Is Wal-Mart just Evil?
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Reviewed by Dan DiMaggio
THE NEW film by Robert Greenwald, Wal-Mart: The High
Cost of Low Price, exposes the brutal nature of the world’s largest
corporation. In an indication of the intensifying anger at the corporate
domination of US society, of which Wal-Mart is the central symbol,
hundreds of thousands of people flocked to libraries, union halls, and
campuses to see the film in the first week of its release in November
2005.
The film shows Wal-Mart doing what it does best:
making huge profits while keeping its workers in poverty, driving small
businesses into bankruptcy, exploiting workers in poor countries, and
disregarding the environment. Wal-Mart’s strategy is based on
ruthlessly cutting costs, allowing it to undersell its competitors and
earn enormous profits.
As Jim Hightower put it: "Wal-Mart and the
Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way – by roughing people up.
The corporate ethos emanating from the Bentonville headquarters dictated
two guiding principles for all managers: extract the very last penny
possible from human toil and squeeze the last dime from every
supplier". (CorpWatch.org)
The strategy has worked well for the owners of
Wal-Mart, the Walton family, who now make up five of the top ten
wealthiest Americans, with a combined fortune worth nearly $100 billion.
While the Waltons all live on vast estates, Wal-Mart workers earn
poverty wages and are forced to rely on food stamps, section eight
housing, Medicaid, and other publicly-funded welfare provisions to take
care of their families.
Wal-Mart is probably the fiercest anti-union company
in the US, and even the slightest hint of an effort by workers to form a
union is enough to warrant a call to the company’s 24-hour hotline and
a visit from their anti-union ‘Rapid Response’ team.
Nothing stands before Wal-Mart’s profits, not even
the safety of its customers. Wal-Mart parking lots have been the scene
of hundreds of crimes including murders and rapes, but Wal-Mart has
refused to hire security guards to monitor their lots because it would
cut into their profits.
Wal-Mart also shows nearly complete disregard for
the environment. Like many other corporations, Wal-Mart often finds it
more profitable to pay millions of dollars in fines for environmental
damage and continue polluting, while also lobbying politicians to
abolish environmental regulations.
The film provides a sharp indictment of Wal-Mart,
but unfortunately it suffers from serious political shortcomings. The
filmmaker tends to depict Wal-Mart as an ‘evil’ corporation,
different to others.
As Greenwald recently said, "Wal-Mart is
abusive in ways that other corporations that are committed to profits
are not. They have a culture that says it’s okay to do anything as
long as it’s good for profits. It’s okay not to give employees
health insurance. It’s okay to take money away from communities to
build Wal-Marts. I don’t believe there is any other company that is as
aggressively exploiting people as Wal-Mart" (Reuters, 2 December,
2006).
The makers of the film argue that the solution to
Wal-Mart is more ethical, smaller scale American corporations that pay
living wages and benefits. But as the film itself shows, it is companies
like Wal-Mart that are the most successful, not ‘ethical’ companies.
The reality is that the system of capitalism, which
is based on short-term profit maximization, forces companies to place
profits above people and the environment. Wal-Mart has been so
successful not because it is ‘evil’ but because it has ruthlessly
followed the logic of this system.
Wal-Mart’s success illustrates a basic law of
capitalism – the inevitable tendency toward greater and greater
concentrations of wealth and power, first predicted by Karl Marx over
150 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. Through competition, smaller
companies tend to be driven out of business or bought out by their
rivals until a few giant monopolies come to dominate the industry.
For example, whenever a new Wal-Mart bullies its way
into town, the surrounding small retail outlets are squeezed out of
business. They simply can’t match the low prices Wal-Mart achieves
through its ruthless methods and global purchasing power. Wal-Mart has
even used the tactic of moving into a small town, running the local
stores out of business and cornering the local market and then either
raising prices or relocating 10-20 miles outside of town to a cheaper
location!
Retail is not the only industry in the US to witness
the growth of enormously powerful corporations in recent years.
Industries like airlines, software, autos, and the media are now
controlled by a few huge mega-corporations.
The trend toward global concentration of wealth is
accelerating. The richest 356 people in the world now enjoy a combined
wealth greater than the annual income of 40% of the human race. The 100
biggest companies in the world control 70% of global trade; the combined
sales of the top 200 companies are greater than the combined GDP of all
but ten nations on earth.
There is a growing movement against Wal-Mart,
including communities fighting to prevent the opening of Wal-Marts in
their town, lawsuits against sexism and labor law violations, and
attempts to pass legislation to force the company to pay more towards
healthcare for its workers.
While these are important efforts, history has shown
that fundamental change does not happen by relying on the courts or
politicians, which are beholden to giant corporations like Wal-Mart, but
by building a mass movement of workers and the oppressed from below to
challenge corporate power.
Such a mass movement can win important reforms,
including unionization, higher pay, healthcare, and laws that bring more
control over Wal-Mart. But as long as corporations continue to privately
control the resources of society, they will attack the living conditions
of working people at every opportunity, and use their vast resources to
dominate the political system. They are forced to do so to compete with
other corporations around the world.
There can be no ‘democracy’ when the owners of
Wal-Mart have so much power and wealth that they can completely warp the
priorities of our society around their narrow need for private profit,
dictating laws, diverting resources, reducing millions to poverty, and
destroying our environment.
The only fundamental solution to this outrage is to
take Wal-Mart out of the hands of the Walton family and instead bring it
under public ownership and control. Only such a step could end the
undemocratic power of Wal-Mart’s owners over society and allow society
to democratically and rationally decide how to use our resources
according to our needs.
But why stop at only one corporation? Don’t the
inequities of Wal-Mart fundamentally apply to the rest of the giant
corporations, like Microsoft, ExxonMobil, McDonalds, GM, etc, that lord
over our economy and society? Wal-Mart may be extreme, but the same
basic situation exists with all of Corporate America.
Rather than pointing in the direction of trying to
reform or tame the corporate-dominated system of capitalism, as some
argue, the case of Wal-Mart powerfully illustrates the need for a
complete overturn of that system. Not just Wal-Mart, but all of the top
500 giant corporations that control the US economy should be publicly
owned and democratically controlled by the workers and consumers.
This would allow for a new, democratic system based
on human needs – socialism. Rather than a race to the bottom among
workers in the US and around the world so that a handful of huge
multinational corporations can rake in profits, under socialism the
resources of society could be harnessed to raise the living standards of
ordinary people all over the world, to make possible a new, truly human
culture of solidarity and cooperation.
Fast Facts about Wal-Mart
* Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott earned $27 million in 2004,
while the average Wal-Mart worker made $13,861. In just two weeks, Scott
earns as much as the average Wal-Mart worker would earn in a lifetime.
* Wal-Mart is currently facing lawsuits in 31 states
in the US for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from hundreds of
thousands of workers, who were forced to work overtime without pay.
* A California jury recently ordered Wal-Mart to pay
$172 million to 116,000 workers who were not given meal breaks as
required under state law.
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