Wal-Mart debated at UCLA

Wal-Mart is the largest corporation in the world. It generates
hundreds of billions of dollars in sales each year and employs
millions of workers both at home and abroad. But at a conference
Saturday sponsored by the UCLA Labor Center, critics declared the
one-stop shopping megastore was not good for America.

Held in Ackerman Union, the conference invited labor leaders,
academics and politicians to discuss Wal-Mart’s business
strategies and the company’s effects on organized labor,
working people and the economy and environment, among others.

Some Los Angeles communities have recently been buzzing about
such topics because of battles over Wal-Mart’s continued
growth in Southern California, especially in regards to the
contested construction of stores in Inglewood and Rosemead.

“As the largest private sector employer in this country,
in the world at this stage, Wal-Mart is leading the pack now, but
it’s leading it in the wrong direction,” Terese Bouey,
assistant director of AFL-CIO’s organizing department, said
during the conference.

Bouey and other conference speakers criticized Wal-Mart on a
myriad of issues, arguing that the company causes wage depression,
pays its workers too little, burdens taxpayers and damages the
environment.

While the vast majority of the organizers, speakers and 500
conference participants were Wal-Mart critics, the climax of the
conference was a debate between both Wal-Mart proponents and
denouncers.

Ted Balaker of the Reason Foundation along with California State
University economics professor Glen Whitman argued that Americans
benefit from Wal-Mart’s low prices, which give people with
lower incomes money to spend elsewhere. The two also said Wal-Mart
is successful because it provides services that American people
desire and said the company should be untouched by policies
limiting its growth or sales “Now that people were getting a
better deal buying toothpaste, carrots and soap, they had money to
buy other things,” Balaker said. “Policies
shouldn’t give (Wal-Mart) any special perks, but policies
shouldn’t also give it special problems.”

But Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at UC Santa
Barbara, and Jonathan Tasini, president of the Economic Future
Group, said Wal-Mart’s low prices come with high costs in
other areas, and that despite its smiling image, the company is
creating wealth for the rich on the backs of working people.

Lichtenseitn and Tasini also said Wal-Mart’s effect on the
United States and the rest of the world is detrimental because it
ignores the human and civil rights of its workers and depends on
taxpayers to subsidize its low wages.

“It is immoral that people who work full time (for
Wal-Mart) cannot support their family,” Tasini said.

A Wal-Mart representative was invited to attend the debate, but
the director of Wal-Mart’s California corporate affairs,
Cynthia Lin, said the company declined the request.

“While our company would be pleased to participate in a
fair debate, this conference appears to be, regrettably, a
one-sided event organized by Wal-Mart critics, for Wal-Mart
critics,” Lin said in an e-mail to conference organizers.

Scott Sia, a first-year math student, said he was glad he came
to the conference and felt more informed about the issues
surrounding Wal-Mart. After the debate, Sia said he hadn’t
been convinced that Wal-Mart was good for the United States. Local
battles

Some local politicians at the conference slammed
Wal-Mart’s efforts to expand in Southern California in front
of a crowd that seemed to mostly agree with the speakers’
points.

Wal-Mart currently has 57 stores in the five-county Southern
California region, said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles,
and is trying to spread into more Los Angeles communities.

Recently, Romero said, community residents in the city of
Rosemead have been in a struggle against Wal-Mart, which the city
council previously approved for construction.

But in an election in March, anti-superstore activists mobilized
voters to replace two of the council’s Wal-Mart supporters
with opponents.

“Right now in California, Rosemead is ground zero in this
major fight against the “˜Wal-Martization’ of the
economy of California,” Romero said. She said Wal-Mart
burdens taxpayers because its employees, who do not earn a living
wage, must still use public welfare services.

“Every individual, every taxpayer, every working family,
every man, woman, child and baby in California is subsidizing
Wal-Mart,” she said.

Chairman of the state labor committee, Sen. Richard
Alarcón, D-San Fernando Valley, told conference participants
about a recently introduced bill that would require more financial
accountability from large corporations.

According to the proposed bill, those companies with 20,000 or
more workers who rely on public assistance must reimburse the state
for those funds.

State assembly member Jerome Horton, D-Inglewood, echoed other
critics and said California’s taxpayers pay about $98 million
each year to subsidize Wal-Mart’s health care.

“I believe that the taxpayers of California should have a
choice, to decide should we be subsidizing the largest corporation
in the world,” Horton said.

Horton was previously involved in a successful struggle against
Wal-Mart’s expansion into Inglewood, one of the communities
he represents.

According to a pamphlet distributed by conference organizers,
the Inglewood city council voted down Wal-Mart’s expansion in
2004. Wal-Mart then introduced a ballot initiative to build a store
almost the size of 17 football fields, the pamphlet said, but the
ballot measure was defeated.

“It was not (Wal-Mart’s) goal to bring a store and
jobs to this community, it was their goal to lower the standards of
every retailer in this community to their level, and if that
occurred, Inglewood … would not have been able to employ its
youth, it would not have been able to afford to take care of its
schools, it would not have been able to afford to be able to take
care of the environment, the roads, the congestion that would have
been created by this super store,” Horton said.

“It was inappropriate, it was simply wrong for any
retailer to come into any community and exploit that
community.” International struggles

International critics of the megastore spoke at the conference
of international efforts to unionize stores, raise employee wages
and improve workers’ conditions in countries such as China,
Canada and Mexico.

Paul Meinema, vice president of the United Food and Commercial
Workers’ Canada National Council, outlined struggles to
unionize stores in Canada. And Billy Hung, from the Chinese Working
Women’s Network, explained Wal-Mart’s detrimental
effects on Chinese women.

According to some conference organizers, 10 percent of all
Chinese imports are exclusively for Wal-Mart and over 3,000 Chinese
factories produce goods for the corporation.

Hung said many of the conditions of Wal-Mart’s workers in
China are deplorable and many laborers work between 12- and 18-hour
days for little pay.

Speaking through a translator, Flora Guerrero, from the Frente
Civico pro Defensa del Casino de La Selva, Teotihuacan, Mexico, an
organization that argued against Wal-Mart’s construction of a
store less than a mile from Mexico’s Pyramid of the Sun, a
sacred, historic site, scolded Wal-Mart’s effects in
Mexico.

“The megastores in my country, in Mexico, not only destroy
the micro economy and our environment, they are destroying our
culture, our roots, our forms of eating, our uses and customs. And
for us, it’s a type of neo-liberalist penetration, and some
would refer to it as a penetration of North American
imperialism,” Guerrero said.

“If we ask ourselves is Wal-Mart good for America or good
for the world, we say no it is not,” she said. “We see
it as a cancer, an economic cancer, a cultural cancer, an
environmental cancer.”