Wal-Mart: Evil At Any Price
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
"Wal-Mart wants high
turnover, so people won't become attached to the company, and make demands on
it."
A new study is out, showing that Wal-Mart could easily pay
employees $10 an hour while raising prices so marginally that even the
mega-store's lowest income customers would hardly notice. The Center for Labor Research and Education
at the University of California, at Berkeley, estimates that many workers at
Wal-Mart start out at just $7 to $8 dollars an hour. If starting wages were
raised to $10, it would make a substantial difference in the lives of these
employees, but would only add 36 cents to the cost of an average shopping trip
of a Wal-Mart customer - about $9 extra for an entire year. And that's if
Wal-Mart passed every penny of the added labor cost on to the consumer.
Sounds reasonable, then, that Wal-Mart should not be
fighting tooth and nail to knock down Living Wage ordinances in cities across
the country. Labor researchers and unions have been making the case for years,
that modest wage increases would do negligible damage to Wal-Mart's bottom
line. Yet the nation's largest corporation continues to resist like a rabid pit
bull.
There is no flaw in the methodology used by Berkeley's
Center for Labor Research or any of the other outfits that have done similar
studies. The problem is, Wal-Mart has other reasons for keeping wages so low -
reasons that lie at the heart of its purely evil business plan. Several years
ago, University of Chicago Prof.
Mae Ngai calculated that "if Wal-Mart raised the price of every item
by just one cent, it could provide good health care for all employees."
But it refuses to do so, despite the fact that a penny here and there would
have no effect on Wal-Mart's price competitiveness. Wal-Mart resists modest
wage increases and decent health care for workers because it does not want its
employees to think of their jobs as careers. "Wal-Mart," says Prof. Ngai, "wants
high turnover, so people won't become attached to the company, and make demands
on it"
"Wal-Mart wants a workforce in which each individual
perceives herself as a temporary employee who, with luck, will find a better
job somewhere else."
In other words, Wal-Mart's business plan deliberately
creates conditions that encourage employees not to stick around for very long.
Their corporate policy is to maintain a workplace that nobody would want to
spend too big a chunk of their life in, much less depend on as an anchor for
raising a family. Wal-Mart's Arkansas-based executives know that, once
employees begin to see their jobs as careers, they get together with one
another to talk about higher wages, health care, better working conditions and,
of course, forming a union. What Wal-Mart wants is a workforce in which each
individual perceives herself as a temporary employee who, with luck, will find
a better job somewhere else. No need to organize with my fellow workers for the
long haul - soon, I'll be outa here.
That's why it will take massive, unrelenting political
pressure - People Power - to force Wal-Mart to change its ways. Wal-Mart's
business plan is not about a few pennies at the cash register. Their goal is to
create a corporate environment in which there are only throw-away workers,
throw-away national economies - a disposable, throw-away world.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted
at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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