As I wrote a few weeks ago, a checkout clerk body-slammed my azalea in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. Now I think I’m beginning to understand why. Something awful is going on deep inside this company, something far worse than the abysmal state of the customer service you’ll find in its checkout lines, the abandoned “big boxes” it has strewn across the country in its wake, and the locally owned mom-and-pop stores it has crushed.
It’s called slave labor, and it’s what’s brought you all those red dot rollbacks and the cheap prices Wal-Mart is famous for. As a die-hard capitalist, I’ve always considered corporate boycotts the work of freaky-haired fruitcakes on a social mission from Satan. But when the capitalist drive clashes with individual human freedoms, it’s too much for even me to take.
That’s exactly what is going on in sweatshops in China, where Wal-Mart has earned the dubious distinction of actually lowering Chinese labor standards. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest consumer of Chinese-made products, purchasing about $10 billion a year worth of merchandise from several thousand Chinese factories. According to the trade publication Shopping Center World, Wal-Mart was dropped from the Domini index fund of socially responsible companies after a report from the National Labor Committee that Wal-Mart goods were made by “nearly enslaved workers under armed guard in Honduras and China.”
Haven’t heard about this? That’s because while the alternative media and small trade and human rights publications have carried numerous articles on the topic, an Internet search will show you that the situation seems to have been all but blacked out by the national media — with whom Wal-Mart advertises. But that doesn’t change the fact that through its imports, Wal-Mart has become the largest US exporter of human misery.
According to an April report by the US-based Institute for Public Affairs, China provides foreign companies with a tax-free zone and a labor pool drawn from millions of northern Chinese migrants.
These reports and others have documented human rights violations that include 13- to 16-hour shifts assembling and painting toys seven days a week, with 20-hour shifts in peak season. Although the minimum wage in China is theoretically 31 cents an hour, workers provided by the government for factories in Northern China are paid 13 cents an hour and live in squatter shacks or company “dorms” — tiny spaces that lack indoor plumbing and which, in some cases, are shared by more than a dozen people. Most are women, teenage girls and occasionally children.
There are no health or safety standards in these factories, the NLC report states, and workers suffer headaches and constant nausea from paint fumes hanging in the sweltering factory air. Workers are responsible for their own medical treatment and can be fired if they’re too ill to work. Those who have refused to work or have spoken up about these conditions often have been jailed by the Chinese government.
As for those who work in Wal-Mart’s domestic stores, well, it’s easy to understand why they’re disgruntled. According to the Hightower Lowdown — a publication published by author and radio commentator Jim Hightower — despite bonus-sharing among company employees who work at profitable locations, a full-time worker at Wal-Mart earns between $11,000 and $15,000 a year, hardly enough to afford the hefty cost of health care coverage which is available to workers after they’ve been with the company for two years. Only 38 percent of the company’s 1.2 million workers are actually covered, which leaves you and me to pick up the tax bill for their coverage. Prices at Wal-Mart don’t seem so cheap anymore, do they?
Were the company struggling to stay afloat, the above might at least be explainable. But the $220 billion company, the world’s largest corporation, posts about $7 billion a year in profits. Five of the 10 richest people in the world are members of the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. I think they can spare the change to wipe out the human misery they have caused. Until they do, I don’t plan to spend another dime in the place, and you shouldn’t either. Boycott Wal-Mart. *
This article appears in May 8-14, 2002.
