Wal-Mart bill.

‘‘I voted for that bill and I just think it’s grossly unfair I have to pay for the health care for the employees of one of the wealthiest and one of the richest companies in America. It’s un-American I have to do that,” Dyson said. ‘‘If I could vote 10 times, I would do it. It’s just the American thing to do.”

Click here to read the full story in today’s Gazette.

This letter to the editor reprinted in Sprawl-Busters from small businessman Joel Olson captures Wal-Mart’s negative impact on small-town America. This time the locale is Montevideo, Minnesota.

Our city council members passed a motion to support a proposal to re-zone property east of town to allow a Wal-Mart Super center to be built. I would like to know what research they have done to educate themselves on what impact this 155,000 sq ft super center (that is almost 2 ½ times bigger than the current Wal-Mart) will have on this and surrounding communities?

Growth comes from industry, manufacturing, colleges, etc. Not from retail. A super center in this community will not be economic development, it will be economic displacement. Some people think a Wal-Mart super center will be a draw to this community. What happens when all of the communities around us have a Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Super center, Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market or a Sam’s Club? When this happens--and it will-- that draw is gone and they will have most of the retail dollars.

They talked about how community-oriented they are. As a past Montevideo Area Chamber of Commerce board member and past president, Wal-Mart has never been a consistent member. Some quarters they pay their chamber dues and some quarters they do not. In the past they have gone more than a year without being a chamber member.

We pride ourselves on being able to provided a good wage, benefits, 401(K) for our employees to live a good middle class life style. Thirty seven percent of our staff are full time at forty plus hours, not twenty eight hours as described as Wal-Mart’s full time. We do not encourage employees to survive on a lower wages and government-funded health care or welfare. Do we want to lower our standards of our community? Do we want to pay more taxes to support Wal-Mart employees?

Read our report ”Shameless: How Wal-Mart Bullies Its Way Into Communities Across America” to learn more about the giant retailer’s underhanded tactics.

Page 284 of 319 pages « First  <  282 283 284 285 286 >  Last »