Praise Uncle Sam and pass the 18p an hour

Observer, London ^ | Sunday, June 20, 1999 | Gregory Palast's

[Calpernia]

At Wal-Mart's 1992 general meeting, founder Sam Walton asked shareholders to sing God Bless America. The 15,000 Wal-Martians responded to Sam's call - even though Walton had been dead for two months.

Walton's request to the shareholder-cum-revival meeting in rural Arkansas - channelled through a spotlit executive crouching on bended knee to speak to the departed Deity of Retail - was scarcely surprising. Wal-Mart is America's most patriotic, flag-waving company.

But look under the flags. Stores are decked out like a war rally. Stars and Stripes hang from the ceiling. Cardboard eagles shriek 'Buy America!' But one independent group sampled 105,000 store items and found only 17 per cent of them made in the USA. Indeed some items in trolleys marked Made in America came from elsewhere. So just where does all this stuff come from? Ask avid Wal-Mart shopper Wu Hongda.

'Harry' Wu is famous in the States. He escaped from China after 19 years in a prison camp for holding 'counter-revolutionary' views, then conned his way back into the prisons to document the misery of forced labour. In 1995, Wu was jailed once more, but not before he had reported the appalling tale of slave labour.

Naturally, Wal-Mart has contracts with suppliers that say none of its merchandise should be made by slaves, prisoners or little children. But among its suppliers is Shantou Garment Trading Company, based in Guandong Province. The Trading Company uses factories in Shantou town: nothing wrong with that. But some of the Trading Company's manufacturing is also carried out in nearby Jia Yang prison.

Do any of Wal-Mart's goods come from the prison? The company says it would refuse to handle anything made in a prison, and no one suggests that it knowingly connives in supporting prison labour. Wal-Mart repeats the mantra that its contracts forbid it.

But there is a clear problem here. An associate of Wu helping to investigate the Trading Company was told that Chinese authorities explicitly prohibit the monitoring of production inside the prison. Hence it is virtually impossible for any buyer to establish for certain whether goods from the Trading Company have been made by prisoners or 'free' labour.

According to Wal-Mart, it has to rely on the word of suppliers when they say that goods have been made only by 'free' workers.

And outside China? Who makes the dirt-cheap clothes that fill Wal-Mart's shelves? Are the factories that supply the company staffed by properly rewarded adults? This has long been a sensitive topic for Wal-Mart. In 1994, former Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Ortega, author of the fearsome expose, In Sam We Trust, was taken round Guatemalan factories which supplied Wal-Mart. They were filled with smiling adult workers.

But Ortega had arrived secretly two weeks earlier, and managed to speak to the child seamstresses hidden from the official tour. (When the scandal was exposed, Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with the plant.) Furthermore, in 1996, Wendy Diaz of Honduras testified before Congress about the sweatshop where, as a 13-year-old, she earned 18p an hour making Wal-Mart label clothes.

Wal-Mart has been decidedly touchy when questioned about the use of child labour. Do children make its goods? The answer depends on how you define children. When reporters confronted chief executive David Glass in 1992 with photographs of 14-year-old children locked in Bangladeshi factories that supply the company, he replied: 'Your definition of children may be different from mine.'

But this was in the bad old days, before Wal-Mart published its Code of Conduct, which was meant to end abuses. Since then, the supply chain has been cleaned up.

Or maybe not. The National Labour Committee of New York has given The Observer an advance copy of a yet-unpublished report on manufacturing in Bangladesh. It lists Wal-Mart contractor Beximco as paying teenage seamstresses an hourly rate of 12p and their helpers 5p, both for an 80-hour week - half Bangladesh's minimum wage and way beyond the country's maximum 60-hour working week.

Wal-Mart told me this could not happen if contractors stuck to their word.

The Observer last week sought the views of Wal-Mart's former lawyer, Hillary Clinton, the 'little lady' Sam appointed to his board of directors. She did not return our calls to Washington.

Despite the bothersome gripes of a few skinny children from Guatemala - and, as the company is fond of pointing out, this all happened years ago - Wal-Mart maintains a folksy image based on Walton's aw-shucks Joe Bloke manner. Joyous clerks chant pledges of customer service that end with shouts of: 'So help me, Sam!'

The multi-billionaire took time to go into his shops and warehouses and chat with employees over doughnuts. In 1982, on his way to becoming America's richest man, he dropped into an Arkansas distribution centre and told the loaders, as one regular guy to another, that if they voted to join a union in a representation ballot, he would fire them all and shut down the centre.

The words, corroborated by eight witnesses, were darn effective. The workers voted down the union, keeping Sam's record perfect. Out of 2,450 stores in America today, not one is unionised.

Who needs a union anyway? Arkansas headquarters would not tell The Observer the company's wage rate for clerks. So our volunteers called Wal-Mart stores nationwide to apply for cashier jobs. Openings averaged $6.10 an hour, equivalent to £3.59. When we inquired at a store near an Indian reservation, we were told the starting rate was only £3.03.

Wal-Mart offers a pension plan and there is profit-sharing. But remember, Sam Walton invented the disposable workforce. About a third of Wal-Mart's workers are temporary; working hours are expanded, shifted, contracted at whim. The workforce turns over like the shoe inventory. And the shorter time someone is with the company, of course, the more difficult it is to build up a full pension or qualify for profit shares.

With 780,000 workers, Wal-Mart has the nation's largest payroll. Many are among the country's worst-paid employees. But it could have been worse: Walton asked for the company to be exempted from US minimum wage legislation. Courts refused.

Wal-Mart doesn't completely ignore workers who plead for an extra bowl of porridge. According to Ortega, when Kathleen Baker, a Wal-Mart employee in Minneapolis, handed her store manager a petition from 80 workers hoping for a rise, she was fired on the spot for using the company typewriter to write the petition. The charge ruined her ability to get another job - until Wal-Mart, under government pressure, agreed to clear her name.

In 1994, Linda Regalado was told she would lose her job if she continued to talk to fellow 'associates' about their right to join a union. She persevered and Wal-Mart made good its threat. Only when the government intervened did Wal-Mart agree to pay compensation.

And shortly afterwards Linda Regalado found herself at loggerheads with the company, her husband Gilbert, working at the same store, was seriously injured at work. Wal-Mart initially refused to pay for surgery, but later agreed after being sued by the family.

Having conquered America, will Wal-Mart's megaliths now chew up England's green belts and bleed high streets dry? A Wal-Marted Britain is not an inevitability. US towns 'are wising up,' says Al Norman, head of Sprawl-Busters, which has helped 88 communities slam the door on the Beast in the Box. Near my home, 60 miles from New York City, Wal-Mart has built a Sam's Club. It is one of the company's smaller outlets. Yet still, it could accommodate three super-Tescos and a football field. Shoppers are offered 70,000 different lines begging to be bought. Sam's Club panders to my nastiest human desire for Cheap and Plenty.

But my store-gasm has a cost. I step out of the Big Box and into the Pine Barrens, the last scrap of woodland left on Long Island's suburban moonscape, which Wal-Mart cut down for its parking lots. So Help Me Sam.

[Calpernia]

This is one of my links I kept for notes. I notice this article isn't available online anymore. I pulled this from the Web Archives to post here for safe keeping.

[denydenydeny]

I'm not the biggest Wal-Mart fan, but foreign hatred of them such as this--based primarily on its "Americanism"--makes me want to shop there on principle.

[Calpernia]

I didn't archive if for the foreign view of walmart. I clipped it for the Clinton connection.

[JoJo Gunn]

It's from Palast. Not good enough to print for toilet paper.

[Calpernia]

What does the article being from the Palast have to do with Hillary being a lawyer for WalMart?

[JoJo Gunn]

Do you know who Palast is?

[Calpernia]

The author of the article. What does that have to do with Clinton's law firm being the lawyer's for Walmart since 1985?

I posted in post 1 that was only archiving here at FR since the article is now offline.

[JoJo Gunn]

Hey, you do what you want, but be aware that a couple of threads have even been deleted because of his sterling reputation.

[Calpernia]

Then ping the admin.

[JoJo Gunn]

What's your problem? How about you go to his site and see for yourself what he is instead of acting like a petulant crybaby?

[Calpernia]

And how he acts bothers you because?

[JoJo Gunn]

And his kind doesn't bother you because?

[Calpernia]

I don't follow his work. I just want the walmart hillary reference posted here.

Thank you for your concern.

[nw_arizona_granny]

Thank you for finding and posting this.

It will take all we can get come 2008.

proves even the evil left, can goof and write something worth reading.

Since Walmart is the #1 store in this area, I won't comment on the Made in USA, wish I could do so.

[Calpernia]

Wow, I just picked up on something else.

See this:

>>> But among its suppliers is Shantou Garment Trading Company, based in Guandong Province.

What on earth is Guandong Province?

This area made an entire section of my newspaper back in 2001 covering about HIV tainted blood. Villagers there sold their blood to make money, then most of the village was whiped out from HIV.

Then, while we were tracking the SARs threads, we just about pinned SARs to Guandong from that inspector that caught it there.

Now, this WalMart article is making reference to prison labor camps in Guandong.

A pretty horrid picture is being painted of this area.

[JoJo Gunn]

Then perhaps you should follow his work.

Palast is one of the cheerleaders for the wacko Left, as evidenced in his many scrivenings over the "theft" of the Election by President Bush, not once, but twice. Yes, he claims that Kerry won.

That obsession alone means he hasn't one scintilla of credibility about anything, hence my comment that his "writing" is nothing better than toilet paper, which I threw out there in passing and went on my merry way, but you seem to have taken offense. Before you take such umbrage in the future I suggest you haunt a few of the various hippie sewers, see how Palast is held in such regard, and maybe you'll at least have a little understanding of why some of us totally dismiss him.

Hang in there....

[Calpernia]

Dang fly on my monitor.

[investigateworld]

I went two months without Wally Bashing as they allowed the Salvation Army to fund raise in front of their stores.
HOWEVER, when they had their boy in congress try to change the hours of service for truck drivers, they got me riled up like the Irish I am.
I used to admire Sam Walton as anyone who can make millionaires out of truck drivers is my kind of capitalist!
But doing research on that greedy old blankety-blank, sure turned me off on him and his mating with Satan. (Don't tell me Satan don't exist, I was married to his sister for five years)
Anyhow, if one reads Sam's book, plus knows a little back ground, it's easy to see why unions will make a comeback.
Does anyone recall that Sam found out his employees died at a faster rate than the insurance companies actuaries allow for?
Well now, Sam not being one to miss out on picking up a quick if sleazy buck, took out insurance on his people and made himself the beneficiary!
And before the Branch Creek Knob's WM asst manager of ladies notions and mustache wax's flames me, may I point it out that it's all IN HIS OWN BOOK!
On the plus side he cop's out to the fact that the FRENCH are major stockholders.
But someone started a rumor that Target (which I don't shop at) was owned by le Frenchies.
(Whew...nuff said...back to my corner)

[nw_arizona_granny]

One has to ask how easy it is for SARS and HIV and other germs to travel in shoes, clothes and toys?

What are we buying with our bargains?

[Calpernia]

I remember flutters has an older bump list when we were following this more closely. We saw articles that said the germ can live on money. So I would imagine it can live on other materials too.