An Empire Built on Bargains Remakes the Working World

[OneBlueSky]

Wal-Mart is so powerful that it moves the economies of entire countries, bringing profit and pain. The prices can’t be beat, but the wages can.

By Abigail Goldman and Nancy Cleeland
Los Angeles Times
November 23, 2003
(First of three parts)

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walmart23nov23a,1,7637894.story?coll=la-home-headlines
(registration required)

LAS VEGAS — Chastity Ferguson kept watch over four sleepy children late one Friday as she flipped a pack of corn dogs into a cart at her new favorite grocery store: Wal-Mart.

The Wal-Mart Supercenter, a pink stucco box twice as big as a Home Depot, combines a full-scale supermarket with the usual discount mega-store. For the 26-year-old Ferguson, the draw is simple.

"You can't beat the prices," said the hotel cashier, who makes $400 a week. "I come here because it's cheap."

Across town, another mother also is familiar with the Supercenter's low prices. Kelly Gray, the chief breadwinner for five children, lost her job as a Raley's grocery clerk last December after Wal-Mart expanded into the supermarket business here. California-based Raley's closed all 18 of its stores in the area, laying off 1,400 workers.

Gray earned $14.68 an hour with a pension and family health insurance. Wal-Mart grocery workers typically make less than $9 an hour.

"It's like somebody came and broke into your home and took something huge and important away from you," said the 36-year-old. "I was scared. I cried. I shook."

- much more . . .

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walmart23nov23a,1,7637894.story?coll=la-home-headlines
(registration required)

[wryter2000]

1. Not in Oaktown

Our city council has banned their super stores.

[realFedUp]

2. Don't empires eventually fail?

[realFedUp]

3. 2nd part of a REALLY IMPORTANT SERIES

(Everyone should read this series at the LA Times)

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walmart24nov24,1,3188309.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Scouring the Globe to Give Shoppers an $8.63 Polo Shirt
Wal-Mart, once a believer in buying American, extracts ever lower prices from 10,000 suppliers worldwide. Workers struggle to keep pace.
By Nancy Cleeland, Evelyn Iritani and Tyler Marshall
Times Staff Writers

November 24, 2003

SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS -- When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. demands a lower price for the shirts and shorts it sells by the millions, the consequences are felt in a remote Chinese industrial town, at a port in Bangladesh and here in Honduras, under the corrugated metal roof of the Cosmos clothing factory.

Isabel Reyes, who has worked at the plant for 11 years, pushes fabric through her sewing machine 10 hours a day, struggling to meet the latest quota scrawled on a blackboard.

She now sews sleeves onto shirts at the rate of 1,200 garments a day. That's two shirts a minute, one sleeve every 15 seconds.

"There is always an acceleration," said Reyes, 37, who can't lift a cooking pot or hold her infant daughter without the anti-inflammatory pills she gulps down every few hours. "The goals are always increasing, but the pay stays the same."

Reyes, who earns the equivalent of $35 a week, says her bosses blame the long hours and low wages on big U.S. companies and their demands for ever-cheaper merchandise. Wal-Mart, the biggest company of them all, is the Cosmos factory's main customer.

Reyes is skeptical. Why, she asked, would a company in the richest country in the world care about a few pennies on a pair of shorts?

[realFedUp]

4. The third part of this series link here:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walmart25nov25,1,3647063.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Third of three parts

Grocery Unions Battle to Stop Invasion of the Giant Stores
Wal-Mart plans to open 40 of its nonunion Supercenters in California. Labor is fighting the expected onslaught, but the big retailer rarely concedes defeat.

By Nancy Cleeland and Abigail Goldman
Times Staff Writers

November 25, 2003

Inglewood seemed to offer the perfect home for a new Wal-Mart Supercenter, with low-income residents hungry for bargains and a mayor craving the sales-tax revenue that flows from big-box stores.

But nearly two years after deciding to build on a 60-acre lot near the Hollywood Park racetrack, Wal-Mart is nowhere near pouring concrete. Instead, the world's biggest company is at war with a determined opposition, led by organized labor.

"A line has been drawn in the sand," said Donald H. Eiesland, president of Inglewood Park Cemetery and the head of Partners for Progress, a local pro-business group. "It's the union against Wal-Mart. This has nothing to do with Inglewood."

Indeed, similar battles are breaking out across California, and both sides are digging in hard. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wants to move into the grocery business throughout the state by opening 40 Supercenters, each a 200,000-square-foot behemoth that combines a fully stocked food market with a discount mega-store — entirely staffed by non-union employees. The United Food and Commercial Workers and the Teamsters are trying to thwart that effort, hoping to save relatively high-paying union jobs.

The unions have amassed a seven-figure war chest and are calling in political chits to fight Wal-Mart. The giant retailer is aggressively countering every move, and some analysts believe that Wal-Mart's share of grocery sales in the state could eventually reach 20%. The state's first Supercenter is set to open in March in La Quinta, near Palm Springs.

continued