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According to Bloomberg, Wal-Mart has won preliminary court approval to pay as much as $85 million to settle 30 wage/hour lawsuits. The lawsuits claimed the company didn’t pay employees for all hours worked, forcing them to miss breaks and forgo overtime pay.

Late last year, Wal-Mart announced that it would settle 63 wage and hour class action lawsuits that have been pending against the company for several years. There were just under 80 such suits pending against Wal-Mart at the time, so it represented a pretty large legal housecleaning. This $85 million settlement covers just under half those cases as part of the larger agreement made back in December, which could cost the company up to $640 million before all is said and done.

Following the initial settlement, we noted that what these cases revealed through evidence and employee testimony was a “corporate culture” and systematic approach geared towards cutting labor costs, by dictating managers hire below the “preferred” staffing levels and rewarding managers for keeping labor costs down. Steven Greenhouse on TPM has pointed out that while store management is ultimately responsible for setting schedules, pressure often comes from the top:

Robert Eckert, a former assistant store manager at several Wal-Marts in California, said: “They tell you that working off the clock is against the law, is not allowed by Wal-Mart, and then they tell you to get the job done. But they didn’t give you the budget to get the job done. It is clearly understood that if you don’t make payroll, it’s a serious issue and you can lose your job over it.”

For more information on wage theft in general, you should check out Kim Bobo’s “Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid - And What We Can Do About It.”

As for the $85 settlement, a Federal Judge in granting temporary approval called the wage theft agreement “fair, reasonable, and adequate.” Merely adequate for the workers, perhaps, but no doubt a “steal” for Wal-Mart.

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“Underpaid, disempowered Wal-Mart employees have a tough time staying chipper these days — and they pass along their misery to the company’s customers.”

So begins the entry for Wal-Mart in Business Management Daily’s list of the five worst companies for customer service. In compiling its list BMD interviewed several sources, including Service Quality Institute president John Tschohl and David VanAmburg, managing director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The worst offenders, in order:

1. Bank of America; 2. Comcast; 3. ebay; 4. Wal-Mart; 5. U.S. Airways

So where exactly does Wal-mart come up short?

“Wal-Mart built its business on customer service, but they’re in the sink now,” Tschohl contends. “The stores are ugly, and they attract the people with the least amount of money who are willing to put up with bad service.” Adds David VanAmburg, managing director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index: “They are at the top of our list when it comes to value, but near the bottom when it comes to service.”

The key, of course, is that you would think this problem would have an easy solution. Treating your employees better through better wages, better/more affordable health benefits, consistent scheduling, ending discriminatory practices and pay theft...well, you get the picture...would all lead to a more content work staff. And what happens when you have happy employees? That’s right, happy customers.

“It’s a matter of treating your employees better than anybody else does and offering world-class customer service,” explains a manager of a Les Schwab Store in Concord, Calif. “That is what keeps your business growing.”

That will be something for Wal-Mart to keep in mind as the economy slowly rebounds. As more people return to their previous shopping habits - and more importantly, their previous shopping locals - Wal-Mart could see its sales figures returning to the flat numbers from pre-recession days. Is it really THAT hard to show your employees a little love??

Failing grades: The 5 worst companies for customer service [Business Management Daily]

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Will Wal-Mart succeed in its Latin American invasion?

The Latin Business Chronicle looks at Wal-Mart’s plan to build stores in nine Central and South American stores this year, and cites Wal-Mart’s “success” in Mexico and Brazil. (Although it isn’t without controversy. In Mexico, Wal-Mart’s sales have risen but the retailer has also faced some notable setbacks: it can’t yet set up the controversial in-store banking services it wants to and its credit card interest rates are exorbitant. )

The Chronicle interviews different economists on the issue, and mainstream consensus is that 1) Wal-Mart will benefit from the recession and 2) success still depends on Wal-Mart’s ability to adapt to the cultural differences of each country. This is no small challenge, and Wal-Mart has failed in the past at this in countries like Germany and South Korea. For example, Chile has more wealth and a more differentiated grocery market than Honduras. Service has never been Wal-Mart’s strength and many Latin American consumers clearly value the personal attention their traditional retailers are good at providing. Additionally, Wal-Mart’s standard distribution networks, fairly efficient in the U.S., may prove unmanageable in a region as vast, mountainous and (in many places) still poorly developed as Latin America.

And most importantly, Wal-Mart’s success will depend on the willingness of Latin American governments and peoples to accept the Wal-Mart business model. Will the people of Latin America accept a foreign company moving in in a time of recession to knock local retailers out of business?

The full article article is republished below:

Last May, Michael Bergdahl, former director of human resources at Wal-Mart, told the First Global Forum on Customer Service in Santiago, Chile, “Our strategy of low prices has become a competitive advantage for us. So long as our competition focuses on how much they can get for their products, we focus on how little we can get for ours.” According to Bergdahl, this strategy generated revenues of about $13 billion in 2007, and in 2008, “we open a new store each day, and each week, 176 million customers buy from our stores.”

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In 1980, Wal-Mart opened a store in the small community of Livingston, Alabama. Residents initially welcomed the new store because with 40% of the town living below the poverty line, job creation and inexpensive goods were seen as a lifeline for the community. However, as the years went by, more and more local stores went out of business as Wal-Mart solidified its power in the area. People began to wonder if Wal-Mart was really changing their town for the better. In 2006, Wal-Mart made the decision to close the Livingston store in order to funnel traffic to a new supercenter in Demopolis, which happens to be 30 miles away. This move would change the town forever…

Below you will find some comments from a Livingston resident (and Wal-Mart Watch blog reader) on what Wal-Mart did to the town.

“Wal-Mart destroyed my small town of Livingston, Alabama, and then left.  My town is part of Sumter County - one of the poorest counties in the nation. Surrounded by other extremely poor counties in the heart of the Deep South, retail options are very limited. Wal-Mart closed its local store in 2006 and left without any media coverage at all.  I wrote emails and letters and made phone calls to all major newspapers and television stations in the area without any serious response or support.  Sumter County is 75% black and about 60% of the people here live below the poverty line.  Surely, those facts alone should be good enough to generate some kind of negative feedback. Wal-Mart came to our town, eliminated the downtown competition, created abandoned buildings throughout the town, and then just left for questionable reasons.  They closed down shop...when do you hear of a Wal-Mart shutting down because they were building a supercenter 30 miles away?  I feel it is a textbook case of Wal-Mart’s practices crippling a small town. It seems to me that what they did to such an impoverished area would generate some kind of humanitarian response.”

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On December 23, 2008, Wal-Mart announced that it would settle 63 wage and hour class action lawsuits that have been pending against the company for several years. That number represents approximately 86% of the 73 wage/hour and overtime class actions currently pending against Wal-Mart.

What these cases have revealed through evidence and employee testimony is a “corporate culture” and systematic approach geared towards cutting labor costs, by dictating managers hire below the “preferred” staffing levels and rewarding managers for keeping labor costs down. It has been suggested that Wal-Mart’s motivation for settling these lawsuits is not simply to avoid costly defeats in the courtroom, but to tie up issues that might be used by supporters to argue for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Thousands of employees have sued Wal-Mart for unpaid overtime and unfair break practices, so-called “wage and hour” suits. Download our fact sheets to learn more about these suits, and the most recent settlement.

Wal-Mart Wage and Hour Settlement (PDF)

Wal-Mart Wage and Hour Litigation Stipulation Regarding Stay of Proceedings (PDF)

Wal-Mart’s Wage and Hour Violations (PDF)

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According to The Christian Science Monitor: “In Britain, carbon footprinting – used initially to broadly measure environmental impact across a company’s entire operations – is morphing into an eco-labeling tool.” This after a British group reported that 80% of a product’s carbon footprint is laid before the consumer actually drives out and buys or uses it.

Unfortunately, carbon-labeling appears to be a tool Wal-Mart believes the American consumer isn’t ready for.

As for carbon-labeling, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of sustainability, Matt Kistler, says that he doubted existing methodologies and the Wal-Mart customer’s ability to relate carbon with consumer merchandise. “I’m not sure the consumer will ever make a purchase based on the carbon footprint,” he says, “especially the mass consumer.”

Possible. But I think Mr. Kistler underestimates the public’s knowledge on the issue. Sure, many consumers may not know what exactly a carbon-footprint is, but the majority have probably at least heard the term and know it relates in some way to the environment. Carbon-labeling may not affect the buying habits of the majority, yet even if a small percentage of Wal-Mart shoppers were to see the labels and be moved to research the issue further, that can’t be a bad thing, right?

Those making efforts to examine their carbon footprints often do so without transparency – essential to generating both customer support and supply-chain innovation.

At Wal-Mart, consumer transparency is largely tied in to its corporate press releases, a growing assortment of eco-labeled products, and in-store awareness campaigns. A more robust effort is the company’s “Love, Earth” jewelry, which enables customers to use the Internet to map where the jewelry’s gold and silver were mined and manufactured, including information on how the mines manage cyanide and waste dumps.

Are you ready to go on a carbon diet? [The Christian Science Monitor]

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Apparently, the highly-publicized annual Wal-Mart analyst’s meeting served a purpose other than announcing that Wal-Mart plans to: scale-down domestic expansion, improve existing stores, and embark on foreign conquest.  They also announced a new venture from Sam’s Club, slated to debut in Houston next year. It is a new club-format store, geared toward Hispanics, creatively titled: Más Club ("More Club” in Spanish. They could name every Sam’s this, no?).

The clubs will feature an expanded selection of Hispanic foods and products produced in Mexico and Latin America.  The Houston Chronicle reports that the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, has estimated that the Hispanic population will account for 1.2 trillion dollars of spending power by 2012 - and Sam’s Club wants a piece of the action. 

The store looks to drape itself Hispanic culture, featuring a cafe that sells ‘fresh’ tortillas (sounds delicious) and branding itself in the red, green and white of Mexican flag. Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Sam’s Club is quoted in Reuters:

“Our objective is to create an additional shopping choice that provides currently unavailable value for families, restaurant owners, convenience stores and more...”

McMillon chose not to discuss Mas Club’s suppliers. Given that it will be carrying mostly Hispanic products, “Mas Club” might actually break a new Wal-Mart record for percentage of products not made in the U.S.  But Latin American suppliers beware. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is notorious for bullying down their suppliers to sell products at a price they can barely afford (Vlasic, Levis). 

While the first store is to serve as a prototype, The Northwest Arkansas Morning News said McMillon is ”pumped” about the new chain, which will also feature gas stations…

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Curbing carbon emissions is a crucial part of environmentalism, but its an issue which Wal-Mart has been slow to address. In 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott announced plans to reduce Wal-Mart’s massive carbon footprint, with the ultimate goal of carbon neutrality from the company. Carbon offset programs – methods of shifting the burden of carbon elimination to a third-party – were an imperative part of that plan.

To better implement these carbon offset programs – and to avoid misleading marketing claims about the process – the Federal Trade Commission began work standardizing offsets and regulating the process. Wal-Mart, however, had other ideas about the process.

Herein lays the scandal: Despite the company’s “green” initiatives, Wal-Mart is actively lobbying against the clarification of offset guidelines. The company’s hypocritical stance on the issue came to light last week in a hearing of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is attempting to modernize the “Green Guides,” guidelines issued for corporations defining acceptable marketing claims regarding environmental products and initiatives. In response to the FTC’s solicitation of retailer comment to guide the process, Wal-Mart’s Director of Energy Regulation, Angela Beehler, expressed Wal-Mart’s firm opposition towards the clarified scope and definition of carbon offsets:

Wal-Mart’s Comments to U.S. Federal Trade Commission (PDF)

Although some may urge otherwise, the Commission should resist the temptation to define what constitutes an eligible offset or REC. Doing so would require the Commission to resolve highly technical environmental debates that are beyond its expertise…

The Commission should recognize that in the absence of a governmental definition or a widespread consensus about the precise contours of what constitutes a carbon offset or a REC, there may be multiple ways to establish a reasonable basis for such claims.

Beehler’s words reveal Wal-Mart refuses to endorse even a proper definition of a “carbon offset,” and it follows that the corporation is uninterested in the transparency necessary to ensure the legitimacy of its environmental claims.

Wal-Mart’s attempt to keep offsets guidelines vague shows the company is more interested in marketing potential than actual environmental change. Unspecific standards would allow the retailer to ‘commit’ to carbon-neutrality, without providing much real documentation. A responsible, sustainable corporation would place the necessity of carbon-offset clarification and oversight in front of the bottom-line.

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Less than 12 hours after the story broke in the WSJ, news coverage of Wal-Mart’s politically coercive means has reached a fever pitch. We feature the media coverage in the wake of Wall Street Journal’s expose, “Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win.”

Wal-Mart denies that it told employees how to vote [Associated Press]

Wal-Mart Watch, a union-backed group that has criticized the company for what it calls skimpy pay and benefits and poor treatment of its workers, said in a statement that the article “demonstrates once again that Wal-Mart intimidates its workers.” The group, which supplied some of the sources to The Wall Street Journal, said the stories cited in the article are “consistent” with numerous reports it has received in the past week.

The development deals a blow to Wal-Mart’s reputation just as the company has started seeing its image improve and criticism diminish as it works to improve benefits and push through its “Save money, live better” campaign.

Wal-Mart warning managers of labor bill [Reuters]

Wal-Mart opposes proposed legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize by signing a card rather than holding a vote.

“We believe EFCA is a bad bill and we have been on record as opposing it for some time,” Wal-Mart spokesman David Tovar said. “We feel educating our associates about the bill is the right thing to do.”

Wal-Mart warning workers off Democrats [Salon.com]

The law in question is the Employee Free Choice Act, which is supported by Democrats and would replace secret balloting when workers choose a union with a “card check” system, something likely to result in increased union membership.

The meetings appear to be legal, though the company may be treading on thin ice by bringing in the department supervisors.

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A fascinating 52-minute documentary about the rise and fall of suburbia and the suburban way of life: car-bound, oil-dependent and ever-consuming. It’s a model that Wal-Mart depends on, but as this documentary explains, it’s a model that probably won’t last another 50 years. [Via]

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Feel like celebrating America this weekend? A trip to Wal-Mart isn’t the way to do it. The retailer has been damaging American jobs and American communities for decades, and this Fourth of July isn’t any different.

Exporting Manufacturing Jobs. Jobs that were once the backbone of the American economy have been exported to countries where labor is cheaper and standards are lower. Wal-Mart has played a critical role in this process, using its size and market share to force manufacturers overseas.

Damaging U.S. Communities Wal-Mart makes a lot of promises when it builds a new store. Town councils are often dazzled by the company’s promises of more jobs and increased revenue, but these promises rarely pan out. The retailer drains municipal resources by forcing its employees on state-sponsored health care, getting subsidies from local governments and frequently undercutting its property and income taxes. Read more about Wal-Mart’s impact on communities >>

Devaluing Retail Sector Jobs. Wal-Mart often woos communities with promises of more jobs, but what communities frequently don’t take in to account is the quality of these jobs. Wal-Mart pays bare minimum wages, and even lowers the overall employment rate of an area by shutting down competing businesses. Just last year, Chicago refused Wal-Mart’s request to build a store on the south side of the city, citing the company’s low wages as the reason. Read more about Wal-Mart’s wages and labor policies >>

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You gotta hand it to Wal-Mart: when that company does something, it does it all the way. While most companies couldn’t break the law two million times if they tried, Wal-Mart has managed to do just that - and that’s in Minnesota alone. A recent case found that Wal-Mart has violated Minnesota state labor law two million times by forcing employees to work without breaks and without full pay.

The judge in the case called Wal-Mart’s labor policies “dehumanizing and reprehensible,” reinforcing what labor activists have long maintained about working conditions in the company’s stores. As details of the case come to light, Wal-Mart’s mechanized stinginess leaves little room for sympathy and instead reveal just how coldly calculating the retailer can be. Reporters, labor activists and bloggers weigh in.

Always Low Motives. Always. [Condé Nast Portfolio]

A million violations here, a million violations there: Pretty soon they being to add up. What they’ve added up to for Wal-Mart is at least $6.5 million in damages—and potentially much, much more…

Even worse for Wal-Mart: This is only one of 70 similar cases pending in courts across the country.

King, for one, sounded unsympathetic. “Wal-Mart’s failure to compensate plaintiffs was willful,” he wrote in a 150-page decision. “Wal-Mart was on notice from numerous sources of the wage and hour violations at issue and failed to correct the problem.”

More after the jump.

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Rapper and multi-talented entertainer Percy Miller (better known as “Master P”) has announced that he and his son Romeo will rerelease their clothing line, P. Miller Designs, exclusively through Wal-Mart.  The move comes years after the line had previously been released through the department stores Mervyn’s and Kohl’s, and serves as the latest example of a previously anti-establishment music act going completely corporate.

Given Master P’s impressive track-record of community involvement, not to mention his work with the NAACP, one would hope that he would be critical enough of Wal-Mart’s disproportionate effect on and discrimination against members of his own community that he would be unwilling to sign repeated exclusive deals with them.  With the launch of his new record label “Take A Stand” well underway, we hope that Master P won’t continue to fall to the fantastical rhymes of the world’s largest retailer.

Reuters has the story: Wal-Mart finds rappers Master P, Romeo a fashion fit

Master P and his son, fellow hip-hop hit-maker Romeo, have agreed to relaunch their P. Miller Designs apparel line exclusively through Wal-Mart, Billboard has learned.

The father-son duo’s brand of men’s apparel will be available at about 350 Wal-Mart stores starting in July and will include graphic T-shirts, fleece hoodies and fashion denims. The P. Miller line was last available at such retailers as Kohl’s and Mervyns “a few years ago,” Master P (aka Percy Miller) said.

The veteran rapper said that Wal-Mart was a logical vendor for P. Miller Designs, which he described as “high fashion at an affordable cost.” Master P said he has shifted most responsibilities for the clothing line to 18-year-old Romeo.

“Wal-Mart stands for everything P. Miller does,” he said. “It’s America and diversity. Our whole thing is price point. I want to put out affordable clothes where the masses can buy them.”

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After roundly defeating insurance group Wellpoint in the sweet 16, Wal-Mart has made it to the semi-semi finals of Consumerist’s Worst Company in America contest, this time going head to head with American Airlines. Personally, charging $15 for checked bags just doesn’t seem as bad as systematically undercutting millions of workers and employees worldwide, but we’ll let democracy decide. Show your support - GO VOTE!

Wal-Mart:
“They undercut the bottom lines of companies so much that the company barely gets a profit - but if the company says “No, I can’t afford to switch all my manufacturing to 5 gallon jars of pickles”, Walmart says they won’t carry any of that brand’s products. Period.”

“Wal-Mart: Squeeze your vendors, not your customers. “

“The truth was that Wal-Mart paid Logitech to use Logitech’s Chinese production centers so that they could make items which looked very similar to the normal product lines, but which had components in them which were solely the responsibility of Wal-Mart (ie, not purchased, inventoried, or in any way guaranteed or the responsibility of Logitech). Wal-Mart just paid a certain amount per unit to put their crap into a shiny Logitech box and have the Logitech logo shown on it.”

“I bought a GE Skillet from them a while back and it was a piece of shit. To find out why, I checked the box and it said something like “made for Wal-Mart” and ever since then, when I do venture into Wal-Mart I always check for that label.”

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Research group Harris Interactive published this week the findings of their most recent “Reputation Quotient,” a ranking of major U.S. companies based on reputation. In this year’s report Wal-Mart had one of the largest drops in reputation value, ranking third worst overall - just behind corporate-misbehavior poster child Haliburton. The study also notes that despite being extremely well-known among consumers, Wal-Mart ranked poorly on a “sincerity” scale.

This news comes after Wal-Mart has spent more than two years trying to improve its reputation, during which time the company has hired numerous P.R. firms to convince consumers it is not only more sustainable, but a more friendly employer, too. So why hasn’t it been more successful? Harris perhaps provides the answer, noting “The most essential item in evaluating a company’s social responsibility is treatment of employees, including labor practices and human rights. Personal health and safety is a close second.”

For all its environmental platitudes, Wal-Mart has done little to address concerns of human rights violations in its supply chain, raise wages for U.S. employees or improve the quality of health care available to store associates. The company’s ongoing reputation for wage-and-hour violations and lack of care for injured employees only damage its reputation further. It’s time the retailer took some responsibility for these actions and realized cutting corners on human rights just isn’t worth it.

Harris Interactive, “The 9th Annual RQ: Reputations of the 60 Most Visible Companies: A Survey of the U.S. General Public” (PDF)

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The Northwest Arkansas Morning News released over the weekend a Kim Morrison piece on some of the largest legal cases currently pending against Wal-Mart, and most of the findings really shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point. There is, of course, the Dukes gender discrimination suit, and the multitude of wage and hour cases pending - the full extent of which you can also see here, on Wal-Mart’s SEC filing. The two largest wage/hour cases to date - Savaglio and Braun/Hummel - have resulted in combined judgments of over $350 million against Wal-Mart, although the cases are currently in the appeals stages, so Wal-Mart has yet to pay a cent.

What you might find really interesting in the story is the way a company the size of Wal-Mart plans ahead for the day it will have to make a possible million billion-dollar payout:

“It’s not like they wouldn’t be able to pay the light bill if they had a billion dollar settlement,” said Patricia Edwards, fund manager with San Francisco-based Wentworth, Hauser and Violic. “It wouldn’t be good, don’t get me wrong. But the low point in cash last year at quarter end was just short of $5 billion.”

Edwards said Wal-Mart reserves cash for potential future lawsuit payouts so there would be a reduced impact on shareholders in the event of such a case. With Wal-Mart’s ability to absorb some of the impact, a billion dollar payout may show up in earnings as a loss of 5 cents per share, Edwards said.

Well that is certainly good to know, that Wal-Mart - instead of making sure its female employees are treated equally, and ALL of its employees are provided adequate breaks and paid for the overtime they work - has socked plenty of money away underneath its $150 bargain mattresses to pay for its legal shortcomings.

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Wal-Mart has, unsurprisingly, been the target of more lawsuits than one can count over the years. The company’s treatment of it workers and “save money at all costs” mentality has resulted in a flood of legal challenges ranging from single plaintiff suits to multi-million dollar class actions. Dukes v. Wal-Mart is of course one large example (the largest class action in American history, actually), as are the myriad wage/hour/overtime class actions the company faces.

Just as important as those large class actions, however, are the countless suits filed by individual plaintiffs – the tiny David trying to win justice over Wal-Mart’s Goliath. We at Wal-Mart Watch will be focusing on one of these stories each week, highlighting those cases that warrant further attention because of the light each sheds in its own way on how Wal-Mart does business.

Anita Loya (And yes, that is her real name…)

Ms. Loya was an employee at the Wal-Mart store in Deming, a small city in the southwest corner of New Mexico about sixty miles west of Las Cruces. In January of 2006, Loya filed a complaint against her store manager, Les Williams, claiming she had been discriminated against and sexually harassed. Amazingly enough she was not fired, and in fact Wal-Mart did indeed investigate her allegations.  Meanwhile, Loya transferred in May to a Wal-Mart store up in Silver City while the investigation was ongoing. The parties entered into mediation in June 2006, but that tactic failed, and soon after Les Williams was officially the ex Store Manager at the Deming Wal-Mart.

That, you would think, would be the end of our tale. The victim was at a new store. The guilty party, following investigation, had been terminated. Done? Finito? End of story?? Unfortunately, not so much.

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The debate continues over whether Wal-Mart’s efforts to shape up are actually genuine, or merely the result of a well-crafted PR campaign. I think it’s fair to say: both. Perhaps the biggest problem this debate reveals is Wal-Mart’s lack of transparency. Despite the retailer’s dominant presence in communities across the country, no one really knows how it runs its business. What we do know, however, is that Wal-Mart will do anything to fight the negative publicity it’s received in recent years. As Wal-Mart Watch’s executive director David Nassar says in the article, “Wal-Mart heard the criticism and is trying to do something to address it. All the changes it’s made so far have passed costs onto someone else, whether it’s a health care plan that’s increasing costs for workers or environmental initiatives that pass costs on to suppliers.”

Creating a Better Rep: Wal-Mart Undergoes An Image Turnaround [Women’s Wear Daily]

Talk about a turnaround.

Wal-Mart not too long ago was making headlines almost weekly as critics lambasted the retailer for its pay practices, pollution and rapaciousness. Now it’s being held up as one of the retail world’s better corporate citizens. Along the way, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executives — famously insular and focused principally on what founder Sam Walton would have done — have become more outspoken, open to outsiders’ views and adaptable.

Thanks to a multimillion-dollar public relations and marketing campaign, aggressive environmental initiatives and price rollbacks billed as the retailer’s very own “economic stimulus package,” the company is out to recast itself as a champion of the environment and a benevolent big business.

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Wal-Mart has, unsurprisingly, been the target of more lawsuits that one can count over the years. The company’s treatment of it workers and “save money at all costs” mentality has resulted in a flood of legal challenges ranging from single plaintiff suits to multi-million dollar class actions. Dukes v. Wal-Mart is of course one large example (the largest class action in American history, actually), as are the myriad wage/hour/overtime class actions the company faces.

Just as important as those large class actions, however, are the countless suits filed by individual plaintiffs – the tiny David trying to win justice over Wal-Mart’s Goliath. We at Wal-Mart Watch will be focusing on one of these stories each week, highlighting those cases that warrant further attention because of the light each sheds in its own way on how Wal-Mart does business.

Tenna Hopkins

Tenna Hopkins was hired by Wal-Mart as an associate way back in 1984 – the year the Russians and others boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles;” the year the Space Shuttle Discovery made its inaugural flight; the year the first Apple Macintosh went on sale. On August 21, 2006, 22 years later, Tenna Hopkins was a store manager at a Wal-Mart Store in Daytona Beach, Florida. On August 22, 2006, Tenna Hopkins was out of a job.

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Yesterday came news that hard rock band AC/DC had signed a distribution deal with Wal-Mart. Bloggers expressed outrage and disappointment over the deal, but AC/DC fans aren’t the first to be disappointed by their band’s decision to partner with Wal-Mart

Genesis signed a deal with Wal-Mart last year for the exclusive US distribution rights to the band’s “When In Rome” tour DVD. Sales of the DVD started just this week.

Genesis’ partnership with the retailer is especially shocking, given the band’s humanitarian reputation and Wal-Mart’s notoriously bad business practices. Phil Collins has spent many years working on issues ranging from animal rights to children’s charities to homelessness. In the same time, Wal-Mart has worked on lowering wages, avoiding local taxes, and increasing its use of sweatshop production.

Collins’ work on these issues is admirable, and he should follow through with it by renouncing this partnership with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has a shameful track record on many of the issues Phil Collins cares about, including raising people out of poverty and building strong communities.

Record deals with Wal-Mart are inevitably profitable, but bands should also be thinking about the practices they endorse by signing a deal with the retailer. Fans have long admired Genesis for its socially-progressive message - how will its deal with Wal-Mart influence those supporters?