Part of the challenge now was to establish that mindset in the thousands of new workers being hired — to "Wal-Martize" them, as it came to be called. To make workers feel that despite their low wages, they had a stake in Wal-Mart, and they would prosper as the company did. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.86-7)
Workers would be gathered at the front of the store. "Gimme a W!" he'd shout. "W!" the workers would shout back, and on through the Wal-Mart name. At the hyphen, Walton would shout "Gimme a squiggly!" and squat and twist his hips at the same time; the workers would squiggle right back. The cheer always ended with Walton shouting “Who’s number one?” and the workers shouting back “The customer!” (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.91)
And fast may not be strong enough a word. Once the man who invented the concept, Sol Price, got it working right, his warehouses sold goods at such (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.140-1)
When Sam Walton flew out to San Diego to sniff around in late 1982, he took Rob Walton with him. ... operation from tip to floor, the deeply impressed Waltons called on Sol Price (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.144-5)
As he would struggle over the next few years to change his merchandise, to offer better service, and to find other ways to compete, Falgoust also would begin (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.170)
.... It was in this climate that Alice developed an aggressive trading program in stock options" with another E.F. Hutton account executive, Donald LoCoco. It was a high risk strategy that produced fat commissions for her LoCoco, and EF Hutton; and it was a strategy many other commission starved brokerage houses were diving into, too. But when turns in the market led to heavy losses, and complaints from clients began to mount, the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to investigate the brokers pushing these trading programs.
E.F. Hutton was the third brokerage house that the SEC trained its sights on for making what it called “unsuitable” trades. In early 1979, the commission accused Alice, LoCoco, and ten other E.F. Hutton employees in eight cities of violating anti-fraud provisions of securities laws in connection with their options trades. According to the charges, trades that she and LoCoco made had netted the pair about $129,000 in commissions, while costing customers $197,000 in losses. The SEC staff said the two, along with others at the brokerage, made false and misleading statements, didn’t fully disclose how risky the strategies were , and illegally used trading strategies unsuited to the “financial situations, investment sophistication and investment objectives” of some of their clients.
The firm and most of those accused, Alice Walton included, agreed to settle the charges without admitting or denying them. She would later deny the charges and say she only settled to avoid a drawn-out legal fight. Ten years later, when she applied to register an investment firm of her own with the SEC, she claimed on the form that all the investors who complained had been solicited by LoCoco and that “if these persons were misinformed as to the guidelines and objectives of the program it was the fault of Mr. LoCoco,” not Alice Walton. The SEC staff, though, seemed to have felt that she was no innocent bystander. As part of the settlement, she was suspended for six months from holding any job with a broker, dealer, investment company, investment adviser or affiliate; LoCoco was suspended for two months. No other EF Hutton employee in the settlement drew a suspension longer than three months.
Walton left the firm. She got divorced again, and moved back to Arkansas. Then came her accident in Acapulco.
Alice, like both her parents and her brother Bob, had a reputation as a fast driver. The Walton’s leaden feet had long been a popular topic of banter in Bentonville. Helen’s pastor, the Reverend Gordon Garlington, joked that Helen’s silver Lincoln continental …..
a woman trying to cross the road, killing her instantly. Fifty-year-old Oleta Hardin, mother of two fully grown sons, had been waiting for a ride to her job at a nearby canning factory when she decided to step down off her porch …..
Neither she nor Alice Walton saw each other until too late. Hardin was carried up onto the hood of the car. Her head smashing through the windshield before her body was thrown off as the Porsche skidded to a stop. ....
Oleta Hardin's husband, Harold, who worked the night shift at a nearby tool plant, arrived home from work barely an hour later to find a policeman waiting on his front porch with the terrible news. He was still in shock when Alice showed up a little later that day and tried as best she could, stumblingly, to apologize to him. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.199-204)
First, the background: Studies estimated that, in 1985, 43 percent of all apparel sold was imported. Hundreds of U.S. manufacturers had been moving production overseas, especially to Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America. In the case of the latter two regions, U.S. companies were getting active encouragement and financial help to go abroad from the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.204)
The New York Times lauded him as a man swimming against the tide. Walton made the Buy American theme a centerpiece of the company's raucous annual (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.205-6)
Meanwhile, Helen and Alice began lobbying Sam on behalf of their own candidate: Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was a rarity in Arkansas: a powerful, articulate woman who resisted conforming to the Southern belle stereotype expected of prominent women there. That may have been one reason the two Walton women felt a kinship with her. Sam Walton knew her too, of course, and not just because she was Bill Clinton's wife and a shareholder. The Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, where she was a partner, had represented Wal-Mart many times. And she had personally enlisted Sam Walton’s help back in 1983, when she took charge of getting an ambitious education reform plan through the Arkansas legislature, a plan that would later be called Bill Clinton’s biggest achievement as governor.
…. Hilary Clinton convinced them to back education reform, and got Walton and other Moguls, such as chicken processing king Don Tyson, to contribute to a political fund to pay for ads to push the initiative.
Arkansas’s schools ranked among the worst in the country. …. Mandatory kindergarten, smaller classes, testing of teachers, higher sales taxes….. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.212)
Even as the case was being argued in court, the commission's new chairman, Clarence Thomas Jr., told the Washington Post "I've been trying to get out of this since I've been here."6 In the end, the commission's lukewarm handling of the case (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.214-5)
In the television studio at Wal-Mart headquarters from which Sam Walton so often had delivered his homespun soliloquies over the satellite system, David Glass now sat down for an unprecedented interview with an NBC television correspondent. It was early December 1992.
Walton generally had avoided reporters. In fact, not long before his death he’d turned down an interview request from the same news show, Dateline NBC, that Glass had now agreed to talk to. But in the eight months since Walton’s death, many things had begun to change.
Cool and composed, his left leg casually crossed over his right, Glass fielded a few softball questions from correspondent Brian Ross about Sam Walton and Wal-Mart’s buy American program. Behind him, watching intently, Don Shinkle hovered off camera as both NBC’s and Wal-Mart’s cameras rolled. But then the questions turned much, much tougher. Ross told Glass he’d visited 11 Wal-Mart stores and found, in one department after another, goods made in Bangladesh, Korea, and China under the signs saying MADE IN THE USA. Glass sat still. “It shouldn’t have been signed that way on the rack,” he said. “That’s-that would be a mistake at the store level.”
Ross looked at him quizzically. “But rack after rack, in a number of stores in Florida and Georgia, we found that.” He said.
“On apparel racks?”
“Ye.” Ross said, …. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.223) “The Children who work in this plant are locked in until all hours of the night, until they finish that day’s production.” His camera man zoomed in tight on Wal-Mart’s chief executive.
“Yeah,” said Glass, sitting back and making a tent with his crossed fingers under his chin, "there are tragic things that happen all over the world,"
Ross looked at him incredulously. "That's all you have to say about it?" Shinkle couldn’t wait any longer. “Excuse me, let’s-“ he started to say, as Glass staring at Ross, said “I-I don’t know what else I would say about it.”
At that Shinkle ordered a halt to the interview, and Wal-Mart’s crew cut the lights and cranked up music to prevent NBC from doing any further taping, Glass walked off and took Shinkle and some other Wal-Mart people back into the studio’s control froom. An angry voice-whose it wasn’t clear-floated back to the studio. “Are you happy now?” it demanded. Ross was very happy. Astonished at his luck, he packed up his crew and left.
This was going to be very, very bad, the Wal-Mart men knew. Charges of child labor smuggled Chinese goods, misleading MADE IN THE USA signs. And that interview! They had to do something. Glass said he wanted someone sent to check out the Saraka factory immediately. And, after some tense debate, Glass decided he would try to recoup by doing a second interview with Ross. Rather than phone Ross directly, though, he called and complained about being ambushed to Jack Welsh, the chairman of General Electric Co., which owned NBC. Welch called NBC president Robert Wright. Wright talked to Ross, who readily agreed to go back and interview Glass again.
Two weeks after the first interview, Ross and his crew flew back to Bentonville, Ross’s producer, Rhonda Schwartz, had phoned Bangladesh, and they knew a Wal-Mart man had visited the Saraka factory. By now, Ross expected, Wal-Mart would certainly have cleaned up the problem. Probably they would say that it was just a local mistake, that theyd been appalled to find children there, but they’d corrected it as quickly as they could. No doubt they would say it wouldn’t happen again. It would make Ross’s story a bit less dramatic, but that was fair enough he supposed.
This time, Glass would be prepared to handle him. At least, that was the theory. What actually happened was that Ross polished him off like a piece of buttered toast.
Before the interview, Glass took Ross and Schwartz off to his modest office for a tête-à-tête. He told them offhandedly about his call to Welch; but Glass tried to be friendly, seemingly anxious to get this interview off to a better start. Once they set up in the studio, Glass began by telling Ross that Wal-Mart had inspected the Saraka factory and others Ross had cited- but he added firmly, they hadn’t found any evidence of children working there. …….
…….
“But they are,” Ross insisted. “We saw them.”
Still doggedly trying to put his denial across, Glass said, “Well, we have not been able to substantiate that.”
But Ross kept pushing. “How can you believe that, given what we showed you?”
“Why should I not believe that?” Glass retorted.
”The pictures of the young woman don’t contradict the assurances you received from an employer or boss in Bangladesh?” Ross asked.
Glass, looking as though the interview wasn’t going quite as he’d expected, stammered. “The-the picture-the-the-the pictures you showed me mean nothing to me. I’m-I’m not sure where they were or who they were, you know. Could have been anything, I’m not sure.”
“I'm telling you,” Ross said directly, “they're not of anything, they're of the Saraka factory, of children making Wal-Mart clothing.”
“Well,” said Glass, “I'm - I'm comfortable with what we have done.”
And that, more or less, was that. The interview rambled on on a bit longer. Among other observations, Glass saidAsian workers just looked young because they were so small. Afterward, Glass seemed satisfied that he’d aquited himself well. As he and Ross walked back to Glass’s office, the chief executive confided in the reporter that his peopae had let him donw a bit the first time, that he hadn’t been prepared.
But it wasn’t long before Gl;ass began to realize that perhaps neither he nor Wal-Mart was going to come off quite so well as he initially believed. When Ross got back to NBC, Wright sat down with him to watch the tape. Wright was stunned at how poorly Glass handled the interview. He asked Ross why Glass seemed so unprepared. Ross shrugged.
At Wal-Mart, as the advance preparations for damage control began, executives muttered about the unions being behind this-which, as it happened, was at least partly true. But then, that was something that Glass, Shinkle, and the rest really should have anticipated. After all, these questions that Ross raised had come up before.
Nearly a year before Sam Walton’s death, in May of 1991, on Mother’s Day, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union had held a press conference and handed out leaflets in front of Wal-Mart stores in ten cities, calling on Walton to have Wal-Mart stop buying goods in Bangladesh because of the use of child labor there. Pat Scarelli, a union vice president, had specifically fingered two shirt brands sold at Wal-Mart as being made by children at a factory in the capital city, Dacca. The media had almost entirely ignored the event, but the Wal-Mart men should have known that the UFCW wouldn’t let the matter drop and that Wal-Mart ran the risk, sooner or later, of being called to account for how its goods were made. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.225)
(Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” alternative description of Ross/Glass interview at “Life Without Wal-Mart”
Yes, You Can Blame Wal-Mart for Outsourcing American Jobs at Dailykos
Yes, You Can Blame Wal-Mart for Outsourcing American Jobs at Walmart Watch
Seay and others at Wal-Mart staunchly maintained that none of these leases were sweetheart deals and that every one of them had been reviewed by Wal-Mart’s real estate committee (which of course included Sam and Bud Walton), but Curtis Barlow, a Wal-Mart vice president in the real estate section with fourteen years at the company, had a different view. In 1991, he was assigned to look over a proposed Sam’s Club site in Dallas that Stan Kroenke wanted to lease to Wal-Mart. Kroenke wanted $10 a square foot, or about $1.3 million a year, for a 130,000-square-foort building. Barton told the real estate committee that, given Dallas rents, Wal-Mart shouldn’t pay any more than $6 a square foot.
“We can do better,” Barlow said. “We should push for our numbers instead of his numbers.” But the committee quickly agreed to Kroenke’s price; and after the meeting, Barlow said Seay pulled him aside and scolded him saying, “You’re not being a team player.” Then, Barlow said, Seay warned him that “if I ever got in a position where it was me against the family, that I would be the loser ….[and] that I could either accept it and go on and do things the way they wanted things done, or I should look at going someplace else.” (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.235-6)
Wal-Mart served the shareholders free soda, pretzels, and cookies, all made in America, as red-white-and-blue signs proudly announced. The usual parade of celebrities-singer Conway Twitty, the latest Miss USA, and porky gymnast and tout Mary Lou Retton, among others-were on hand to liven up the proceedings. There were the usual company cheers, flag waving and songs. Much of the meeting was a memorial for Sam Walton who had who’d died two months earlier. It began with a video tribute to him on three huge screens at another point, a Wal-Mart employee even pretended to talk with Walton in heaven, declaring that Mr. Sam wanted everyone to sing “God Bless America.” They did.
When the time came, Harbrant read his resolution aloud and then turned the microphone over to Wu, who was given three minutes to make his case. In his halting accented but impassioned voice, Wu told the share-holders briefly about his nineteen years as a political prisoner working in forced labor camps and stressed that he was asking Wal-Mart to make every attempt to ensure it wasn’t importing products made with slave labor. He specifically asked the board to investigate whether the company’s New Order jeans used prison-made denim.
“The need for an investigation is not an admission of wrong doing,” he said. “It is a recognition of the reality of the pervasiveness of the gulag. It would show a willingness and determination not to be used by the Communists. It would tell the world that Wal-Mart is a responsible corporation.”
Rob Walton cut Wu off, telling him his three minutes were up and to close his comments. Then David Glass gave a three-minute rebuttal, saying Wal-Mart already had strong policies in place. “I view this as nothing more than a disruption of our meeting and I recommend that you simply mark your ballot against it,” he said. Later announcing that 94 percent of the shares had voted against the resolution, Rob Walton told the cheering crowd with satisfaction that they could “pitch it” away. Leaving the meeting, a somber Wu told Harbrant and Fielder that he hadn’t seen a meeting like that since the last Communist rally he’d been forced to attend in China.
Fiedler meanwhile had been digging up whatever he could find on child labor, especially in Bangladesh. Earlier, he had run across a news photo showing the 1990 fire in the Saraka factory. On a hunch, he’d called the AFL-CIO’s office in Dacca and had them buy photos of the fire and morgue shots from a Bangladeshi newspaper. Now, not long after the Wal-Mart annual meeting, …. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.240)
To fight back in public, executives decided to draft others to defend Wal-Mart, in what would be made to look like a spontaneous outburst of support. Wal-mart public relations people designed newspaper ads for the company’s vendors to sponsor, defending the Buy American program. Suppliers were given sample ads with phrases such as “Thanks, Wal-Mart” and “We Support Wal-Mart BUY AMERICA Program” in huge print. Wal-Mart buyers were to ask vendors to use their own words, to make the ads seem their own. Wal-Mart “recommended” that vendors, depending on their size, either buy full page ads in national newspapers such as USA Today (for $65,810) and Wall Street Journal (for $110,629) or buy ads in local newspapers. Wal-Mart helpfully included a list of newspapers, phone numbers, and names of whom to contact, and what the rates for a full-page ad would be ($2,790 at the Biloxi Sun-Herald, for example). Vendors were supposed to say the ads were their idea and were warned not to run them before Wednesday morning, the day after the broadcast. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.242)
day at the bustling local market, making and selling corn tortillas with her mother. ......
Not that Guatemala was unique. Studies by United Nations and U.S. government agencies described similar conditions in other Central American, Caribbean, and Asian countries. Such conditions, on their face, would seem to violate U.S. U.S. retailers' codes of conduct. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.249)
Workers couldn’t count on being protected by Guatemala’s labor laws, which, thanks to corruption and indifference, were practically meaningless. Government labor officials estimated that half of the 80,000 workers in the apparel industry were paid less than minimum wage. Factory owners, workers, workers and government officials agreed that the commonest way to settle a complaint was by bribing the inspector. “There is a lot of trafficking of influence,” said labor inspector Juan Castillo Rodriguez matter-of-factly, sitting at his battered desk in a grimy office in Guatemala City. At factories exporting to the United States, “workers often aren’t paid for overtime,” he said.
“It is common for these companies to close the doors and force workers to stay all night working,” he said, shrugging. “There are many minors working.”
Legally, factories weren’t allowed to make youths between fourteen and seventeen work more than seven hours a day. But that law was ignored as faithfully as all others. Ana Mendoza de Rivera, chief of the Labor Ministry’s child-worker protection office, said, “We don’t have the people to investigate” what she estimated to be 300,000 child workers under fourteen across all industries. Her office, with a staff of five, had no telephone.
“Many children want to work” because their parents’ wages are too low to support the family, Mendoza said.
……
“The ethics of the world market are very clear,” said Carlos Arias Macelli, one factory owner. Retailers and manufacturers, he said, “will move wherever it’s cheapest or most convenient to their interests.”
The other potential worker protection, unions, were a scary proposition in Guatemala. During the country’s decades-long civil war, trade unions were targeted by the military-dominated, conservative government. In the first half of the 1990’s, more than 40 unionists were murdered of “disappeared,” including several working for makers of United States bound apparel, according to human rights organization. Kidnapping, death threats, rapes, and beatings were all common. Human rights observers generally blamed right-wing death squads, allied to business and military interests, for most of the violence. In any event, by 1997, Guatemala’s national police hadn’t charged anyone in conection with the murder of a single trade unionist in the previous ten years.
……
When workers began organizing in the fall of 1994 at Disenos y Maquilas S.A. an apparel making clothes for Kmart and Penny an assistant plant manager and a gun-toting guard drove seven union leaders into the countryside, according to the workers, and ordered them to sign resignation papers on the spot. “They said we would disappear or be killed if we didn’t sign, “said Jose Amilear del Cid Arias, one of the seven. They signed.
How did retailers respond when told of the incident by a human rights group? They asked their supplier, CHR Industries of New York to look into it. Bothe Penny and Kmart declared themselves satisfied after GHB’s vice president, Robert Rahn, told the retailers he’d gotten assurances from the factory that there was nothing to the claims and that no one had filed any complaints with the police or the attorney general’s office. As it happened that simply wasn’t true: Detailed complaints had been filed. Rahn also neglected to mention one other little fact: GHB owned the factory and he was the factory’s president.
For a retailer to let a contractor investigate itself might see problematic, to say the least. But even after GHR’s ownership of the factory was brought to their attention, both Penny and Kmart continued having clothes made there.
While it would be hard to spend much time in Guatemala, or visit many factories there, without becoming aware of how workers were treated, Wal-Mart and most United States retailers usually took action only when they were forced to-say by a group such as U.S. Guatemala Labor Education Project. This Chicago based, union-funded group tried to encourage organizing and improve work conditions in Guatemala City. The project tried to pressure factory owners there by taking abuses to United States retailers, using the threat of public exposure to get the retailers to push their contractors to clean the factories up.
….. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.251-3)
There was a weird disconnect here. David Glass was considered by his friends and family to be a fine, upstanding, morally correct, and honest man. Don Soderquist was a devout Christian once named lay churchman of the year by a national Baptist organization. And yet these two men ran a company that profited from the exploitation of children, and in all likelihood, from the exploitation of Chinese prisoners, too. Time and again it was put before them, by Dateline, by Harry Wu, by the wall Street Journal, by others. And yet their response was to do the very least they could, to hold up, time and again their feeble code, as if its mere existence-forget monitoring, forget enforcement-was enough: as if uttering once more that “our suppliers know we have strict codes” would solve any problem. And nothing would change. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.258-9)
Norman had immediately plunged into opposition research and poured whatever he found into more ads. When he discovered that the campaign finance (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.290-)
Before the town council’s July vote, Wal-Mart had funded a telephone poll in which Greenfield residents were asked such question as “Do you think that the town council should follow the will of the people in voting along the lines of the [April] referendum, or should they vote against the will of the people?” Anyone saying they favored the zoning change had been urged to phone the town council members.
Wal-Mart ran an even more aggressive version of the poll about the same time in Westford, a northeastern Massachusetts town where it also faced well-organized opposition to a proposed store. These pollsters asked people to reveal their income, their education level, and their shopping preferences, before popping the question: “Are you prepared to support your local town officials in an expensive and losing legal battle if [the proposes store] is denied a permit?”
But such heavy handed tactics irked many Westford residents and seem to have inadvertently boosted opposition to the store. …… (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.291)
Everybody building big stores and malls knew there were already too many out there: but everyone seemed convinced that they could be the one to snatch someone else’s business away, rather than being the victim. It got to the point that few commercial developers could get any money fo build shopping space, not that this slowed the retail frenzy. And in a deposition for a lawsuit, tom Seay described why, “We have more shopping space in the US than is needed. We’re in an overbuilt situation. So most people cannot get financing to build a center. And so if we want to continue our program of expanding stores, relocating stores, building new stores, [continueing] our growth and serving the customer and taking care of that customer, then in today’s financial environment we have to fund it ourselves>” And that’s just what Wal-Mart and many other big retailers did. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.294)
National Grassroots specialized in fighting grassroots efforts through what has come to be known as “AstroTurf” operations: creating the appearance of grassroots-support for a project, irrespective of whether any exists or not, and then cultivating local community leaders to come on board. That had been one strategy in Greenfield, where early ads favoring the Wal-Mart store had been signed as paid for by citizens for Economic Growth, even though the funding actually came from Wal-Mart. Eventually, local spokesmen had been recruited by a public relations agency to front the efforts.
Whitney explained the approach to public relation industry conference in Chicago. “One of the things we don’t like to do is hire a local PR firm,” she said. “They are not part of the community.” (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.296-7)
The owner, Reubin \Veiner, said he'd seen a letter Robinson had written to the local paper saying a Wal-Mart store would bring jobs and push local prices down.
…..
“It won’t do us any good to have them go and tell the Ithaca Journal or Times that we apparently have something to hide,” said Robinson exasperated. “if they aren’t in this room in five minutes, I’ll bet I can talk to everyone we have here from Ithaca for Wal-Mart and get them to come with me and leave.”
Reithmeyer agreed to let them film.
The more he dealt with the Wal-Mart people the more disheartened Robinson became. It bothered him that they referred to the planning board members, people he knew, as sons of bitches It bothered him, too, that Wal-Mart made an issue of even the most picayune accommodations that planning board members suggested-such as planting more trees in the parking lot. “I very rapidly developed a distaste for the way they do business,” he said.
I ended up on several occasions in an adversarial situation with representatives of Wal-Mart or east Coast Developers because they’d say, “We’re going to do this,” and I’d say, “Wait a minute, who’s we?” and they’d say, “Your organization,” and I’d say, “You can’t tell us what to do, all you’ve done is cause us problems. …. If you say soothing that makes sense to us, we’ll work with you. If it doesn’t, we won’t, and if that isn’t good enough, you can disassociate yourselves from us publically and go hire your own people.”
Members of the Sto Wal-Mart group mercilessly spotlighted short-comings in Wal-Mart’s filings and studies. Though not guided by al Norman, they’d picked up one of his packets and had taken to heart his admonition to do their research. When a consultant hired by the city to study Wal-Mart’s impact came back with a glowing report, Stop Wal-Mart delivered a withering critique describing in exquisite detail how the consultant had used misleading, incomplete, and inaccurate data to reach skewed conclusions. The group also pointed out that the consultant not only worked for Wal-Mart in other towns, but had written newspaper editorials praising the company.
At a public hearing, when opponents complained about the store hurting the view from the state park, a Wal-Mart spokesperson replied, “It’s not like it’s the Grand Canyon” which might be true but was hardly likely to win the company friends.
It was a bizarre debate (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.312)
From that point on, Falgoust became one of Wal-Mart’s harshest and most active critics. He fired off columns around the country, warning against letting Wal-Mart …. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.312-3)
It was just a small rectangle of cardboard, a few inches across, with a photo of a pretty, brightly smiling woman on it. The young Honduran girl who’d smuggled it out of the factory had no idea who the woman was or what the writing below the photo said, but the tall norteamericano had asked her to bring anything labels, hangtags like this one- that would tell him what brands of clothing she and the other assembly-line workers were making.
The face on the picture didn’t mean anything to the tall American, either. Charlie Kernaghan had come to Honduras to track down factories making clothes for the Gap, a mid-scale clothing chain he’d been investigating. A grizzled professional type with a nose that looked like someone had once punched it very hard indeed. Kernaghan was head of the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America-a rather grand name for the tiny three-person outfit working out of a shoe-box office in lower Manhattan and scraping by on donations from sympathetic unions and churches.
When some of the women at this factory, Global Fashion, had heard that he was asking people at other factories about conditions and how workers were treated, they had approached him to complain about their 14-hour days, the forced overtime without pay, the locked bathrooms, the way they were screamed at and hit. Kernghan had asked how old the workers were and had been intrigued to find some were as young as twelve years old. But like most apparel workers in Honduras the women at Global Fashions had no idea who they made clothes for. …..
This Kathie Lee was the seemingly inescapable Kathie Lee Gifford, cohost of one of the country’s most broadly syndicated TV talk shows, Live with Regis (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.318-)
Gifford’s combination of fizzy glamor and down-home, clean cut appeal had seemed to make her the perfect celebrity for Wal-Mart, with it’s flag waving, mom-and-apple-pie image.For Wal-Mart, of course, there was the added bonus of getting effectively getting free advertising every day her show was on the air. And her clothing line had roared off to a phenomenal start-with an estimated $300 million in sales its first year. Gifford’s cut was 3 percent, $9 million, of which she gave roughly 10 percent to children’s charities. .....
She described this as an Orwellian experience. “I sensed then and later on throughout the Christian movement of the 1970s” she said, “an unmistakable worship of money and power.” She said it made her sick to watch the revival teams counting up the money after each meeting, to see the manipulation of the poor and the sick, to note the contrast between Robert’s own wealthy lifestyle and his haranguing of the poor to give money. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.320-1)
It was another to be able to say that the Gap paid workers 16 cents a shirt and to compare that cost with the shirt’s $20 retail price-to be able to say that the labor made up less than one percent of the shirt’s cost. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.326-7)
This wasn’t the progress he’s had in mind. It was time to go public. On April 29, Keraghan testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill about child labor and work conditions in overseas factories. At first, Kernaghan was surprised to see that there (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.330-)
When he was accused of exaggerating or misrepresenting the situations, Kernaghan would unapologetically cite example after example of times when the companies had lied, fudged, or twisted the truth.
But in league with Reich’s campaign and various union efforts he got results, inch by inch: JC Penney said any supplier caught violating its code would lose all future contracts unless they put independent monitoring in place. Disney which had to be hyper-vigilant about its Snow-White image as did Gifford about hers quietly investigated his accusations against it in Haiti, even as it denied everything and then said it would appoint monitors to look over its factories. So did Kmart. So did Eddie Bauer. Kernaghan’s main goal remained getting independent monitors to keep an eye on factories, as he’d done with the Gap. And bit by bit, he kept pushing the industry in that direction.
Kernaghan repeatedly argued that retailers were pitting US workers against poor teenagers in Third World countries in a race to the bottom, forcing them to compete over who would accept the lowest pay and most miserable conditions. He blamed the presence of US sweatshops on retailers demands “that their US contractors meet the same production prices they get off shore, which is impossible to do legally.
“The corporations tell us that they go off shore to provide the U.S. consumer with lower prices. What they conveniently leave out is that the traditional 100 percent markup when a product goes from a U.S. manufacturer to the retailer becomes a 500 percent to 600 percent markup when the production goes off-shore,” he said.
Kernaghan was exaggerating a bit the typical markup on imports was closer to 400 percent. But his basic point was true: At the same time that retailers, Wal-mart included, were complaining that they had to go wherever they could get the cheapest production to compete, they were tripling and quadrupling their markup by importing good. And there was no question about the race to the bottom: By 1997, many of the 28-cent-anhour jobs Kernaghan complained about in Honduras would have moved to Nicaragua, where workers made as little as 14 cents an hour, or to Indonesia or Burma, where wages were as low as 11 cents an hour.
This wouldn’t be a struggle with a clear-cut ending. In April 1997, the white house anti-sweatshop task force announced a watered down agreement for companies to put “No Sweat” tags on their goods. The code of conduct called for recognizing workers right to organize, for a ban on child labor (with a minimum of age of fourteen) and for independent monitoring. Left unsettled was who would do that monitoring accounting; accounting firms and private security firms reporting to the companies, as the retailers and apparel makers wanted, or human rights groups, as some labor and watchdog organizations proposed.
Meanwhile, Gifford’s rehabilitation, steered by Rubenstein, continued, Over the fall of 1996 and the following winter, he negotiated flattering cover stories about her in various woman’s magazines. Good Housekeeping described her on its
(Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.342)
In 1996, 150 Wal-Mart pharmacists filed two suits seeking class action status and trying to force the company to pay all its pharmacists millions of dollars in overtime back pay. Wal-mart considered the Pharmacists to be on salary but at the same time it sent them home during slow periods and docked their pay. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.351)
Still, Regalado was insistent, so he agreed to help. Wal-Mart disputes what happened next. However, according to a petition filed by the National Labor Relations Board seeking a federal court injunction against Wal-Mart, and according to (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.358)
While the New York lawsuit was pending, Wal-Mart changed its dating rule to forbid only supervisors from dating their direct employees. …. Rhoads, who subsequently married Beuman, of course, wasn’t fired. …..
Early one morning in 1992, while restocking shelves on the night shift at a Wal-Mart in Savannah, Georgia, thirty-eight-year-old Annette Bryant, a single mother, collapsed. Neither her co-workers nor the paramedics they called could open the store's locked doors until police drove to an assistant manager’s home to get a key. By then it was too late. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.360-)
One day in 1995, Eric Matthys, a software salesman in St. Charles, Illinois, bought four new tires at the local Sam’s Club for his pickup truck. ….. his tool box were gone, along with the truck’s stereo. Mirrors and most of it’s insides. Matthy’s had to pay $220 to get what was left towed back.
Matthy’s, reasonably enough, felt that Wal-Mart should make him whole. One might justifiably suspect that Sam Walton, who advocated tossing in something extra, say a free pair of socks, whenever a customer had to return so much as a defective pair of shoes, wouldn’t have balked for a moment at making restitution. But when Matthy’s called Bentonville officials there told him Wal-Mart wasn’t responsible and refused to give him any compensation, until Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Boyko etched a scathing account of the whole affair in one of his nationally syndicated columns. At that point, Wal-mart officials abruptly decided they could compensate Matthy’s after all. (Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” 1998 p.365-6)
One of the great success stories of our time is Wal-Mart. That homespun company that knows how to make money.
And Eric Matthys, a customer, says he recently got an idea of why they have done so well.
Matthys, 28, of St. Charles, Ill, needed some new tires for his pickup truck, so he went to Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart warehouse outlet that sells all sorts of basic stuff.
“I bought the tires, then drove around to the service area where they put the tires on.
“They said it would be done in 45 minutes to an hour, so I did shopping.”
“He warned me that I could be held liable for anything bad I said against Wal-mart. I told him that I don’t see how I could be held liable for the truth Tire Job At Wal-mart Costs Man His Truck . - Google News
“Truck Stolen, Stripped, But Still Gets Owner Runaround” by Mike Boyko Chicago Tribune
Wal-Mart's Violation of US Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association
Sprawl-Busters
Oppose Wal-Mart (OWM)
PBS Frontline: Secrets - Wal-Mart And China - A Joint Venture | Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
(Bob Ortega “In Sam We Trust” NYT review
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