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Wal-Mart film uncovers the real face of the retail giant - low prices, perhaps, but at high cost Robert Greenwald's critical Wal-Mart documentary continues to attract the interest of thousands after thousands of viewers in the United States and the outside world. A pitiless documentary, the movie exposes the high social costs of Wal-Mart's low prices. It takes the audiences to the real lives of Wal-Mart workers and their families, but also to communities where the giant from Bentonville have forced so many small businesses to close. 'Wal-Mart - The High Cost of Low Price' serves as a veritable eye-opener. Things are not always what they appear to be, and particularly not what Wal-Mart would want people to believe them to be. Turn the medal around and what you will find are not only dying businesses and communities, but also poor wages, non-existent benefits and a bad working environment for huge number of Wal-Mart workers. The company which is actually the largest employer in the world does not shy from cashing in on indirect government assistance, financed by US tax-payers. The children of Wal-Mart workers who are effectively denied an affordable health insurance have to rely on social assistance, where the company regularly tops the list of employers who don't want to play according to the generally accepted rules. Greenwald's video has already generated hundreds of newspaper articles in the American press, and very significantly added the pressure on Wal-Mart to wake up and change its business and employer approaches. Instead of this, the company still seems to think that they can fend off the criticism through expensive public relations campaigns, and by spreading what many would call disinformation about their performance. At their Bentonville headquarters, a new task force has been created, to take care of this work. It does seem clear that Wal-Mart is now repeating the mistakes made by some US-based food and apparel producers some years ago, when they got caught for inhumane working conditions in many of their production sites abroad. They also tried to fix the situation by public relations campaign, but it did not work. Finally, they made the right choice and changed reality instead, applying social responsibility codes such as the SA8000 in their production and distribution chains and in this way also allowing an independent monitoring and control. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for Wal-Mart to reach the same conclusion.
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