Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices

I finally got around to watching the film everyone has been raving about: Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price. Click the link to learn more about the film. I looked forward to watching this film but it wasn't a high priority for one simple reason: I already knew Wal-Mart was evil. But films like this are great for getting the message out and that's always a good thing. I'm glad I finally did see it. It's an excellent movie. I'm not going to go too much into describing the film, though. What I would like to do is expand on some things that are mentioned in the film regarding the poor treatment of Chinese workers in Wal-Mart plants.

There are a lot of people out there who seem to think that we don't need unions anymore. The standard position is, "Yes, unions did a lot of good, but they're really not necessary anymore." I'd like to illustrate just how important unions are to all of us who actually have to work for a living.

Here are just a few things you can learn from watching the film:

--Employees are routinely locked in the store at night until the manager comes in the morning to let them out.

--Employees are forced to work off the clock so that Wal-Mart won't have to pay them overtime.

--Wal-Mart spends millions in anti-union practices including surveillance of employees, an anti-union hotline, and profiling and termination of any union organizers within the company.

--Employees spend much of the money they earn on Wal-Mart products.

Watching the workers in China is like going in a time machine back to the 1890s here in the United States. Workers live in dorms owned by Wal-Mart in which they are charged $15 a week in rent whether they actually live in the dorm or not. They are also charged for utilities they use, which probably isn't much considering they work 14 hour days at a meager .17 an hour.

So let's do the math. You worked fourteen hours a day for a miserly $0.17 an hour and at the end of the week you earned a whopping $16.66. In what can only seem a cruel joke you must turn around and give $15 right back to Wal-Mart to pay for your dorm room. That leaves you a $1.66 to spend on your utilities, food, clothing, and everything else. Think about that.

Here's where people get lost, though, so hang on. The natural inclination is to think, "Well that's China; we wouldn't let workers suffer like that." Wrong. The United States of America was a third world country before there was ever such a term. Take the following regarding the West Virginia Coal Mine wars:

Miners worked in company mines with company tools and equipment, which they were required to lease. The rent for company housing and cost of items from the company store were deducted from their pay. The stores themselves charged over-inflated prices, since there was no alternative for purchasing goods. To ensure that miners spent their wages at the store, coal companies developed their own monetary system. Miners were paid by scrip, in the form of tokens, currency, or credit, which could be used only at the company store. Therefore, even when wages were increased, coal companies simply increased prices at the company store to balance what they lost in pay.

This was just over a hundred years ago in this country. We had the same constitution that we have now. We had the same system of government that we have now. So what's different? Why is it a guy or girl in China will work for $0.17 an hour and we won't?

It has nothing to do with our nifty pseudo-democratic Republic of Capitalism, but it has everything to do with our labor movement. Coal miners didn't write a nice letter to the president informing him that they were being mistreated; they didn't "vote" in the right candidate. Hell, the government was aiding the oppression of workers right into the 1930s in this country, using the national guard, the police, and even private security outfits to beat, maim, and kill workers who were organizing. But they didn't give up. They educated themselves, organized, and agitated for a better deal.

The idea that Wal-Mart would lock American workers inside the store seems crazy, but it has precedent in this country. Perhaps the most famous incident occurred on March 25, 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. On that dreadful day a fire broke out killing 146 Triangle workers who were locked in the factory. The New York World Reported:

...screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact on both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying....

From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death--girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.

That's capitalism, folks. Historians refer to the period as laissezfaire capitalism. You won't hear that term used in reference to modern capitalism, though. The positive label is the "Free Market" as in free market capitalism. As we see in China, and the rest of the global south, it amounts to the same thing. If Wal-Mart could treat its American workers the same way it does its Chinese workers, it would. The ideal is to have you working 14 hour days with no safety or environmental regulations at all. The goal is to squeeze every last ounce of production out of you until you die without investing a dime in the process.

The only real salvation workers have ever found is to organize themselves into unions to fight their exploitation and oppression. Workers of the World, unite!

| +Save/Share | |