WAL-MART WATCH GOES LOCAL BEGINNING IN 5 CITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY

WAL-MART WATCH GOES LOCAL BEGINNING IN 5 CITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY, NEW CAMPAIGN CHALLENGES WAL-MART FOR ITS ROLE IN OUTSOURCING OF AMERICAN JOBS

For Immediate Release
Friday, April 29, 2005

Washington, DC, April 29, 2005 – Wal-Mart Watch, the newly formed nonprofit organization aimed at reforming the business practices of retail giant Wal-Mart, takes its advertising campaign into cities across the country. Click here to read a sample copy of the local ad and factual backup are attached.

The ad campaign is directed at towns across the country that have been affected by outsourcing job losses. The ads ask, “What happened to the Wal-Mart ‘Buy American’ Program?” The ‘Buy American’ program, once the centerpiece of Wal-Mart’s business model and of much of their marketing and public relations, has been abandoned by the company in recent years. Now as much as 70% of Wal-Mart merchandise is imported from China alone. The ad illustrates one aisle in an actual Wal-Mart store, where the majority of the merchandise is made in China.

The terrific pricing pressures imposed by Wal-Mart on its suppliers has forced those companies to relocate factories and jobs overseas, a massive outsourcing of American jobs that has left communities and families devastated.

One of the ads will run in Kannapolis, North Carolina. As a North Carolina news report noted, “The cheaper costs of overseas labor have slowly drained away the jobs that once fed families across the state.” Over 19,600 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Kannapolis since 2001.

Wal-Mart Watch Executive Director Andrew Grossman said, “Wal-Mart may say ‘low prices’ but we’re here to ask, ‘at what cost?’ At the cost of America’s manufacturing base? At the cost of well-paying American jobs and the families, communities, and futures they support? Wal-Mart does more than simply exploit and profit from the outsourcing of American industry to China. With its unprecedented leverage in the retail sector and its relentless pressure on suppliers to slash their prices, Wal-Mart has actively forced the shipping of American jobs to China and elsewhere.”

Wal-Mart Watch, a campaign of Five Stones, a 501(c)(4), was founded in December 2004, along with The Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, a 501(c)(3). Their mission is to reform Wal-Mart’s business practices and help improve Wal-Mart as a neighbor, employer, and corporate citizen. Reforms by Wal-Mart, the world’s largest and perhaps most imitated business, will spawn improvements in corporate practices around the world. Operationally, the organizations have three broad goals: to synthesize and distribute Wal-Mart-related data and resources; to foster enhanced communication and cooperation among the hundreds of organizations currently engaged against Wal-Mart and its practices; and to help provide intellectual and political leadership to this nationwide community of citizens and activists.