Protestors Picket Wal-Marts Worldwide
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 17 (OneWorld) - A coalition of grassroots organizations will lead worldwide demonstrations against Wal-Mart and other so-called "big box" retail stores today.
The organizations, which include the San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange and the Washington, DC-based International Labor Rights Forum, are linking their protests to the start of the holiday shopping season, which traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving. "We want to remind people that shopping in these stores has implications in your community," the International Labor Rights Forum's Trina Tocco told OneWorld. Tocco said that while big box stores like Wal-Mart offer low prices, families who purchase goods there cannot be sure if the goods they buy will be safe. Many of the products are made by workers paid low wages in developing-country sweatshops, she added. "At the same time, you have small businesses closing and a lot of other negative impacts on the communities where the stores are situated," she said. "These are our communities and we want to have a voice in the process." In Salt Lake City, Utah activists have organized a "Shop Outside the Box" parade, which will wind through several neighborhoods of the city. Organizer Ashley Sanders told OneWorld more than 200 local businesses and artists are participating in the parade. "We'll have every different kind of business walking down the street together," she said, including office supply stores, clothing shops, and independent coffeehouses. After the parade, participants will gather in a local coffeehouse where, she said, every employee is paid a living wage and most of the food is grown in a garden in the rear. "It's all about having joy in the local community," she added. Sanders, who recently graduated with a degree in religion and philosophy from Brigham Young University, said she sees the day of action as a continuation of her religious studies. "It is easier to have an ethical business than people think it is," she said. "If we shop locally we can support the ethics we believe in when we shop. We can keep our values and not harm one another."
The company reports the average wage of its workers is $10.76 per hour. According to Business Week, sales associates, who hold the most common job in Wal-Mart, earn an average of $8.23 an hour, amounting to annual wages of $13,861. In 2000, when a small meat-cutting department successfully organized a union at a Wal-Mart store in Texas, Wal-Mart responded a week later by announcing the phase-out of its in-store meat cutting, company-wide. Partially in the face of growing criticism, Wal-Mart has launched an all out program to make its stores more environmentally friendly. In October 2005, the company's CEO Lee Scott decided Wal-Mart would move toward using more renewable energy, producing less waste, and selling products that help sustain resources and the environment. On Thursday, the company released a 64-page report cataloging a dozen such programs -- from selling organic cotton clothes to using low-energy freezer cases. The report shows, among other things, that Wal-Mart sold over 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs in 2006, improved the efficiency of its fleet of vehicles by 15 percent, and gave away $301 million in charitable contributions. "From the day that Sam Walton opened the doors of the first Wal-Mart store in 1962," Scott said in a statement, "our mission has been to save people money so they can live better. Today that mission extends to sustainability. We don't believe that our customers, whether they shop in a Todo Dia, ASDA store, Wal-Mart Supercenter, or Sam's Club, should have to choose between products they can afford and products that are ethically sourced, high quality, and environmentally friendly." "We have found that there is no conflict between our business model of everyday low costs and everyday low prices and being a more sustainable business," Scott added. "To make sustainability sustainable at Wal-Mart, we've made it live inside our business. Many of our environmental sustainability efforts, for example, mean cost savings for us, our suppliers and our customers, so that in both good times and bad times, they will remain part of who we are." Some environmental groups praised Wal-Mart for its efforts.
"Over the last two years, Wal-Mart has built the foundation for a robust environmental program with many innovative and potentially transformational projects," Environmental Defense said. But not all activist groups are so sanguine. A coalition of 23 groups, including Global Exchange and the International Labor Rights Forum, issued their own report critical of Wal-Mart's efforts, arguing that the company's new practices can't make up for a global business model that causes environmental degradation and tramples workers' and communities' rights. Wal-Mart's "green" initiatives, the groups said, "lack real impact on global warming, employee health, and welfare." "Wal-Mart can change to more efficient light bulbs, but that doesn't change its carbon footprint or the enormous social consequences of its globally unsustainable business model. If we look at its practices internationally, Wal-Mart has used its market power to cut costs at the expense of workers and the environment across the developing world," said Ruben Garcia of Global Exchange, who helped write the report. ....................................................................................
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"Lies of Silent Assertion"Author:
Don Robertson
Time: 11/20/2007 02:29
Comment:
When I finished more important things I had to do this week, I read this Walmart article with some small interest. I've been to Walmart once in the last couple of years. There is nothing there I want. I more went for the Pulp Fiction entertainment one can find watching the world go down the tubes fast. The article, interesting though it may be, and inspiring to some neophyte to long term Humanitarians, it is an abysmally adequate characterization of our political/social/cultural consciousness coming both from the author and the author's now trite observations. There are those who disagree or, perhaps better phrased and understood, they dislike Walmart because this quintessentially capitalist success story has shut down Main Street USA. I suspect those who feel this way are mostly those Americans who have two SUVs parked in the driveway. It's likely they resent having to shop with the working class (at Walmart) they so despise. They probably lament angrily the bygone era when they could should at all the quaint consumer outlets that made downtown USA. There are those who dislike Walmart because Walmart pays what are essentially slave wages far below the poverty line, and because Walmart executes contracts with suppliers worldwide who run sweat shops around the world. I suspect these malcontents are true Humanitarian heroes who would give every human being a couple of SUVs and, provide every opportunity for every human being worldwide to consume, pollute and become educated like the typical American. I neither agree with any of these sentiments nor, do I have any of these concerns in mind concerning Walmart. In fact, I have the very same concern about Walmart, that I have about this article. The Walmart corporate culture lives the very same lie of silent assertion that comes across loud and clear when I read this article. That lie is that anyone really needs anything that is sold at Walmart. No human being really needs anything that is sold at Walmart, not any more than they need any of the hundreds of tons of packaging that in right now ready in every Walmart store, ready to be transmitted to consumers of and right along with Walmart products. It will all end up in the landfill, the packaging, and everything those consumers buy. It's all trash. Another lie of silent assertion that comes from the Walmart corporate culture, just as it comes from this article is that there is anything moral about these generally horribly obese people and their far too many children who shop, work for, or supply goods to Walmart. The whole world's culture that is being increasingly groomed toward producing Walmart shoppers all over the globe is simply a paradigm of producer-consumer good-economy but suicidal proportions that will denude our planet, destroy cultural diversity, and greatly decrease the potential for future humanity to survive. Walmart, (like Coca Cola, General Motors, Democracy, Universal Suffrage, flush plumbing, anti-biotics, genetic engineering, stem cell research, electric lights and a college education that teaches everyone exactly how to destroy the world faster and far more spectacularly), is being sold to the world as the "life" science has made better for all of us. There is only one problem with this vision worth mentioning here. Life is the ultimate good and the ultimate truth for all of us. Anyone who tells you they can make life better, is simply making a lie of silent assertion. Life can be made no better. Nothing made of our modern culture is worth debasing the future for humanity one iota. And all of modernity debases life as it will, or may get to exist in the future. Don Robertson, The American Philosopher |
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