Well we have a Scrooge of the Year in in Rob Walton of Wal-Mart so it’s only fitting that we get another end of the year labor item courtesy of the International Labor Rights Forum. They recently put out a list of the worst corporations to work for if you want to join a union (PDF). I believe they’ve compiled this list in previous years and some of the same companies often get listed year after year, mainly because they’ve never improved.  The Scrooge’s in this year’s report are Dole, Hershey’s, Philippine Airlines and Wal-Mart (obviously).

The India Cabinet wants to enable businesses with 51-percent foreign direct investment to enter India’s retail sector–basically inviting in big box behemoths like Wal-Mart under the banner of efficiency and consumer choice. But many Indians aren’t buying it. This week, UNI Global Union reports that shops went on strike.

via Wal-Mart Circles Indian Markets, and Indians Push Back – Working In These Times.

These people know what’s up. All of their small businesses will be eradicated once a big box moves in.

I wish that more communities would actually explore the route that the residents of Saranac Lake did.

It took nearly five years — the recession added to the challenge — but the organizers reached their $500,000 goal last spring. By then, some 600 people had chipped in an average of $800 each. And so, on Oct. 29, as an early winter storm threatened the region, the Saranac Lake Community Store opened its doors to the public for the first time. By 9:30 in the morning, the store, in a former restaurant space on Main Street opposite the Hotel Saranac, was packed with shoppers, well-wishers and the curious.

I’ve read of a similar story in the book Big Box Swindle. There’s a store called the Merc which the Times article also cites.

“There was a great concern that Main Street would fail if we didn’t have a store to replace the Stage,” said Sharon Earhart, who was director of the Powell chamber of commerce at the time. Ms. Earhart and a few other residents raised more than $400,000 from local residents in three months by selling $500 shares, and opened the Merc.

This has got to be the first time I have ever in all the years of blogging written something good about Wal-Mart. They are using their massive power of scale to essentially regulate like a government agency would.

Wal-Mart is banning a controversial flame retardant found in hundreds of consumer goods, from couches to cameras to child car seats, telling its suppliers to come up with safer alternatives.

In perhaps the boldest example yet of "retail regulation," Wal-Mart is stepping ahead of federal regulators and using its muscle as the world’s largest retailer to move away from a class of chemicals researchers say endanger human health and the environment.

I am truly shocked that they would actually do this. Is it because they fear future litigation and sense that to stop using this chemical now would be less costly?

Some people might be wondering why wouldn’t an area that could benefit from the development and jobs of a huge conglomerate want it there? I think this excerpt does a good job of explaining why.

As District residents, many of Ward 4 in particular, we are coming together to say “No!” to this; no to the the corporate takeover of our neighborhood, no to jobs that will be lost if Wal-Mart opens, no to the driving down of wages in other retail jobs that accompanies Wal-Mart, no to the closing of small businesses (current and future) due to Wal-Mart’s presence, no to the poverty wages that Wal-Mart pays their employees, no to the sweatshop wages that the workers that make many products for Wal-Mart stores are paid, no to the funding of conservative political candidates by Wal-Mart executives and PACs, some of whom oppose Statehood for the District, no to the tax burden that Wal-Mart adds by not paying its employees enough to afford the limited health care that it offers to some, no to the Wal-Mart’s discrimination against women, and on, and on, and on.

On and on indeed! People in New York City should also be wary of the superstore entering its borders. It would most certainly change the financial make up of whatever area it were to go into.

It is the height of hypocrisy for Wal-Mart to complain about collusion among its adversaries. The beast from Bentonville has never hesitated to use every trick at its disposal – including the funding of front groups – to advance its expansion efforts. Over the summer it succeeded in getting permission to build a second store in Chicago by using tactics such as creating fake community groups and hiring low-income people to pose as demonstrators supposedly eager to get a Wal-Mart job. The company also pretended to have seriously negotiated with unions on wage rates for the store.

via Wal-Mart Plays the Victim | Dirt Diggers Digest.

Could it be that the millions of dollars that the corporation has paid to the likes of Edelman and other PR groups hasn’t had the result they wanted?

Wal-Mart may feel that the likes of Safeway and Supervalu are violating some unspoken rule by supporting site fights, but it has broken every rule in the book itself in pursuit of endless expansion. But rather than defending those rivals, the most important thing is to be sure Wal-Mart does not exploit this issue to put shackles on community groups and unions, which are often the only forces working against the company’s quest to take over everything.

Furthermore, it’s a free market isn’t it (sarcasm)? If you can’t deal with your competitors going after you then well….

The drumbeat of “news” around Wal-Mart’s entry into Chicago’s retail market continued yesterday, as the local media continued to print Wal-Mart’s press release promising jobs city-wide and wages that start at 50 cents above the minimum wage. And Mayor Daley demanded answers from labor leaders in Chicago for their opposition to the mega-retailer’s urban expansion. “They’re up to the highest point that no other retailer pays at the beginning salary. And they don’t pay that in the suburban area. No other retailer has gone that far,” Daley said, before launching into a tirade that Fran Spielman noted hinted at playing the race card, as the mayor did four years ago when he vetoed the so-called big-box ordinance.

“Why is it only in the African-American and Hispanic [neighborhoods of Chicago] that you cannot build a Wal-Mart? We built one on the West Side and no one complains about it. Those people who work there don’t complain. Those ex-offenders don’t complain. … That’s sales tax for us [for] public transportation, schools and parks,” he said. “If it’s built in a suburb, there’s not one controversy. Not one controversy dealing with the development. And why is it now there’s a controversy? It’s in the African-American community. You ask me.”

via Daley’s Wal-Mart Drama Continues – Chicagoist.

Wal-Mart like most chain stores when they come into a neighborhood do more harm than good. Greg LeRoy has written all about this. Also, there is controversy when a Wal-Mart is built in suburbs all over America. People have stood up and fought back. There are people in Manhattan still fighting the entry of Wal-Mart into that borough. Lastly fifty cents above the minimum wage is not a living wage. Besides the sales tax revenue is Wal-Mart going to pay any other type of corporate taxes or is the city of Chicago giving them a break on those?

The American Booksellers Association asked the Justice Department’s antitrust division to investigate “predatory” pricing of books sold by Amazon.com Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp.

“We ask that the Department of Justice investigate practices by Amazon.com, Walmart and Target that we believe constitute illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers,” nine ABA board members wrote in a letter addressed to Christine Varney, the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division.

via Booksellers Seek Probe on ‘Predatory’ Amazon.com, Target Prices – Bloomberg.com.

This is just like everything else a big corporation would do when competing in the marketplace. They move in then undercut the competition with lower prices. When the competition is gone you will then see prices raised. It is unjust. Although with the online element of Amazon I would gather that their predatory pricing is capable of major damage.

I wasn’t going to blog about this but then the audacity of Wal-Mart really got me thinking. It turns out that the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Canada have been running a very successful website at walmartworkerscanada.ca. The reason why I think this site is so great is because of what Wade Rathke in his latest book talks about and that is workers organizing through minority unionism and worker centers. While not all Wal-Mart stores in Canada and certainly none of the ones in the US have recognized unions via a government approved election. This still doesn’t mean that workers can’t organize outside of the workplace and there’s nothing any corporation especially Wal-Mart can do to stop them.

So Wal-Mart is trying to thwart this website because of what it represents and what it is doing and that is organizing workers against Wal-Mart’s will. Sure they’ve closed down stores who have tried to unionize the “normal” way (in Canada) and have fought attempts via the NLRA process in the US. However, this sort of organizing is something that is harder to stop.

The Starbucks Union is built on a similar idea. Also, before the Smithfield plant in Tar Hell, NC was finally unionized by the UFCW in the United States they too implemented direct action and minority unionism tactics for years. This sort of organizing can also be seen with the AFL-CIO’s Working America and WashTech.

In the end Wal-Mart should know that you can’t really take down a website. If they have to change some things in order to not infringe on their “trademark” then I’m sure it would be done. Also, worst case scenario do not think that a website can’t go underground! If people in Iran can find ways to organize and use the Internet as well as in Burma. Do you really think you’re going to stop the Canadians?

So Wal-Mart got a lot of press last week for the announcement that it would be creating something it called a sustainability index.

Walmart today announced plans to develop a worldwide sustainable product index during a meeting with 1,500 of its suppliers, associates and sustainability leaders at its home office. The index will establish a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of products.

“Customers want products that are more efficient, that last longer and perform better,” said Mike Duke, Walmart’s president and CEO. “And increasingly they want information about the entire lifecycle of a product so they can feel good about buying it. They want to know that the materials in the product are safe, that it was made well and that it was produced in a responsible way.

You have to give credit to their PR people (Edelman?). I mean this is one class A PR effort. When I heard about this earlier in the week I honestly did not really care to think much about it. I figured at least they were trying to do something good for a change. Now that I’ve read Philip Mattera’s surgical smackdown I now have a change of mind!

Rating products is a good idea. It’s already being done by various non-profit organizations that bring independence and legitimacy to the process. Wal-Mart, by contrast, brings a lot of negative baggage. In recent years, Wal-Mart has used a purported commitment to environmental responsibility to draw attention away from its abysmal record with regard to labor relations, wage and hour regulations, and employment discrimination laws. It also wants us to forget its scandalous tax avoidance policies and its disastrous impact on small competitors. The idea that a company with a business model based on automobile-dependent customers and exploitative supplier factories on the other side of the globe can be considered sustainable should be dismissed out of hand. Yet Wal-Mart is skilled at greenwashing and is, alas, being taken seriously by many observers who should know better.

They are indeed very skilled at their messaging and spin. They’ve made it into a science really. I honestly get tired of blogging about Wal-Mart but when you’re the biggest corporation in the world doing so many bad things I guess you make good copy.