Wal-Mart has been busy over the past few years. They've been consistently violating workers' compensation and child labor laws (1,400 violations solely in Maine), invading their employees' privacy through various means of surveillance, replacing 50-100 percent of their employees each year, with many stores reaching as high as a 300 percent turnover, and of course, causing more local businesses to shut down than any other multinational according to the Transnational Corporations Observatory. We're not in "friends with benefits" territory anymore - this is an abusive relationship.
The analogy created by Nate Goralnik in his article "Wal-Mart: a friend with benefits" between bad college hook-ups and working at Wal-Mart is not only ridiculous, it's incongruous. Bad college hook-ups occur for reasons ranging from the influence of alcohol to desperation. However, a student can still decide to live comfortably without engaging in a bad hook-up. Here, the student has a choice and once the hook-up is over, it's over. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, is usually the only choice for employees. "Liberals" aren't protesting the fact that people are working at Wal-Mart in order to make a living, but rather that Wal-Mart takes advantage of its employees. The average employee at Wal-Mart makes only $15,000 a year for full time work, but most are denied even this income as they're held to part-time work. Even though the company claims to employ 70 percent of its workers full-time, Wal-Mart's notion of full-time work is 28 hours per week; a full-time employee thus grosses less than $11,000 per year. Unionization is prohibited in Wal-Mart, further eliminating the rights of employees to bargain for better wages.
In Jacksonville, Fla., the meat-cutters working at a Wal-Mart Supercenter were not pleased when they received the same pay for working longer hours. They decided to establish the first-ever Wal-Mart union in the U.S. and began signing union cards for the United Food and Commercial Workers. Eleven days later, Wal-Mart announced that it was closing the meat-cutting departments of all its stores and would buy the prepackaged meat elsewhere.
During a subsequent National Labor Relations Board hearing, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman stated, "While unions may be appropriate for other companies, they have no place at Wal-Mart."
Wal-Mart has also been repeatedly convicted for disregarding employees' rights. In fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has had to file more suits against Wal-Mart for cases such as disability discrimination than any other corporation. Female employees at Wal-Mart recently filed a national class-action lawsuit, charging that there is a "harsh, anti-woman culture in which complaints go unanswered and the women who make them are targeted for retaliation."
Despite its claim that the corporation "buys American," the majority of Wal-Mart's products were the result of inexpensive labor from China. In 1998, after frequently being questioned about the origin of its products, Wal-Mart finally admitted its source and in 2001, even moved its worldwide purchasing headquarters to China. Wal-Mart's policy of getting costs down thus resulted in slashing wages and benefits and imposing mandatory overtime shifts.
Workers in Chinese factories interviewed by the National Labor Committee stated that they were getting paid less than the minimum wage in China (13 instead of 31 cents per hour) and typically lived in "squatter shacks," paying $7.45 per week for rent and unsanitary food. Work hours were usually 13 to 16 hours per day and 20 hours per day during peak season. Wal-Mart states that they have a "code of conduct" to ensure workers' rights, yet the NLC was unable to find a single worker who had seen or heard of it.
While no other company provides "everyday low prices," Wal-Mart also guarantees an "honest" living for families - at its employees' expense. Yes, Wal-Mart and its policies are definitely analogous to free love, with the same unsatisfying and abusive person. Over and over again.
Reshma Ramachandran '09 supports Christopher Walken for President in 2008.
