Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism
Charles Fishman
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Although it’s got all the hallmarks of agitprop–tabloid urgency, arguments that don’t always hold up under scrutiny–The High Cost of Low Price effectively uses the stories of people like Esry to make its point: Wal-Mart is bad for the country in ways that can’t simply be explained away by free-market economics. The movie appeals to the emotions to grow resentment against Wal-Mart for its treatment of an underpaid and overtaxed workforce and for the devastating effect a new store, stuffed to the ceiling with vast mountains of goods at “everyday low prices,” has on the economic fabric of the surrounding community. But while Greenwald’s polemics aren’t without foundation–on January 12 alone a Pennsylvania judge ruled that workers could move ahead with a class-action suit alleging they were pressured to work off the clock and the Maryland legislature in effect voted to force Wal-Mart to spend at least 8 percent of its payroll on employee health benefits–you have to turn to the bumper crop of new books on the company for context. It’s one thing to hear in the film about a corporate jet full of union busters that zooms in from headquarters to quash the faintest whisper of labor organizing and quite another to read the detailed schematic of Wal-Mart’s aggressively anti-union culture as laid out by Nelson Lichtenstein in his essay in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism, an authoritative anthology he edited that came out last month from the New Press.
Without resorting to red-state-baiting, Lichtenstein makes a good case for linking the company and the current administration: “Like the conservatism at the heart of the Reagan-Bush ascendancy, Wal-Mart emerged out of a rural South that barely tolerated New Deal social regulation, the civil rights revolution, or the feminist impulse. In their place, the corporation has projected an ideology of family, faith, and small-town sentimentality that coexists in strange harmony with a world of transnational commerce, stagnant living standards, and a stressful work life.”
Ultimately the Wal-Mart difference is simple: size. “Wal-Mart is increasingly beyond the control of the market forces that capitalism relies on to enforce fair play,” says Fishman. “Wal-Mart isn’t subject to the market forces because it is creating them.” Take the all-too-typical example of the Peoria-based L.R. Nelson sprinkler company: Nelson had been manufacturing high-quality lawn sprinklers since 1911 and sold many of them at Wal-Mart. But the retailer regularly demands that suppliers cut prices year after year–and often tells them just how to do it. Last year Nelson laid off almost all of its Peoria factory workers because Wal-Mart said unless they cut costs by moving manufacturing to China, the company could no longer do business with them.
