everyday low values

Set to coincide with the Wal-Mart annual shareholders’ meeting, the folks at Wal-Mart Watch have issued their own annual report for the world’s biggest retailer. It’s available as a PDF for download (if you click that last link), but, thanks to one of the diarists at the Daily Kos site, some of the report is available on-line. Here’s an excerpt:

On worker pay:

Dismissing the Century Foundation’s numbers and other studies, Wal-Mart executives and public relations professionals inflate income statistics claiming that full-time workers “average” $9.68 and hour for a 35-hour workweek. Even with their inflated numbers, which include highly-paid executives and Wal-Mart managers, an annual pay of about $17,600 leaves an “average” worker with a family of four substantially below the $19,157 federal poverty line, according to the New York Times.

On unions:

Wal-Mart’s opposition to unions is so great it assigns a “Union Probability Index” to each store based on anonymous surveys of workers. The company officially says the index is for “Unresolved People Issues,” but when it goes too high, management sends in a special team of managers to gear up for an effort to root out pro-union activity.

New hires are often showed two videos. The first is general information about the company and the second is about why Wal-Mart should be union-free. Jon Lehman, a former store manager, told Bloomberg News that two dozen people with headsets at Wal-Mart headquarters tap into calls and e-mails from stores around the country to see whether anyone is talking about unionization.

On sweatshops in developing countries:

Wal-Mart doesn’t want the U.S. buying public to know that its famous “always low prices” are the product of human misery. While it loudly proclaims that its global suppliers must comply with a corporate “code of conduct” to treat workers decently, it strictly prohibits the disclosure of any factory names and addresses, hoping to keep independent sources from witnessing the “code” in operation.

In related news, I just heard from Steve Cherry that Robert Greenwald, the man behind the documentaries “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” and “Uncovered: The War on Iraq,” has a new Wal-Mart film in the works… A post by Greenwald, explaining the project, is available at the Huffington Post, and you can find a New York Times article about it here… I’m considering hosting a local showing of the film in a Wal-Mart parking lot when it’s done. I’ll keep you posted.