[Marxism] Wal-Mart

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

LRB | Vol. 28 No. 12 dated 22 June 2006 | John Lanchester

The Price of Pickles
John Lanchester

The Wal-Mart Effect: How an Out-of-Town Superstore Became a Superpower by 
Charles Fishman · Allen Lane, 294 pp, £12.99

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price directed by Robert Greenwald

(clip)

Wal-Mart is so big and so powerful that it is in effect defining its own 
reality ? creating its own products, and a market for them, by sheer act of 
will. Fishman cites the example of Chilean salmon. This is on sale in 
Wal-Mart for $4.84 a pound. Atlantic salmon is ? there?s a subtle hint in 
the name ? not native to the Pacific, and 12 years ago there were no 
Atlantic salmon at all anywhere in Chile. Today, 65 per cent of the farmed 
salmon eaten in America is Chilean, and salmon farming has taken over the 
economy of southern Chile, ?ushering in an industrial revolution that has 
turned thousands of Chileans from subsistence farmers and fishermen into 
hourly paid salmon processing-plant workers?. The salmon live in huge 
underwater pens, and leave a ?toxic sludge? of excrement and uneaten food 
on the ocean bed. The impact of that cheap fish ? as Fishman points out, 
?you couldn?t mail a pound of salmon back to Chile for $4.84? ? on the 
environment and social structure of Chile is enormous. Inspired by this 
example I took a look around my local Asda and found fresh Brazilian 
sirloin at £2.96 for a 250g steak. Let?s parse that price. Beef cattle are 
usually between one and two years old. So that cow was raised and fed for 
(say) 18 months, slaughtered, butchered, packaged, refrigerated, shipped 
six thousand miles, distributed and shelved. It paid the wages of everybody 
involved in those processes, and made its profit for Wal-Mart, and still 
cost £2.44 less than it would cost to post the steak back to Brazil. The 
feeling this gives is a little like the one that washes over you when you 
see flights advertised for 99p: something just isn?t right.

Robert Greenwald?s documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price makes a 
strong argument about what exactly is not right. It boils down to the 
question of just how Wal-Mart achieves its control of costs ? a word which, 
in a business context, to a large extent means ?wages?. The best documented 
controversy in this area concerns the abuses Wal-Mart has committed in the 
US, where the bulk of its ?associates? ? i.e. employees; Sam Walton thought 
up the name after a visit to John Lewis ? earn between $8 and $9 an hour. 
As the current head of Wal-Mart likes to point out, this is twice the 
minimum wage; but it is still a sum so low that a large number of Wal-Mart 
workers qualify for free medical aid and equivalent relief programmes in a 
large number of American states. In other words, you can be working for 
Wal-Mart and still live in poverty. (I suspect that this section of the 
documentary plays differently in Europe, since over here using state 
services is no badge of shame. Not quite, not just yet.) Other documented 
abuses include making ?associates? work overtime without pay, forcing them 
to work after they have clocked off, and locking them in stores overnight, 
allegedly to prevent stealing. All these abuses are, obviously, linked to 
the question of keeping down prices/costs/ wages. Lawsuits on these issues 
have taken place or are pending in 31 states.

Wal-Mart is, it almost goes without saying, fanatically anti-union. As one 
union organiser says in the film, it is ?one of the most anti, if not the 
most aggressively anti-union company in the entire history of the United 
States? ? which is really saying something. The company goes to all the 
usual lengths to try and keep unions out of its stores: one favourite 
tactic is, the instant union activity begins in a store, immediately 
announcing a freeze on all pay rises, saying, ?we can?t give anyone in this 
store a pay rise because we can?t be seen to be giving in to bribery.? Just 
as unadmirable, but slightly harder to understand, is the alleged 
institutional bias against women that has caused the company to be the 
subject of the huge class-action lawsuit mentioned above. It is 
characteristic of Wal-Mart that, having been made the subject of the 
lawsuit, the corporation is tackling it in the most aggressive way 
possible, by arguing that the class-action suit violates its legal rights. 
Specifically, Wal-Mart claims that the suit violates its right to argue 
every single case on its specific merits; it says it should have the right 
to contest every lawsuit separately on a store-by-store basis. This would, 
obviously, overturn the principle on which class-action lawsuits are built. 
This won?t succeed in the Ninth Circuit of the US federal court system, but 
Wal-Mart are very clearly heading for the Supreme Court, with its shiny new 
ultra-conservative bias. A ruling in favour of Wal-Mart would effectively 
make all corporations immune from class-action lawsuits. Watch this space.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n12/lanc01_.html


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