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Bus Tour ends today, is
end of Walmartization in sight as well? America's working families rise to defend their right to health care and decent living standards Wal-Mart has gone too far, forcing down the social conditions of its workers and their families. Now, the reaction has come. In a resounding way, ordinary Americans throughout that vast country are saying that enough is enough and Wal-Mart must change. They will not sit quietly and watch as the Bentonville giant sends working families into poverty and destroys the US health insurance system. The WakeUpWalMart.com Bus Tour ends today in Seattle, in the State of Washington at the United States West Coast. The tour across the continent has been an enormous success. Leading politicians, community leaders and people from all ranges of life have been flocking at the bus stops. 260,000 Americans have now signed up to join WakeUpWalMart.com itself. It is the fastest growing popular movement in the United States.
When the bus took off for New York on 31 July, nobody - except probably the WakeUpWalMart.com people themselves - could have predicted how big an impact the tour would have. Suddenly, Walmartization and Wal-Mart's antisocial behaviour became one of the hottest issues on the American political scene. Politicians all the way from local election candidates to potential Presidents of the United States made their way up to the bus to sign up for the campaign. The movement for Wal-Mart to change has become something of a rallying point for all those who want to fight for a more social and more considerate America. There is a tiredness with the Bush years and its ever growing rift between the rich and the poor, which is translating into concrete action. As the leader of the pack, Wal-Mart is set to become the number one target for those who want to reinstate a social America, as the Bus Tour has so clearly shown. Particularly leading Democrats, the party which has a tradition of speaking out for working people, have made it clear that they will expect real changes to take place. Wal-Mart management continues to stumble When CEO Lee Scott and the other Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville have tried to counter these ever louder calls for change, they have stumbled time after time again. Ambassador Andrew Young had to go, another leading 'supporter' made the company ridiculous through his infamous 'hezbocrats' statement. The health care 'improvements' presented by Wal-Mart proved to be mere cosmetics and the much toted raise of minimum entry wages was overshadowed by the wage cap that hit hard on the company's most long-time workers. Wal-Mart's anti-social and anti-union behaviour is not only about the company itself. With is over 1.6 million workers world-wide, the retail giant has taken the lead in an aggressive corporate drive to squeeze out ever higher profits and bonuses for shareholders and managers. In retailing, labour costs are the obvious area where additional money can be found, when logistics and technology are already very far developed. Disregard for human rights and social conditions All traders today watch their labour costs carefully, and we have seen that clashes with their workers and unions are not uncommon, but Wal-Mart has taken the exploitation to new levels of disregard for the human rights and needs of its workers.
Over 775,000 Wal-Mart workers and their families are not given company health care facilities, WakeUpWalMart.com says. Nearly one out of two children of Wal-Mart workers are either uninsured or dependent on public health care assistance. Unless this changes, Wal-Mart will cost the US tax payers a staggering 9.1 Billion Dollars through public health care charges. What makes Wal-Mart's social dumping and inhumane treatment of its employees particularly disgusting is that it is clearly driven by profit motives. Workers are brutally kept out of their organisations not because of a general dislike of trade unions, which some employers of course still harbour, but by cold calculation. Would they have a union to represent them and would Wal-Mart be forced to sign a collective agreement, it would mean having to provide more decent conditions and pay. The Wal-Mart way may soon come to an end For some time, Wal-Mart's social dumping concept worked well. Competitors were undercut in pricing and the low-cost oriented customers arrived in large numbers. There seemed to be no limits to the company's expansion, neither at home or abroad. Then the problems started to build up. Other retailers, large and small, were able to show that by respecting their workers and treating them well they could reach a productivity in their stores which made them highly competitive. The quality was higher and the atmosphere better, while prices were still kept reasonable, and this attracted customers. Today, both in the United States and outside, there are other retailers who fare much better than the Bentonville multinational. In its home market, Wal-Mart is not a welcome corporate citizen when trying to establish itself in new locations. The news websites are full of reports about local citizens' movements to stop the company at city gates and stories on council decisions and legal proceedings to achieve this. The legislators in Chicago moved in on Walmartization, setting minimum decency standards for what Wal-Mart has to pay its workers. Class action and other lawsuits are frequent and repeatedly the company has had to pay for its bad behaviour. Wal-Mart's arrogant and immoral decision to close down its store in Jonquière in Quebec, Canada rather than allow its workers to conclude a collective agreement through the UFCW may just have been a definite turning point in how the public at large conceives the retail giant. There could hardly have been a better illustration of the brutality and cynicism with which Wal-Mart thinks it can approach universal human and moral values, than its behaviour against the Canadian shop workers and their families. Finally this summer, Wal-Mart gave up both in South Korea and in Germany, and in Japan the company's operations continue to generate important losses. Walmartization has not travelled well, and social dumping has not paid off. With WakeUpWalMart.com fast gaining momentum in the United States, and with the poor performance of Wal-Mart stock compared to many others, it really seems that the wake-up call has come through the Bus Tour, if not already much before. UFCW's Joe Hansen speaks out for affordable health care Joe Hansen is President of UNI-affiliated United Food and Commercial Workers Union UFCW and of UNI itself. He has been leading much of the American workers' campaign for decent work and affordable health care - values which Wal-Mart and its Walmartization policy are constantly attacking. - Working people produce more, work longer and give up family time for their jobs, only to be compensated with choices like whether they can afford both the house and medical coverage or whether they should drop coverage for a year to save enough to qualify for a mortgage, he said in his Labor Day message on Friday. - Five years into an economic recovery, American workers are doing more and getting less--especially health care which is more expensive, less accessible, and less dependable. - Despite the fact that we spend more than double what other industrialized countries spend on health care, the number of workers and their families without health insurance keeps increasing, our life expectancy is lower, and the infant mortality rate higher than the countries, like Germany, we outspend, Joe Hansen said. This is a rather stark picture that the top union leader paints of American society and where has been heading. The George W. Bush years have not been easy on working families, and the WakeUpWalMart.com Bus Tour showed that now they have had enough. The determination which so many top political leaders have shown when committing themselves to supporting these aspirations gives hope that we may soon be seeing Walmartization coming to its end. Wal-Mart and others destroyed 40 years of building up health care Joe Hansen, who is member of a Congressionally mandated group of corporate, community and union leaders that has worked on a national health care agenda, says in his Labor Day message that the employer-based health care system has served the Americans well during the last 40 years. Things started to change when Wal-Mart and others broke with it and shifted health care costs to taxpayers. This bad influence of Walmartization has made also other employers curtail or leave their health care schemes. - In the national dialogue on health care conducted by the Citizens' Health Care Working Group, Americans expressed a clear and pressing need for fundamental reform that brings universal health care coverage for everyone--and they want it now, Joe Hansen says in his Labor Day address.
- The Working Group will soon present its recommendations for addressing this issue to the President and Congress. Those recommendations will include: making it public policy that all Americans have affordable health care; defining a "core" benefit package for all Americans; and guaranteeing financial protection against very high and catastrophic health care costs. Change will come to Wal-Mart, as will dialogue with unions So it has been quite a month for UFCW and WakeUpWalMart.com, the popular movement which it supports. The pressure on Wal-Mart keeps mounting, people are calling for real change, and here an escalation of propaganda activities does not help. How long will it take for the Bentonville managers to understand that there are limits to what a corporate behemoth can do to enrich its owners, and that these limits cannot be passed. At it last World Congress, UNI made it clear that the Global Union wants to see a change in Wal-Mart's corporate employer behaviour and an end to Walmartization. UNI Commerce did indeed try to initiate a dialogue with the company, to make an attempt to find workable solutions for an improvement of the situation. Responding to public pressure, Wal-Mart did accept UNI's invitation to open talks. Some telephone conversations between UNI Commerce and management did indeed take place during the next months, but before they could develop into a real dialogue, the company cut them off. But the offer is still there. When also management gets to understand that a social dialogue with its workers and their unions is a useful way forward both on national and international levels, the company will find a willing discussion partner. But then the changes have to be real, with full respect for workers rights and with decent employment and working conditions for the over 1.6 million Wal-Mart employees.
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