Groups to Complain at Wal-Mart Meeting

[Kadie]

Groups to Complain at Wal-Mart Meeting
By CHUCK BARTELS, Associated Press Writer

Wednesday, June 1, 2005


(06-01) 14:59 PDT LITTLE ROCK (AP) --


Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has customarily used its annual meeting as an opportunity to talk about its power as a retailer and its global reach.


Now, Wal-Mart's critics are using Friday's shareholders' gathering in northwest Arkansas as a stage for airing their complaints about the company's health benefits, wages and other aspects of how the world's largest retailer does business.


The group Wake-Up Wal-Mart, backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, staged events Wednesday to call for states to adopt legislation that would require Wal-Mart to provide employees affordable health care.


Wake-Up Wal-Mart director Paul Blank said the group wants to do more than create media pressure on the Bentonville-based retailer.


"It is a little bit broader than public opinion. This is a grass roots movement across the country of Americans who want to change Wal-Mart," Blank said.

more...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/06/01/financial/f145905D73.DTL

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. Good news

It's about time.

[Cha]

2. "Wake Up Walmart"..

What about WAKE UP Mainstream media? Today walmart..tomorrow the World!

[gizmo1979]

3. keep beating on them

it seems to be working.they are losing market share.

[Voltaire99]

4. Went into a Wal-Mart for the first time ever last week.

It was unavoidable, as they were the only ones in town stocking Razor scooters, and the deadline for this present was the next day. ...Don't ask. :-(

Anyway, despite my believe that Bushism is the theory and Wal-Mart the practice, there I was, inside the belly of the beast at last. Mrs. Voltaire was galled, and frankly, so was I.

Inside it reeked. Good lord, did it smell--a scent like Elmer's Glue. Almost as shocking was the ragged landscape of junky merchandise, organized seemingly by whim, and very shoddily piled up, with no concession to style evident anywhere. Harsh lighting, no better than naked bulbs, interrogated us. Everywhere in this unhappy place you could find Henri Bergson's "encrustation of the mechanical upon the living." I have been to markets in developing countries that had one hundred times the vivacity and humor.

The workers looked depressive or stricken to a one, none perhaps so much as the poor, tired, joyless young woman who rang us up with such torpor that when she had nudged over the receipt, she melted away into herself without a word. Alive enough to have strength to die, as the Thomas Hardy poem goes.

Before we could get outside it burned in me, the thought: to this the American Dream has been reduced, a faceless, empty, bad-smelling warehouse, peopled by the sad and exploited, where the savings of a dollar here or there is the price for which we have strangled community-owned small business, let alone the decencies of fair labor practices. No wonder that the experience feels slovenly, petty, dispirited, corrupt.

As Jamie Delano once wrote, "This is not living. Where are the men of righteous rage, the women who know the worth of life?"