The Wal-Mart Model

• Wal-Mart is the largest U.S. company, the world's largest retailer, and, with nearly 1.3 million employed in the U.S., the largest domestic employer.1 Every week, 138 million people around the world shop at the 4750 Wal-Mart stores.2 Sales in the year 2004 were 285 billion dollars, with a profit of over 10 billion dollars.3 Wal-Mart has about 250,000 suppliers in their supply chain.4
• The price pressure on the domestic market affects local businesses. For every new Wal-Mart Supercenter that opens, markets analysts estimate that two local supermarkets will close.5 As the only source of groceries and goods in many small rural towns across the U.S., it is almost impossible not to shop at Wal-Mart in these towns.6
• Wal-Mart's tremendous pressure on supply factories to cut costs creates a demand for illegally low wages and unpaid and forced overtime.7
• With its great market share and power, Wal-Mart is setting the standards for the entire industry. The Wal-Mart model intensifies the global pursuit of low-cost goods.8 In fact, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union claim that "No other company has ever had the global economic impact that Wal-Mart has."9
• After major criticism and numerous lawsuits against Wal-Mart, the company launched a huge advertising campaign trying to dissimulate the reality of their business operations. With over a 100 full-page newspaper ads, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Wal-Mart has tried hard to convince people that it pays well and benefits communities.10

Wal-Mart violates human rights

Wal-Mart has a code of conduct, requiring adherence to the local laws in the country in which they operate. But even this minimal goal is not achieved.

• Wal-Mart bargains are based on low wages and exploitation, which create poverty and leave workers across the developing world in misery.11 Even in low-wage countries like Bangladesh , Wal-Mart does not pay its workers minimum wage.12
• In the U.S., Wal-Mart has racked up huge fines for child labor law violations. The company reportedly makes children younger than 18 work through their meal breaks, work very late and even work during school hours. Several states have found Wal-Mart workers younger than 18 are operating dangerous equipment and working in dangerous areas.13
• In Wal-Mart's supply factories, physical and verbal assaults are used to "motivate" workers to meet impossible quotas.14
• Trade union activists risk being threatened, fired and blacklisted for trying to defend their worker and human rights. When meat cutters in Texas formed a union, Wal-Mart simply closed all the butcher departments. Workers in Canada , Quebec, were also trying to unionize in 2004. The response from Wal-Mart was to close down the store. In fact, Wal-Mart has an anti-union policy, upheld by a special team of managers.15
• Wal-Mart forces employees to work overtime and unpaid. In Wal-Mart's supply factories in Bangladesh , workers typically work about 70 hours a week in non-air conditioned buildings.16 Working off the clock without getting paid is one reason why workers in over 30 states in the U.S. are suing Wal-Mart.17 In Nicaragua, workers at one Wal-Mart supply factory work up to 69 hours per week for as little as 29 cents an hour.18
• A recent Frontline special showed that Wal-Mart is responsible for the rise in sweatshop conditions in China. Wal-Mart refuses to open these factories to truly independent inspection.19

Women and the Wal-Mart model

• Women make 80% of all consumer purchases, and are often most responsible for the family shopping.20 Four out of ten U.S. women shop at Wal-Mart every week.21 34% of Wal-Mart's customer says that they are "just getting by" economically.22
• Wal-Mart's garments are produced by women's cheap labor under atrocious working conditions in foreign countries.23
• In the U.S. , 92% of the clerks, which is the lowest paid position, are women. Meanwhile, men hold two out of three management positions.24
• Many women fill part-time positions because these jobs provide the flexible work schedule necessary to care for their children. Wal-Mart takes advantage of this fact and uses the "flexible workplace" not to be family friendly, but to exploit women's labor.25 The low wages result in that the majority of the employees are unable to afford health care.26
• The Wal-Mart model undermines worker standards as well as consumers' buying power. Through a cyclical process of poor people needing cheaper goods, which requires workers getting less pay to produce those goods, the Wal-Mart model is pulling the rug out from underneath millions of workers' feet.27
• Due to widespread gender discrimination in the company, some 1.6 million women are eligible to join a class-action lawsuit charging Wal-Mart with discrimination. Wal-Mart pays women 5-15% less than men, and women who are pregnant risk being fired.28 Forced birth control and pregnancy tests are used to maintain this.29

Wal-Mart affects everyone

It is probably the women working at Wal-Mart sweatshops all over the world who suffer the most from Wal-Mart's ruthless hunt for profit. But Wal-Mart also affects everyone in the U.S., and the rest of the world.

• Not only does Wal-Mart’s poverty-level wages and insufficient benefits force thousands of employees to resort to Medicaid, but many workers also need food stamps and housing assistance. In the U.S., this costs the citizens 1.5 billion dollars a year, the so-called “Wal-Mart Tax.”30
• Wal-Mart is a major polluter. That is why the company's costs for court and regulatory settlements increase by hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2001, the company had to pay 1 million dollars for violating the Clean Water Act. Wal-Mart pledged to do better, but only three years later, the company repeated the violation, and paid 3 million dollars. Moreover, their global pursuit for low-cost goods pressures the suppliers not only to break labor laws, but also to cut costs to the detriment of environmental concerns.31

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia. Their article on Wal-Mart is very informative, with general information about the company and its history, and including the criticism against Wal-Mart. Moreover, the page has an extensive and interesting collection of links and further readings.

National Labor Committee Read testimonies from workers at Wal-Mart sweatshop supplier factories.

International Labor Rights Fund Read the lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart for violation of their code of conduct.

Movie by Robert Greenwald. Includes suggestions on how you can take action against Wal-Mart.

Children speak out against Wal-Mart with letters to the CEO.

Organizing Wal-Mart: the Canadian Campaign
Roy J. Adams
Just Labour - A Canadian Journal of Work and Society

Labor Dept. Is Rebuked Over Pact With Wal-Mart
Stephen Greenhouse
New York Times (registration required)
November 1, 2005

Human cost behind bargain shopping
-Dateline hidden camera investigation in Bangladesh
Chris Hansen and Richard Greenberg
Dateline NBC, June 17, 2005
(Includes video clips)

Will Labor Take the Wal-Mart Challenge?
Liza Featherstone
The Nation, June 28, 2004 issue

Wal-Mart Whistleblower Speaks out: Working for Wal-Mart as a Monitor
Charles Kernaghan
National Labor Committee, June, 2005

Is Wal-Mart too powerful?
Anthony Bianco and Wendy Zellner
Businessweek online, October 6, 2003

Interview with Edna Bonacich,
professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside.
Frontline, November 16, 2004

It's Time for Back-to-School Shopping, but not at Wal-Mart!
August 2005

Internal documents

These are confidential documents from Wal-Mart to managers about how they can and should stop unions from forming in their stores.

All three documents above in one file (pdf)