Labor Watchdog Slams Wal-Mart for Chinese Suppliers’ Abuses

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5250/labor_watchdog_slam_wal-mart_for_chinese_suppliers_abuses/

Monday November 30 5:40 pm


Shoppers wheel their purchases out of a Wal-Mart store in Los Angeles, Calif., before dawn on Black Friday, 2009. The annual sales bonanza is held one day after the Thanksgiving holiday. (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)


By Jeremy Gantz

You'll have to excuse us here at Working In These Times, as the Thanksgiving holiday break caused us to miss an important—but perhaps unsurprising—story last week.

A few days before Wal-Mart successfully prevented "Black Friday" shopper fatalities (unlike last year), the world's largest retailer was slammed by the human rights group China Labor Watch (CLW) for allowing a litany of worker abuses in at least five of the countless Chinese factories that together produce $18 billion worth of products for company.

The report, "Wal-Mart Standards Fail, Workers Suffer," attempts to "illustrate systematic violations…in Wal-Mart's supply chain," the New York-based group said.

In a sense, the report's big news isn't news at all: It's about what hasn't happened. CLW 's criticisms focus on how little Wal-Mart has genuinely and systematically changed its practices in response to previous criticisms, instead focusing on image and individual factory improvements while conducting lackluster audits that fail to uncover all labor violations.

"Corporate codes of conduct and factory auditing alone are not enough to strengthen workers’ rights if corporations are unwilling to pay the production costs associated with such codes," the report notes. "As the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart leverages its massive product orders to purchase goods at low prices, and workers suffer the financial burden."

Although Wal-Mart's "Ethical Standards" team has promised to create new sourcing policies, force its supplier factories to adhere to higher standards, and revamp the company's audit system, CLW's investigations of Wal-Mart suppliers "routinely identified their failure to implement even Wal-Mart’s most basic standards," the report says.

FULL story at link.