Cover Story	Wal-Mart: The Little People are Fighting Back by Jamie Moses

The Internet is not the only medium making dramatic changes in how we receive entertainment or information. Last year’s presidential election saw mainstream film distribution completely bypassed as independent films were shown at thousands of grassroots house parties across the nation. Home parties and church screenings launched films like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth from the political right, or producer/director Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism from the political left.

Greenwald is back with his latest effort, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and his company Brave New Films is employing the same distribution strategy. In Buffalo alone there will be at least a half-dozen locations screening his new movie for free, including a six-day run at the new Artvoice Cinéma at Town Ballroom on Main St. beginning Thursday, November 17.

The film’s website, walmartmovie.com, also makes available locations to see the film, movie stills, stickers, posters, t-shirts, bulk DVD sales, flyers, postcards, screening kits, press kits, blog sites, Quicktime parody ads, radio spots, and on and on. Much of what is offered is free. There seems to be no stone upon the grassroots field left unturned.

Also, in an unprecedented media collaboration this week, The Nation, The American Prospect, In These Times and AlterNet.org are focusing on issues raised by Greenwald’s new documentary.

IN THESE TIMES

Writing for In These Times, senior editor Christopher Hayes discusses a few details from the film in “Symbol of the System” [edited excerpts]:

There’s a moment in Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, that serves as a perfect metaphor for the entire battle between organized labor and the country’s largest private employer.

Josh Noble, an employee of the Tire and Lube Express division of a Wal-Mart in Loveland, Colorado, is attempting to organize 17 of his fellow workers into a union. As the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election approaches, we see Noble with a United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) advisor going through the list of employees, discussing who’s with them and who’s not. Noble says it looks about 50/50. Later, the organizer cautions Noble that he may have lost the vote of his friend Alicia. “No,” Noble says. “I’ve talked with her quite a bit. She’s just kind of hard to read ... I hang out with her on the weekends. But she’s definitely into it. She’s real strong.”

Cut to: Alicia Sylvia in her car. Management’s putting the squeeze on and she’s now equivocating. We know what will happen. It’s like watching David sent out to battle Goliath, blindfolded. Without a sling.

When election day finally rolls around Noble loses the election, 17 to 1.

In 2000, when seven of 10 butchers in a store in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the UFCW, Wal-Mart responded by announcing that henceforth it would sell only pre-cut meat in all of its supercenters, fired four of the union supporters and transferred the rest into other divisions. (Three years later, the Labor Relations Board ruled the decision illegal. Wal-Mart is now appealing.) And in May this year, when workers at a store in Jonquiere, Quebec, voted to unionize, Wal-Mart simply shut the place down. “They wanted to send a message to every other store,” says UFCW spokesperson Chris Kofinis, “‘Don’t you dare unionize.’”

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"The fact that [employees] haven't been successful [at unionizing] speaks well for Wal-Mart..."

By any means necessary

There’s little secret to Wal-Mart’s success. The company will simply do whatever it takes to keep workers from organizing. “Staying union free is a full-time commitment,” reads one of the company’s training manuals. “From the Chairperson of the ‘Board’ down to the front-line manager ... the entire management staff should fully comprehend and appreciate exactly what is expected of their individual efforts to meet the union-free objective.”

Managers are trained to call a special hotline at the first sign of suspicious behavior, including “employees talking in hushed tones to each other.” After the call, the company’s notorious labor relations division headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, will swing into gear, often dispatching a company jet to the afflicted store, bearing members of its crack team of union busters. Management will convene mandatory meetings with each associate and screen anti-union videos.

Former managers, like Stan Fortune, who worked for Wal-Mart for 17 years and then went to work for UFCW, say the store also illegally follows union sympathizers and spies on its employees with cameras in break rooms. “One of their favorite tactics is to say, ‘We need to freeze all raises in the store because it can’t appear that we’re bribing anybody,’” Fortune says in the film.

And then Wal-Mart will find a way to get rid of troublemakers. That’s what spelled the end of Stan Fortune’s career as a manager at the company. In 2001 Fortune was managing a Wal-Mart in Weatherford, Texas, when his boss instructed him to fire an employee suspected of talking to the union. “I told him ‘I’m not firing him,’ “ Fortune says. “’That’s illegal’ ... He got in my face and said, ‘You fire him or I’m going to fire you.’ “ A week later, Fortune was gone.

In April, the UFCW threw in the towel and decided to start from scratch. Instead of seeking to organize workers store by store, it launched WakeUpWalMart.com, a public awareness campaign designed to educate the public about Wal-Mart’s business impact and negative community effects. A coalition led by SEIU, Democracy for America and the Sierra Club has launched a similar project called WalMartWatch.com.

Cause or effect?

Wal-Mart deserves just about all the bad press it gets, and its recent commercials stressing what a gosh-darn great place it is to work would suggest that these anti Wal-Mart efforts are having some effect. But because there’s been so much focus on Wal-Mart’s misdeeds, it’s easy to surmise that the rest of corporate America would never stoop to such techniques. This is simply not the case. “The right to organize in the United States is on the verge of extinction,” says Andy Levin, director of the AFL-CIO’s Voices@Work campaign. “Wal-Mart’s not a bad apple—it’s the very symbol of a rotten system.”

A book-length report on U.S. labor practices released by Human Rights Watch in 2000 found that “workers’ freedom of association is under sustained attack in the United States, and the government is often failing its responsibility under international human rights standards to deter such attacks and protect workers’ rights.” Certifying a new union local through an NLRB election has become so difficult that unions hardly even bother anymore––it requires emerging victorious from months of campaigning by employers, 75 percent of whom hire union-busting firms.

“Fifty years ago, an average of 500,000 workers formed unions through the NLRB process every year,” says Levin. “And the number of workers whose rights were violated in that process, according to the NLRB, was generally in the high hundreds or low thousands. Fast forward to today. The private sector workforce is twice as large, but the number that organized through elections last year was 80,000. The number of workers whose rights were violated, according to the NLRB, is over 20,000. Most people’s rights are violated probably before there’s a union on the scene to file a complaint.”

Employers don’t have to break the law. They can legally require supervisors to campaign against the union upon pain of termination and they can require employees to attend one-on-one pressure sessions with their bosses. “No other industrialized democracy allows this,” says Levin. But even if they do break the law there are no punitive damages or fines. Employers simply have to give whatever back pay is owed. “Many employers have come to view remedies like back pay for workers fired because of union activity as a routine cost of doing business,” says the Human Rights Watch report. “As a result, a culture of near-impunity has taken shape in much of U.S. labor law and practice.”

For several years, Levin and others at the AFL-CIO have been attempting to build support for legislation that would chip away at this “culture of near-impunity.” The Employee Free Choice Act, which currently has 204 sponsors in the House and 40 in the Senate, would legally recognize a bargaining unit if a simple majority of workers signed a card endorsing unionization. It would also create binding arbitration for the first contract a newly certified union negotiates, and increase penalties for employer violations. Similar legislation has come close to passing in the past, but has often fallen victim to filibusters from corporate friendly senators.

Such legislation isn’t necessary in countries where workers’ rights are already protected. In Germany, Wal-Mart has bought out several stores that were already unionized, and they have stayed unionized. Since Wal-Mart isn’t in the charity business, it’s safe to assume those stores are quite profitable. In the film, Greenwald interviews workers there who proudly speak of health benefits and six weeks of paid vacation. One woman says she doesn’t understand--why can’t her American colleagues form a union?

It’s a damn good question.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

THE NATION

Writing for The Nation, Liza Featherstone offers a succinct portrait of the Waltons in “On the Wal-Mart Money Trail” [edited excerpts]:

With a combined fortune of more than $90 billion, the Waltons—the immediate heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton—are the richest family in the world. Five of the country’s ten richest individuals are members of Sam’s immediate family: his wife, Helen, and their three surviving children—Rob, Jim and Alice—as well as his late son John’s widow, Christy (John Walton died in June when his private plane crashed). Until recently, however, they gave away little of their fortune. As Sam Walton explained in his 1992 autobiography, Made in America, he didn’t believe in giving “any undeserving stranger a free ride.” Nor did he believe in being generous with company profits. “We feel very strongly,” he wrote, “that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business.

As for politics, Sam couldn’t stand the stuff. Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas once quipped that waiting for big campaign contributions from the Waltons was like “leaving landing lights on for Amelia Earhart.”

All that has changed. Since Sam died in 1992, the company and the family have escalated their charitable giving, becoming far more influential in philanthropy and politics. This transformation occurred after Wal-Mart became the nation’s largest private employer and a flytrap for much-deserved criticism. The company is battling numerous employee rights lawsuits in court, the biggest of these being a sex-discrimination class action representing 1.6 million women. Communities around the nation, charging that the company is a stingy low-wage employer with an arrogant disregard for local and national laws, are battling to keep Wal-Mart from opening or expanding stores. Several labor unions have made fighting Wal-Mart a top priority.

A report released by a philanthropic watchdog group in September detailed the recent increase in Wal-Mart and Walton philanthropy, noting its likely relationship to the company’s image problems. Indeed, the increase has been staggering. The Walton Family Foundation (WFF) gave away $106.9 million in 2003—the most recent data available—twice as much as in 2000. Wal-Mart’s company PAC, now the third-largest corporate PAC and the second-largest corporate donor to the GOP, gave away $2.1 million in 2004, compared with just $100,000 in 1994.

Alice Walton donated $2.6 million in 2004 to the influential Republican PAC Progress for America, which supported the sleazy Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gave Bush a critical push in the election’s final months. Since 1999 the Wal-Mart Foundation (WMF)—a company-controlled entity with no direct connection to the WFF—has tripled its giving and by the end of this year will have doled out more than $200 million in cash and merchandise, according to spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien.

The company also donated $20 million in cash and merchandise to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, garnering extensive—and partially justified—praise. To antigovernment zealots like New York Times columnist John Tierney and the wing nuts running the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Wal-Mart’s impressive response to the hurricane showed that the private sector is simply more effective than the government. It is true that when you starve government by draining its resources and electing officials who don’t believe in it, nothing seems to work. But Wal-Mart played a major role in that eviscerating process. Much of Wal-Mart’s philanthropy (as well as that of the Walton family) has been directed toward promoting anti-government politics, whether by lobbying against high taxes for the rich or contributing to Republican candidates, conservative think tanks and efforts to privatize education.

Philanthropy obscures the often unseemly process by which the money was made--and for Wal-Mart that’s at least part of the point. The Wal-Mart Foundation gives a staggering number of gifts, apparently in order to buy goodwill in as many communities as possible. The WMF’s 2003 IRS 990 form is 2,239 pages long. That’s because most WMF gifts are tiny: hundreds of dollars to churches and Lions clubs and Boys and Girls clubs, $500 to the YMCA of Nashville and to the Tulip Trace (Indiana) Girl Scouts Council and so on. Communities where Wal-Mart faced a particular battle over opening a new store—like New York City—enjoyed especially generous largesse. Like the flowers and other tokens of courtship from a suitor who later becomes a wife-beater, such gifts are often followed by demands for public subsidies and tax breaks.

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"I know people that won't shop here because they're getting cheaper products from foreign countries..."

In this way, Wal-Mart is repeating the strategy that has served it so well in Arkansas, where Wal-Mart and the Waltons’ charitable gifts are many and company critics are relatively few. Says Lindsay Brown, president of the Central Arkansas Labor Council, “It’s a hell of a plan, and it works.”

We are supposed to applaud philanthropy, but Walton and Wal-Mart giving serves as a reminder that philanthropy provides an alternative to taxation, a way for rich people to decide what to do with their extra money, as opposed to letting the rest of us decide through our elected governments. Since charitable donations are a tax write-off, it is reasonable to ask whether a family’s or a company’s philanthropy serves the common good to make up for the public revenue that we’re losing.

Speaking of taxes: Wal-Mart and the Waltons have been notably reluctant to pay them. Not only has the company lobbied for tax breaks in communities all over the nation, the Waltons have campaigned vigorously against the estate tax. They have donated money to its opponents, Republicans like John Thune of South Dakota and David Vitter of Louisiana, and enlisted one of Washington’s top lobbying firms, Patton Boggs, a leading anti-estate tax lobbyist, to represent their interests.

Chuck Collins of Responsible Wealth, a group of well-off people who strongly favor the estate tax, observed that Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of a handful of Democrats who draw checks from the Waltons, supports estate-tax repeal (or crippling “reform”). “Senator Lincoln will wax eloquent about the small farmers of Arkansas,” Collins says, “but what’s really on her mind is Walton.”

The Waltons also give money to groups that generally favor tax giveaways to the rich, like Americans for Tax Reform. And the Waltons have already reaped the benefits of tax policies enacted by the conservatives they helped put in office: This year Bush’s dividend tax cut will save the family $51 million, according to United for a Fair Economy.

The Waltons’ philanthropy--and their hostility to paying their fair share of taxes--also needs to be viewed in the context of tax subsidies Wal-Mart has received for building new stores, which Good Jobs First places at more than $1 billion. Taxpayers also subsidize Wal-Mart stores through numerous forms of public assistance given to their low-wage workers: Medicaid, food stamps, public housing. A report by the House Education and Workforce Committee conservatively places that figure at $420,750 per store; the Wal-Mart Foundation’s per-store charitable giving is just 11 percent of that amount ($47,222).

In addition to spending on Republican candidates, the Waltons have lavished funds on right-wing ideological institutions—organizations that serve the interest of wealthy individuals and antiunion companies like Wal-Mart. From 1998 through 2003 the WFF contributed to the Heritage Foundation; the Cato Institute; Hudson Institute; the Goldwater Institute and a dozen similar organizations.

One item in the Walton Family Foundation’s most recent IRS filing shows how uninterested this family is in true social responsibility: a measly $6,000 to something called the Wal-Mart Associates in Need Fund. Contrast that with the millions the family spends promoting right-wing causes, and it becomes painfully clear that the Waltons value conservative ideology far more than they value the human beings who have made them the richest family on earth. Told about these figures, Kathleen MacDonald, a Wal-Mart candy department clerk in Aiken, South Carolina, responded bluntly, “All I have to say about that is, it doesn’t surprise me. Like Bush, they don’t have a clue what working families go through.” MacDonald would like to see “The Simple Life” do a show about working at Wal-Mart. “I could see Paris Hilton on a register at Christmastime, or stocking shelves,” she says. Or perhaps Alice Walton as a greeter, on her feet all day, thanking us for shopping at Wal-Mart.”

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Research support for these articles was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. The full, unedited versions of these and other related articles can be found at the following websites:

www.thenation.com

www.alternet.org/walmart/

www.inthesetimes.com

www.prospect.org

To find local screenings of Robert Greenwald’s movie, visit www.walmartmovie.com.