Make A Difference: Boycott Wal-Mart
For the everyday individual, companies like Wal-Mart have been a
source of great deals, where goods can be purchased at a
relatively inexpensive sum. These companies preach never-ending
low costs for the benefit of the consumer. Most of us have taken
that as face value, resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars
of revenue annually. Wal-Mart in particular has been one of the
major beneficiaries of your hard earned dollar. They promote
themselves as being concerned about the family, about customer
server. Recent events however, have caused us to look a little
more deeply into this chain of stores. Many of us have already
heard about their North American corporate practices. They have
responded to charges of forced overtime, pay inequity, unsafe
working conditions with the usual corporate schpeal of having to
better train their management staff. The average person has
either accepted it, or simply chosen to ignore it, preferring to
worry about the drama of their own lives. But that is not the
end of this story. Wal-Mart recently decided to close down the
first and only unionized store to date, sighting loss of
profitability.
If a store like Walmart, who routinely subcontracts their
manufacturing to companies that pays their employees much less
than minimum wage, cannot make a profit in a unionized
environment in North America, than what it that saying for the
rest of the companies out there? Wal-Mart is not only in the
business of providing low costs on merchandise, but in human
labour as well. While they are not the only ones doing it, they
are the ones that have profited the most by it. What prevents a
company that sponsors 7 day a week, 12 + hour shift with NO
overtime in the 3rd world from trying to do the same legal
equivalent here? This is a company that has made over 9 Billion
dollars in 2004.
What does that have to do with the average everyday individual?
Plenty. Many jobs in the manufacturing industry are being lost
to those same 3rd world countries, because there is no
protection for the common man. They do not enjoy the same
freedoms and opportunities that we do in North America. They
cannot just pick up and choose to work elsewhere. They cannot
just choose to go back to school and get government loans. They
will take, and stay with any job they can get, regardless of
their working conditions because there simply are no other
alternatives. So when North Americans lose their jobs in that
industry, they are forced to work for lower and lower wages, and
subsequently their buying power goes down. With a lowering
buying power, companies like Wal-Mart make more profit as people
seek to stretch their dollar as far as they can.
Old Mom & Pop stores cannot survive anymore either. When they
moved out of the city and into the suburbs, Wal-Mart followed.
Once the population on the outskirts of a city reach a certain
density, you can be sure that there will be a Wal-Mart coming
soon. One may even show up quicker on sites with highway access.
Wal-Mart