Video on Wal-Mart’s Union-Busting, Discrimination Practices and Sweatshop Sourcing

The ENTIRE HISTORY of these topics are thoroughly and completely researched and documented in the exceptional book,"In Sam We Trust “, by Bob Ortega. This is,IMHO,the finest work yet on the history of the company,to date. Ortega,a former WallStreet Journal reporter,does painstaking yeoman’s work to untangle the true hisory of Sam’s dream. I cannot recommend it highly enough for a balnced,in depth history of the corporations beginnings,its policies and positions,and the personalities involved The chapter on Hillary is intrigiung. The book’s research reflects a union busting theme intrinsic in the warp and woof of this company.For those wanting more than a mere sound bite,or cursory glance,you won’t be disappointed and you will most certainly be far better informed.

Joseph A. Palermo
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Republican “Class Warfare”
Posted January 23, 2008 | 02:23 PM (EST)

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In his excellent new book, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity, Robert Kuttner writes:

“Between 2000 and 2006, the productivity of American workers increased by 19 percent. But the total increase in the wages paid to all 124 million non-supervisory workers was less than $200 million in six years—a raise of $1.60 per worker—not $1.60 per hours but a grand total of one dollar and sixty cents in higher wages per worker over nearly six years! Labor market researcher Andrew Sum of the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies compares the $200 million for workers to the $38 billion paid in bonuses alone by the top five Wall Street firms during the same period.” (Kuttner, p. 21)

For many years now scholars and journalists including Robert Kuttner, Kevin Phillips, William Greider, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noami Klein, and others have provided a mountain of data showing that Republican Party rule has produced greater inequality in America, and that Republican class war policies have enriched the few at the expense of the many. With the current economic meltdown millions of Americans might be starting to wake up to the new reality brought on by years of unbridled greed masquerading as economic policy.

Deep inside the engine of our capitalist economy is a powerful incentive for the owners of society’s productive forces to do everything in their power to discipline labor and to push workers’ wages down as low as possible. This imperative manifests itself in the form of crushing labor unions, outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries, exploiting immigrant workers, slashing social programs that benefit low-income people, and silencing the collective strength of working-class people generally. Beginning with Reaganomics, through Rubinomics, and on to Bush’s Kleptonomics, the Republican Party, (and its enablers inside the Clintonite Democratic Leadership Council), have set the economic agenda. They have been gleefully dancing on the heads of working people in this country for decades.

This class warfare directed against the average working American with the aim of holding down wages contradicts the necessity for capitalism to sell goods and services to these same cash-strapped workers. In other words, when capital succeeds in keeping wages low (especially in times of increased labor productivity) it constricts consumption and eventually produces crisis.

Kutter writes:

“The prices of things that enable Americans to be middle class have been rising far faster than average prices. Official inflation statistics understate the real cost of living. Young Americans are increasingly reliant on the unequal wealth of their families of origin. The time squeeze on families has increased the stress of raising children in an era with two working parents and no new social supports. And, quite apart from incomes stagnating, new forms of economic insecurity have increased, such as dwindling health care and pension coverage. . . . [T]he costs of college education, housing, and medical care have greatly outpaced wages and average prices. It just happens that the prices that have risen most steeply are those of the big items that signal entry into the middle class.” (Kuttner, pp. 22-23)
Add to these rising costs for the average working American the shredding of the social safety net, the Department of Labor turned into a union-busting institution, and President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and his vetoing of social legislation such as the S-CHIPS children’s health benefit, and we see the Republican class war at its ugliest.

We must also consider the costs of maintaining America’s global empire. For example, the state of California’s budget deficit, we are told, now stands at about $14 billion. If we diverted one month’s spending on the Iraq occupation we could nearly wipe out California’s debt. If we dedicated two months spending on Iraq to our most populous state we could provide billions of dollars in investment capital to fuel the development of the new green technologies needed to save the planet from global climate change and create jobs and investment opportunities. Screwing California’s public education system is both a penny foolish and a pound foolish. We need the California State University and University of California systems to create the next generation of technological innovation, just as this vital public education system provided the talent that produced the modern computer and Internet age.

With luck, the current economic crisis will force the nation to take a new direction away from perpetual war and the lowering of living standards to a world where we can begin to innovate again and address creatively and energetically our most pressing environmental and social problems.

The above excerpt is from The Huffington Post website. I referred to this article earlier,in another thread,but felt it was germane to the issues discussed above.

ddrb

GREAT POST!

Here’s the Village Voice article I referred to in earlier posts:Wal-Mart’s First Lady
Hillary’s Past Belies Her Support of Labor -Ward Harvaky, May 2000


Twice in three days last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton basked in the adulation of cheering union members. Her record of supporting collective bargaining, however, is considerably worse than wobbly.
Pity the thousands of unionists at last Tuesday’s state Democratic convention who chanted her name, and the hundreds of retired Teamsters at Thursday’s luncheon in midtown who had interrupted their Founder’s Day meal to hear the corporate litigator turned union-loving Democrat deliver a campaign speech.

They would have dropped their forks if they had heard that Hillary served for six years on the board of the dreaded Wal-Mart, a union-busting behemoth. If they had learned the details of her friendship with Wal-Mart, they might have lost their lunches.

She didn’t mention Wal-Mart. Instead, she praised the Teamsters and other unionized workers as a “key movement in creating the middle class,” and she pledged to “prevent anyone from turning the clock back,” reminding them that “the Republicans are trying to do away with collective bargaining.”

As she was leaving the dais, she ignored a reporter’s question about Wal-Mart, and she ignored it again when she strode by reporters in the hotel lobby.

But there are questions. In 1986, when Hillary was first lady of Arkansas, she was put on the board of Wal-Mart. Officials at the time said she wasn’t filling a vacancy. In May 1992, as Hubby’s presidential campaign heated up, she resigned from the board of Wal-Mart. Company officials said at the time that they weren’t going to fill her vacancy.

So what the hell was she doing

n the Wal-Mart board? According to press accounts at the time, she was a show horse at the company’s annual meetings when founder Sam Walton bused in cheering throngs to celebrate his non-union empire, which is headquartered in Arkansas, one of the country’s poorest states. According to published reports, she was placed in charge of the company’s “green” program to protect the environment.

But nobody got greener than Sam Walton and his family. For several years in the ‘80s, he was judged the richest man in America by Forbes magazine; his fortune zoomed into the billions until he split it up among relatives. It’s no surprise that Hillary is a strong supporter of free trade with China. Wal-Mart, despite its “Buy American” advertising campaign, is the single largest U.S. importer, and half of its imports come from China.

Was Hillary the voice of conscience on the board for American and foreign workers? Contemporary accounts make no mention of that. They do describe her as a “corporate litigator” in those days, and they mention, speaking of environmental matters, that she also served on the board of Lafarge, a company that, according to a press account, once burned hazardous fuels to run its cement plants.

Wal-Mart, though, was the crown jewel of Arkansas, the state’s First Company fit for a first lady. During her tenure on the board, she presumably helped preside over the most remarkable growth of any company until Bill Gates came along. The number of Wal-Mart employees grew during the ‘80s from 21,600 to 279,000, while sales soared from $1.2 billion to $25.8 billion.

And the Clintons depended on Wal-Mart’s largesse not only for Hillary’s regular payments as a board member but for travel expenses on Wal-Mart planes and for heavy campaign contributions to Bill’s campaigns there and nationally. According to reports in the early ‘90s, before Bill and Hillary moved to D.C., neither was raking in the big bucks, but prominent in their income were her holdings of between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock.

A press report on the Clintons’ finances during the early stages of Bill’s 1992 run for the presidency showed that most of their income came from her $109,719 annual salary from the Rose Law Firm and tens of thousands of dollars in fees she received from serving on corporate boards. (She was on two others besides Wal-Mart’s.) Her honoraria and director fees grew almost as fast as Wal-Mart’s profits during the ‘80s—rising from $111 in 1980 to $6500 in 1986 to $64,700 in 1991, according to the same source.

During the same period, small towns all over America began complaining that Wal-Mart was squeezing out ma-and-pa stores and leaving little burgs throughout the Midwest and South with downtowns that featured little more than empty storefronts.

But selected small companies were doing quite well, thanks to the Clintons’ friendship with Wal-Mart. The Boston Globe reported in January 1992 that Bill Clinton had introduced a brush company’s executives to Wal-Mart executives, hoping that the two could do bidness. Executives of the brush company had been rebuffed in previous attempts to sell their products to Wal-Mart. Lucky for the company, it happened to be located in New Hampshire, where Clinton was trying to win a presidential primary. At the time, Hillary Clinton was still on Wal-Mart’s board, and the retail giant was still resisting the unionization of any of its workers.

Last week, Hillary was wearing a different hat. She stood in solidarity with the elderly Teamsters as Local 237 president Carl Haynes greeted her warmly, endorsed her, and then left early on what other union officials described as “AFL-CIO business.”

But the AFL-CIO was thinking of other business only a few months earlier when the union’s leaders, including its chief, John Sweeney, marched specifically against Wal-Mart’s oppression of its meat-market workers. According to a Web site run by activists at the AFL-CIO affiliate United Food and Commercial Workers, Wal-Mart “has profited by pushing its workers to the bottom of the wage scale.” The union points out that hourly wages “average $2 to $3 per hour less than at unionized supermarkets.” More grave for workers everywhere in the United States are these figures spouted by union activists: Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the country, “yet fewer than 40 percent of its workers are covered by the company’s health plan

The union notes that Wal-Mart’s “hometown” judge in Arkansas issued a nationwide temporary restraining order against the UFCW, barring anyone associated with the union from entering Wal-Mart facilities to educate workers about their legal rights in the workplace. The union, however, successfully appealed the order—noting that the judge holds more than $500,000 in Wal-Mart stock. The case remains in litigation.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart’s first lady, who also benefited from Wal-Mart stock, solicits support from union workers.

Which makes her words to the elderly Teamsters last week especially poignant: “You can count on me to stand up for the right to collectively bargain!”

Right on, sister!

I would like to stipulate that as the above article was written in 2000,the stats on % of WalMart associates with health coverage may be at variance with current percentages of those with health coverage .

...when capital succeeds in keeping wages low (especially in times of increased labor productivity) it constricts consumption and eventually produces crisis.

Am I missing the “beauty” here? Not only does the ‘system’ not work, but in order to work it requires unsustainable consumption.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish caught will we realize we cannot eat money. ~ Cree Indian Proverb

Ken V in Texas: “Am I missing the “beauty” here?” Yeah,Ken, now that you mention it ,Mary has been MIA for a few days,now.

“In his excellent new book, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity, Robert Kuttner writes:"…

Outstanding material ddrb, thank you for bringing it to this forum with extended dialogue.

SDV: You’re very welcome!