Please don't shop at Wal-Mart's - Part 9

Here's another article on why not to shop at Wal-Mart's. It's entitled, "Battling Wal-Mart" by Neal Peirce:

The Wal-Mart Watch campaign, a labor-environmental group highly critical of America's mega-mega retailer, recently launched more than 1,000 events nationwide for its "Higher Expectations Week."

"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," a scathing documentary by independent filmmaker Robert Greenwald with a focus on Wal-Mart's business tactics and treatment of workers, began to play to audiences across the country.

Wal-Mart is fighting its critics with waves of television ads celebrating happy workers and the company's gifts to local charities.

But the action goes much further. Across state capitals, legislators are into spirited debates over whether Wal-Mart should be forced to pay adequate health benefits or leave it to the states to subsidize its low-paid workers through Medicaid and other public benefits.

Scene of the biggest current fight: Maryland, where Gov. Robert Ehrlich vetoed a measure to require any company with more than 10,000 workers -- only Wal-Mart qualifies -- to spend at least 8 percent of payroll on health benefits. Or, alternatively, to contribute significantly to the state's health insurance program.

An override vote on Ehrlich's veto is set for January. Wal-Mart has deployed at least a dozen lobbyists to Annapolis, offering goodies such as a $10,000 gift to underwrite a conference of black legislators.

In one sense, all of this is predictable: With annual sales of $288 billion and 1.6 million employees, Wal-Mart is now the world's biggest corporation. Its footprint on American communities and retailing is so vast that some opposition to its tactics is virtually inevitable.

Current debates about proposed Wal-Mart stores in Cornelius, Gresham and Beaverton -- with the typical protests by many local citizens and smaller retailers -- are par for the course. Usually Wal-Mart wins, though not always; it has experienced some dramatic rejections.

But something even bigger seems to be happening. Wal-Mart has become the poster child for an era of unfettered globalized corporate operations -- "a destabilizing business model, a dangerous detriment to America's local and national economies and to the middle class," in the words of critic Leo Hindery Jr. He's former CEO of the telecom carrier Global Crossing and an active figure in Democratic Party politics.

At a recent Washington conference organized by the Center for American Progress, Hindery noted that as recently as 1992 (the year of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's death), the Business Roundtable of top business leaders was saying that corporations had a major responsibility not just to stockholders but to their employees, society at large, and the nation's economy.

But now, Hindery says the Business Roundtable -- and most of the corporate world -- focuses almost exclusively on profits for stockholders.

I know it can be tempting to shop at Wal-Mart's this time of year. Just say no, okay?