Pride at Work to LGBT community: Don't be fooled by Wal-Mart

[kweerwolf]

In an effort to reach out to the large lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender market, Wal-Mart will be hosting a seminar tomorrow entitled “Why Market to Gay America?” As Wal-Mart begins efforts to woo the LGBT community, Pride At Work, AFL-CIO, urges members of our community to not be fooled by Wal-Mart’s new marketing ploy. Regardless of Wal-Mart’s marketing strategy, their low prices come at a huge price, and their support of the LGBT community is tepid, at best.

The seminar, which will be hosted by Wal-Mart’s Office of Diversity, is in fact merely an effort to buy into the estimated $610 billion of purchasing power the LGBT community is believed to hold.

The seminar comes nearly a year after Wal-Mart announced the expansion of its definition of ‘immediate family’ to include domestic partners, although they do NOT offer domestic partners health benefits. While Wal-Mart does include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policy, their corporate history is riddled with cases of employment discrimination, including the largest class action gender discrimination lawsuit in United States history. “Knowing Wal-Mart’s deplorable history of employment discrimination, it’s obvious to me that Wal-Mart’s nondiscrimination policies are not worth the price of the paper they are printed on,” said Josh Cazares, Pride At Work Co-President. Wal-Mart still does not protect workers from discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression.

“Pride At Work stands in solidarity with workers who are being denied the right to unionize, being deprived of fair wages, being deprived of affordable health care, and being discriminated against based on their gender and ethnic identities,” said Nancy Wohlforth, Pride At Work Co-President. “Wal-Mart imposes each of these injustices on its workers. The LGBT community has a long history of being on the forefront of battles for economic and social justice. We firmly believe that the LGBT community will not be enticed by a company whose corporate values are so diametrically opposed to the values which so many LGBT people hold dear: values of fairness, justice, and equality.”

http://prideatwork.org/page.php?id=284

FYI - Pride At Work is an LGBT-supportive affiliate of the AFL-CIO