The antichrist of retail?

A recent article on the Slate website spoke out against Wal-Mart. It took a press release by H. Lee Scott Jr and analysed it. The press release claimed that Wal-Mart wasn't a bad company. Its average employee wage was $10USD an hour and compared to other local retailers, it had more full time employees and offered more insurance coverage to its employees. Timothy Noah, the writer of the article, claimed that average wage would be silly thing to look at the average because high paid employees (whose income was well above the sale clerks income) was included in the average. He estimated, though various sources of reference, that the medium wage of an employ was $8.50 an hour. He also found that "full time" in the U.S. was usually considered 40 hours a week, except at Wal-mart, where it was 34 hours a week. Noah calculated that the average income for a sales clerk would be about $1000 under the poverty line in the USA.

The UFCW also ran a story on Wal-Mart, claiming that the store used overseas, sweatshop-made, clothing while simultaneously campaigning to "buy American". The UFCW found that Wal-Mart imported 10% of ALL China's exports. It also found that sweatshops for Wal-Mart often refused its workers access to healthcare, forced workers to work overtime, and locked bathrooms so workers could not use them during working hours (and this is just the short list). In 2002 Wal-Mart was forced to pay the huge fines for 1,436 child labour infractions. In the china sweatshops, workers are women between the ages of 17-25. They are housed in a dormitory type setting with 15+ to a room. They are monitored 24 hours a day, work for a mere 12-28 cents an hour, and fired when they reach the age of 25 because they are "too old".

Wal-Mart is cheap and easy, just like a whore. But they aren't a whore, they are a pimp. They sell the goods of others to the benefit of those on the very top. The chief executive officer of wal-mart, H. Lee Scott Jr., makes around $29 million a year, including stock option grants. His workers make barely enough to survive. Why do we put up with it? He isn't the only one that makes million off the little guy, Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, makes obscene amounts while those making plush toys for him starve.

So what can we do? Do we boycott the companies? We can, but usually it hurts the workers more than those at the top. Do we scream and yell and pretend it is helping? We can. Write letters, make songs, legislate ethics? All of these things have been tried to various forms or another. In the end, it is always the little people that gets screwed. So drop the soap and bend over, the big guy wants your action!