Wal-Mart's Shocking Impact on the Lives of Hundreds of Millions of People

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/150781/wal-mart%27s_shocking_impact_on_the_lives_of_hundreds_of_millions_of_people/


Wal-Mart casts a global shadow across the lives of hundreds of millions of people, whether or not they ever enter a Supercenter. With $405 billion in sales in the last fiscal year, Wal-Mart is so big, and so obsessively focused on cost-cutting, that its actions shape our landscape, work, income distribution, consumption patterns, transport and communication, politics and culture, and the organization of industries from retail to manufacturing, from California to China.

Yet other paths are possible, and the company would not be so influential had the world not changed to enable its metastasized growth. Had unions been stronger, especially in the South, and more devoted to organizing the growing service sector, Wal-Mart might not have become such an obstacle to labor renewal. If antitrust enforcement had not been narrowed, Wal-Mart could never have grown as big as it did. There would be no such mega-stores if state governments had not repealed Depression-era fair-trade laws. And Wal-Mart’s push of American consumer -- product manufacturing to China depended on a previously established political and technological foundation of pro-corporate globalization.

But it would be a mistake to say that Wal-Mart is merely following the new logic of retail competition, for Wal-Mart reinforces all dimensions of this emerging business climate. As Jennifer Stapleton, assistant director of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ project Making Change at Walmart, puts it, “They set the rules.”

Consider Ana Sanchez, a 45-year-old immigrant to Southern California from Mexico. Wal-Mart does not employ her but is in some sense her boss. Sanchez worked two years at a temp agency that staffed a large California warehouse. She was trying to put her three children through college in Oaxaca, Mexico, on pay that started at $6.75 an hour, then rose to $8, with no benefits. She retrieved cartons, put labels on products, then shrink-wrapped plastic around pallets to ship. Mainly, she shipped children’s clothing made in China to Wal-Mart.

More at the link --

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[yourout]

2. Antitrust enforcement had not been narrowed.......it's been eliminated.

[liberal N proud]

3. Ask the people who used to work for Rubbermaid

Many companies will have to close entire operations based on the business with Wal-Mart.

And then the demands that Wal-Mart puts on its suppliers within the US is unbelievable. Don't know if they demand the same from the cheap Chinese shit they sell or not.