E-Mail This Article to a Friend No sympathy for the devil, continued
	Related Links Wal-Mart The official site. Check out the "fashion revolution" that is Metro 7, or marvel at the corporation’s reach — from Wal-Mart credit cards, to Wal-Mart music downloads, to Wal-Mart vacations. Wal-Mart Watch, Wake Up Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart Versus Women These three sites take on the corporate behemoth, detailing the ways Wal-Mart’s business practices can hurt the very communities they claim to help.

• Low wages and insufficient health-care benefits. As of September 2005, there were 11,450 Wal-Mart employees in Massachusetts; about 300 of those work at the Quincy location and the rest are employed at the company’s 43 other stores in the state. Their average hourly wage is $10.87, according to Wal-Mart. But a February 2005 report from the state’s Office of Health and Human Services shows that almost 3000 of those Wal-Mart employees use state public-health assistance — in other words, almost three out of 10 Wal-Mart employees in the Bay State can’t afford the company’s health-insurance plan or are ineligible for it because they’re part-time workers. So who pays for their health insurance? You do. "In some of our states, the public program may actually be a better value, with relatively high income limits to qualify and low premiums," Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott has said. The company thumps its chest when it describes its health-insurance plan — $40 for individuals and $55 for a family. They don’t brag about the whopping $1000 deductible.

"Wal-Mart’s low-wage, stingy-benefits business model perpetuates a cycle of poverty that means that Wal-Mart employees can only afford to shop in their stores," says Nu Wexler, spokesman for the corporate-watchdog group Wal-Mart Watch.

• Hostility toward unions. Citing its open lines of communication, Wal-Mart asserts on its Web site, "we feel that there is no need for third-party representation in the form of a Wal-Mart labor union." Those lines of communication must have had a faulty connection during the years that some Wal-Mart employees asked for meal breaks during their shifts. On September 19, opening arguments began in Oakland, California’s Alameda County Superior Court in a suit that pits more than 100,000 Wal-Mart workers against their employers, who they say forced employees to work through breaks.

In the meantime, organizations throughout the country, such as the Florida-based Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now (WARN), are trying to give Wal-Mart employees a unified voice.

• Killing community business. It’s rumored that before a new store opens, Wal-Mart representatives will do price checks at stores within a 30-mile radius, then undersell the competition. When the big-box Godzilla enters a community, it generally decimates smaller stores that can’t afford to offer prices as low as Wal-Mart’s.

"The rule of thumb is that if a Wal-Mart Supercenter opens, two grocery stores will close," says Al Norman, of Greenfield, who founded the anti-big-box consulting firm Sprawl-busters after successfully stopping a Wal-Mart from coming into his own Western Massachusetts town.

• Conservative values and philanthropy. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Wal-Mart led an effective corporate response — and garnered well-deserved praise from even its staunchest opponents — by donating truckloads of merchandise and more than $17 million in cash assistance. But a report issued last week by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) sheds a less-palatable light on the corporation’s altruism.

The Walton Family Foundation and the Wal-Mart Foundation are two of the largest foundations in the world. Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart in 1962, died in 1992; his wife and children share a combined fortune of about $90 million. Yet a good part of their philanthropic grant-making — which has soared in recent years — is both ineffective and hypocritical, says NCRP deputy director Jeff Krehely. According to the report, Wal-Mart supports politicians (the Wal-Mart Political Action Committee gave 80 percent of its 2004 contributions to Republicans) and policies (such as school-voucher programs) that mostly work against the low-income communities it serves.

That’s just a taste. Throw in a lively history of product censorship and you have a lot of baggage that comes with that $1.97 bottle of Hawaiian Punch.

ON GUARD

Boston is safe for now. There’s no word yet on what may move into Downtown Crossing, but Target, Home Depot, Kohls, and Jordan’s Furniture have all been mentioned as possibilities. Because Wal-Mart is so much bigger than any of those corporations (Target is about one-sixth the size of Wal-Mart), it’s hard to offer comparisons, Wexler says.

But it’s practically impossible to stop the big-box trend, says Harris Gruman, executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, which advocates for low-income workers in the state. And while Wal-Mart is today’s perfect example of corporate irresponsibility, there will be others — unless politicians and activists change the way businesses do business.

"Keeping them out becomes a superficial attempt to suppress a very virulent predator," Gruman says, suggesting that the Massachusetts legislature look instead toward closing corporate tax loopholes (so big companies don’t get "sweetheart deals" and pay proportionately lower taxes than smaller businesses), raising the minimum wage, and making employers pay for health care. "If Massachusetts is going to be an alternative to Bush’s America, that’s where we have to do it. We have to show that there’s a better way of life here for working people."

From November 13 to 19, Wal-Mart Watch will hold its Higher Expectations Week, a national campaign to call attention to issues of corporate responsibility and economic justice — and Wal-Mart’s seeming ignorance of both. At house parties that week, activists will screen a new investigative documentary by Robert Greenwald (of 2004’s Outfoxed): Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices. Go to walmartwatch.com for more info.

Deirdre Fulton can be reached at dfulton[a]phx.com.