Pioneer Press

David Nassar
Wed Apr 30                     [back to top]      

It's tax rebate time, and no one is hungrier for the tax rebate checks arriving in mailboxes today than Wal-Mart. The retailer is advertising tax-rebate sales and has offered to cash the checks for free -- all in hopes that consumers will spend their newfound money at Wal-Mart stores. But spending your tax rebate at Wal-Mart won't stimulate the economy -- and here's why:

Despite bringing in over $378 billion last year, Wal-Mart repeatedly underpays its American workforce. More than 80 wage & hour lawsuits, including a recently certified class action lawsuit in California, are currently pending against the company. Plus, it faces more than 200 discrimination lawsuits for unfair promotion practices, pay discrepancies and other issues, including the nation's largest workplace gender discrimination lawsuit. By failing to fairly compensate its employees, Wal-Mart cheats states out of income tax revenues. Wal-Mart also pays poorly. While the company seeks to benefit from the government's rebate payout, Wal-Mart's low wages means store employees have little or no disposable income to spend to stimulate the economy. Think about what even a small raise for Wal-Mart's 1 million+ workers would mean nationally, or what it would mean to your city or town if everyone at your local Wal-Mart got a raise.

Wal-Mart sources the vast majority of its products from countries overseas, meaning most of the cost of a given Wal-Mart product doesn't go into the U.S. economy. Rather than boosting the U.S. economy, Wal-Mart has played a major role in exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs to countries with low labor and environmental standards. Meanwhile, the company has embraced unions in its Chinese stores and has negotiated with them to raise Chinese salaries. Apparently, what is good enough for China is not good enough here at home.

Wal-Mart underfunds its health care plan and cuts corners whenever possible, forcing many of its employees to postpone care, thus decreasing their productivity and increasing the eventual cost of their treatment. In desperation, many of them rely on state-sponsored care and drain yet more funds from American communities. That means when Wal-Mart employees end up in emergency rooms, it's U.S. taxpayers who end up footing the bill. If Wal-Mart were truly interested in stimulating the economy, it would begin to adequately fund its health care plan and take care of its own Associates.

Wal-Mart routinely dodges state and local taxes, meaning money spent at a Wal-Mart store won't end up in your community. Wal-Mart actively works to challenge property tax assessments and creates complex real estate arrangements to obscure how much taxes the company owes. When Wal-Mart dodges its tax burden, it takes precious revenues away from cities and states to pay for roads, schools and other services. In turn, individual taxpayers are forced to pay more to make up the difference (which takes more money out of their pockets) or get by with less.

With its low price focus, Wal-Mart may appear to help the U.S. economy. But, the reality is that with its poor wages and benefits, massive China sourcing and tax avoidance, Wal-Mart makes its workers and the communities where it operates poorer.

As our nation's largest employer and most financially-successful company, Wal-Mart is a singular American institution. It occupies a unique position in our world by virtue of its size, reach and responsibility for the livelihoods of millions of workers and the needs of billions of consumers. And with such overwhelming influence comes certain moral responsibilities. It is the acceptance or rejection of those responsibilities that determines greatness.

For the time being, Wal-Mart has rejected those responsibilities and because of that choice, the money spent there does nothing of what it could to strengthen our economy. Higher salaries, quality affordable healthcare and paying what they owe like any good American, are just three things Wal-Mart can do tomorrow that will make them a company worthy of our money.

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved. 

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Keep Promise To Debbie

David Nassar
Wal-Mart Watch                                [back to top]      

Remember when Wal-Mart told Jim Shank on April 1 that the company would not claim Debbie Shank's money in her trust so it could be used for her medical care? Apparently, Wal-Mart is not keeping its promise to Debbie and her family. They still have not released a single penny to the Shank family.

In fact, Jim Shank called the bank this week and is no longer authorized to request a statement on the account.

After a massive public outcry against Wal-Mart's efforts to sue this brain-damaged former employee for the money in her trust, Wal-Mart finally agreed in writing to let Debbie keep her money to pay for her ongoing medical care. But it's a month later, and Wal-Mart has failed to make good on its word.

Check out MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight at 8:00pm EST for Jim Shank's thoughts on Wal-Mart's failure to keep its promise.

Wal-Mart did what it needed to do to put out a public relations fire, yet it's not keeping its promise to Debbie Shank and her family. We know that the only way Wal-Mart will act is if we keep the pressure on.

Send an e-mail to tell Wal-Mart's executives that the company needs to keep its promise to the Shank family right now:

http://action.walmartwatch.com/promise

When Wal-Mart tried to grab the little bit of money Debbie Shank has for her medical care, thousands of people like you took action. Together, we called on Wal-Mart to relinquish its claim to the remaining $200,000 settlement money in Debbie's trust fund so her family could continue to pay for her medical expenses.

The national and local media harangued Wal-Mart for its heartless treatment of Debbie Shank. Finally, Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Pat Curran contacted Debbie Shank's family and told Jim Shank that Wal-Mart would not claim the money so the Shank family could use it for Debbie's care.

But despite its promise, the company still retains all rights to the money and has not relinquished the principal or the accrued interest to the family.

Debbie, who is permanently brain-damaged, paralyzed and in a nursing home, needs every penny to cover her current and future care. Wal-Mart needs to surrender the money and all accrued interest immediately.

Please contact Wal-Mart executives and let them know Wal-Mart needs to keep its word to Debbie Shank now:

http://action.walmartwatch.com/promise

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

David Nassar
Wal-Mart Watch

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Is There Any Way to Stop Wal-Mart & Co. from Sweatshop Profiteering?

By T.A. Frank,
Washington Monthly
April 29th, 2008                                   [back to top]      

I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one area, where metals were being chemically treated, workers squatted at the edge of steaming pools as if contemplating a sudden, final swim. The dormitories were filthy: the hallways were strewn with garbage—orange peels, tea leaves—and the only way for anyone to bathe was to fill a bucket with cold water. In a country where workers normally suppress their complaints for fear of getting fired, employees at this factory couldn't resist telling us the truth. "We work so hard for so little pay," said one middle-aged woman with undisguised anger. We could only guess how hard—the place kept no time cards. Painted in large characters on the factory walls was a slogan: "If you don't work hard today, look hard for work tomorrow." Inspirational, in a way.

I was there because, six years ago, I had a job at a Los Angeles firm that specialized in the field of "compliance consulting," or "corporate social responsibility monitoring." It's a service that emerged in the mid-1990s after the press started to report on bad factories around the world and companies grew concerned about protecting their reputations. With an increase of protectionist sentiment in the United States, companies that relied on cheap labor abroad were feeling vulnerable to negative publicity. They still are.

Today, labor standards are once again in the news. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have criticized trade deals such as NAFTA as unfair to American workers, and the new thinking is that trade agreements should include strict labor standards. Obama has cited a recent free trade agreement with Peru as an example of how to go forward. I hope he's right, but let's remember that NAFTA was also hailed, in its day, for including labor protections. Our solutions on paper have proved hard to enforce. Peru attempts to remedy some of the problems of NAFTA, but we're still advancing slowly in the dark.

In the meantime, as governments contemplate such matters on a theoretical level, what's happening on the ground is mostly in the hands of the private sector. Companies police themselves, often using hired outside help. That was the specialty of my company. Visit the Web site of almost any large American retailer or apparel manufacturer and you're likely to see a section devoted to "ethical sourcing" or "our compliance program." (Those are terms for making sure that your suppliers aren't using factories that will land you on the front page of the New York Times.) Read on and you'll often see that the company boasts of having a code of conduct that its suppliers must follow—a code of labor standards by which the factories in question will be regularly measured and monitored. Are they to be believed? Well, yes and no. Private monitoring, if done properly, can do a lot of good. But it's a tricky thing. A simplified story of Nike may be the best way to introduce the origins of the type of work I was in. In the 1960s, Nike (before it was named Nike) based its business on the premise that the company would not manufacture shoes—it would only design and market them. The physical goods would be produced by independent contractors in countries such as Japan or Taiwan, where labor was, at the time, cheap. In short, Nike would be offices, not factories. The idea was innovative and hugely profitable, and countless companies producing everything from sweaters to toys to exercise equipment have since adopted it. It is now standard.

The problem that arose for Nike and many other companies, however, was that the media, starting in the 1990s, began to run stories on terrible labor conditions in factories in Asia. When consumers started to get angry, Nike and many other companies were nonplussed. We're just buying these shoes, they said—it's not our business how Mr. X runs his factory. And they had a point. If, for example, I learned that my dry cleaner was paying his employees less than minimum wage, I might feel bad about it, but I doubt I'd spend hours vetting alternative dry cleaners for labor compliance. I've got too much else to worry about in life, including my shirts. But such musings hardly make for a great press release, and Nike's case included nasty allegations about child labor—twelve-year-old Americans playing with soccer balls sewn by twelve-year-old Pakistanis, that sort of thing. The company's stock value sank.

In this same period, the U.S. Department of Labor, led by Robert Reich, began cracking down on sweatshops within the United States and publicizing the names of firms who were their customers. Because of this, companies such as mine began to offer their services as independent, for-profit monitors of factory labor conditions. We would act as early-warning systems against shady suppliers who mistreated their workers. Based on the reports we provided, our clients could choose either to sever their relations with a given supplier or to pressure them to improve. Business at my old company is still going strong.

In Los Angeles, where small garment shops of, say, thirty employees were the main focus, we usually worked in pairs and did three inspections a day. Outside the country, where the factories were often quite large (several thousand employees) and made anything from toys to gym equipment, we worked alone or in pairs and did one or two a day. The procedures were similar, but the inspections were more thorough abroad. While one of us might tour the work floors to note all the health and safety violations (the gazebo factory, for instance, had no secondary exits, no guarding on machines, no first aid supplies, no eye protection—the list kept going), the other might review permits, employee files, and payroll records to see what shortcomings were apparent on paper alone.

Then we would begin interviewing employees in private, usually twenty or so, hoping to learn from them what our eyes wouldn't tell us. Did the factory confiscate personal documents, such as identity cards, and use them as ransom? (This was most common in the Gulf States, where foreign laborers from places like Bangladesh could find themselves effectively enslaved. But bosses sometimes confiscated national identification documents in China, too.) Were employees free to enter and leave the compound? How many hours a week did they really work—regardless of what the time cards might say?

Unfortunately, we missed stuff. All inspections do. And sometimes it was embarrassing. At one follow-up inspection of a factory in Bangkok at which I'd noted some serious but common wage violations, the auditors who followed me found pregnant employees hiding on the roof and Burmese import workers earning criminally low wages. Whoops. On the other hand, sometimes I was the one who uncovered what others had missed. A lot of it had to do with luck. Was the right document visible on the work floor? Did we choose the right employees for interviews—the ones who were willing to confide in outsiders? If we were working through a translator, was his manner of speaking to people soothing?

The major challenge of inspections was simply staying ahead of the factories we monitored. False time cards and payroll records, whole days spent coaching employees on how to lie during interviews, and even renaming certain factory buildings in order to create a smaller Potemkin village—all of these were techniques used by contractors to try to fool us. We were able to detect some of them. A collection of crisp time cards that showed every employee arriving within seconds of the next was easy to spot as having been punched by a single worker standing alone at the time clock. An employee whose recollection of hours worked differed markedly from her time sheet was another indication of shady bookkeeping. But others were hard to defeat. Employee coaching deserves special attention for its crude effectiveness. The following composite dialogue, in which every answer is a lie, is typical of the sort of thing we endured:

Me: How many days a week do you work?

Employee: Five.

Me: Any overtime?

Employee: Almost never. We get time and a half in pay for overtime.

Me: How much do you make per hour?

Employee: I don't know.

Me: How much did you get for your most recent pay period?

Employee: I can't remember.

Me: Rough idea?

Employee: I can't remember.

Me: How do you deal with the fumes from the glue?

Employee: It's no problem. We have masks. [Note: This was often true—harmful cotton masks that concentrated the fumes.]

Me: How much do you get paid for Sunday work?

Employee: We don't work on Sundays.

Me: Do you have any sort of worker representative here?

Employee: ?

Me: Someone who represents the workers and talks to your bosses?

Employee: ?

Me: What sort of accidents happen here—you know, people bumping themselves, or cutting themselves?

Employee: No accidents.

Such exchanges, needless to say, rarely produced killer testimony. Sometimes we could work around uncooperative interviewees, or we could get them to stumble over their own answers. However, just talking to employees was no guarantee of anything, no matter how gifted an interrogator you were.

Because any inspection misses something, there were factories that managed to embarrass everyone. In 2000, BusinessWeek published an expose about a factory in Guangdong, China, the Chun Si Enterprise Handbag Factory, which made bags for Wal-Mart. Titled "Inside a Chinese Sweatshop: 'A Life of Fines and Beating,'" the article described a nightmarish place in which nine hundred workers were locked in a walled compound all day, and security guards "regularly punched and hit workers for talking back to managers or even for walking too fast." The reporting, by Dexter Roberts and Aaron Bernstein, was superb. Unfortunately, that reporting led to the door of my company, which had been among the auditors monitoring the factory for Wal-Mart. While they had found excessive overtime work and insufficient pay, inspectors had missed the captive workers and physical abuse.

To be sure, the Chun Si Enterprise Handbag Factory episode was a debacle. (I have no inside account of the story, since it took place several years before my arrival.) I suspect, however, that the fault lay with Wal-Mart as much as with the inspectors. I say this because there's a broader point here: Monitoring by itself is meaningless. It only works when the company that's commissioning it has a sincere interest in improving the situation. In the case of Chun Si, inspectors visited five times, according to BusinessWeek, and kept finding trouble. Now, anyone in the business knows that when inspections uncover safety violations or wage underpayment more than once or twice—let alone five times—it's a sign that bigger problems are lurking beneath. Companies rarely get bamboozled about this sort of thing unless they want to.

And many prefer to be bamboozled, because it's cheaper. While companies like to boast of having an ethical sourcing program, such programs make it harder to hire the lowest bidder. Because many companies still want to hire the lowest bidder, "ethical sourcing" often becomes a game. The simplest way to play it is by placing an order with a cheap supplier and ending the relationship once the goods have been delivered. In the meantime, inspectors get sent to evaluate the factory—perhaps several times, since they keep finding problems—until the client, seeing no improvement in the labor conditions, severs the bond and moves on to the next low-priced, equally suspect supplier.

For the half-assed company there are also half-assed monitoring firms. These specialize in performing as many brief, understaffed inspections as they can fit in a day in order to maximize their own profits. That gives their clients plausible deniability: problems undiscovered are problems avoided, and any later trouble can be blamed on the compliance monitors. It is a cozy understanding between client, monitoring company, and supplier that manages to benefit everyone but the workers.

While private monitoring can be misused, however, when it's done right it can really produce positive change. I've seen it. When companies make a genuine effort, the results can be impressive: safe factories that pay legal wages. That sounds modest, but it's actually hard to achieve in any country. Just visit a garment shop in Los Angeles.

At my company, I quickly figured out which clients cared. The first test was whether they conducted "pre-sourcing"—inspections of labor conditions before placing an order instead of after. This small step truly separates the top-rung companies from the pack, because to prescreen is to forgo the temptation of hiring the cheapest suppliers. (Those suppliers are the cheapest because they tend to break the rules, so they usually fail the preliminary inspection.) The second test was whether the company had a long-term relationship with its suppliers. Long-term commitments are what motivate both parties to behave: the supplier wants to preserve the relationship, and the customer wants to preserve its reputation. The third test was whether the company requested unannounced inspections as opposed to ones that were arranged in advance. The advantages of this are self-evident. And the final test was whether the company made inspection results public. This was almost never done.

Who, then, were the good actors of the trade? There are a number of them, actually, but here I'll just point out two that often surprise people. The first is Mattel, the same company that was tarnished last summer by a recall of toys that were found to have lead paint on them. Whatever the chemical flaws of their products, Mattel had a reputation among us monitors for earnestness in pressuring its suppliers to improve their labor practices. It also owned and operated a few factories in China—a country with dreadful factories—that were exemplary. These facilities were regularly inspected by independent monitors, and anyone who wants to know what they've found there can visit Mattel's Web site: the reports are public. The second unexpected company is Nike, which long ago took its bad press to heart and remade itself into a role model of how to carry out thoughtful labor monitoring. Nike has become such a leader in the field that its Web site may be the single best resource for those trying to understand the difficult business of international labor standards. Not only does Nike prescreen factories, it also discloses the name and address of every factory it uses and makes public much of its monitoring.

But let's not be confined to praise. You may get the sense that I'm not Wal-Mart's biggest fan. You'd be right. I betray no confidence here, since Wal-Mart wasn't a client of ours while I was at my company. Nevertheless, I still got to visit plenty of its supplier factories. That's because any given factory usually has more than one customer, and during an audit we would always ask the bosses to name their other customers. Wal-Mart was often one of them. And its suppliers were among the worst I saw—dangerous, nasty, and poorly paid even by local (usually Chinese) measures. I noticed that Wal-Mart claimed to require factories to maintain decent labor standards—but why did it seem to think it could find them among the lowest bidders?

Now, I know about good and bad actors mostly because I saw them directly. But ordinary consumers searching on company Web sites—Walmart.com, Nike.com, etc.—can find out almost everything they need to know just sitting at their desks. For instance, just now I learned from Wal-Mart's latest report on sourcing that only 26 percent of its audits are unannounced. By contrast, of the inspections Target conducts, 100 percent are unannounced. That's a revealing difference. And companies that do what Nike does—prescreen, build long-term relationships, disclose producers—make a point of emphasizing that fact, and are relatively transparent. Companies that don't are more guarded. (When in doubt, doubt.)

As for those who feel especially strongly about the issue and kick up a (peaceful) fuss about sweatshops, I think they're doing a valuable thing. Even when they take actions that are sometimes off-base—such as continuing to boycott Nike when its competitors are the bigger problem—the effect is still, overall, good: it scares businesses into taking compliance more seriously. Boycotts, protests, letters to Congress, saber-rattling lawmakers, media exposes—they do have an impact. And just imagine if members of Congress or the executive branch made an effort to praise or shame companies for their records with foreign suppliers and to encourage transparent monitoring in the private sector. I suspect it would do more for international labor standards in months than the most intricate trade agreements could do in years.

I don't pretend that everything monitoring brings about is for the best. An example: Mattel's factories in China are superb, but workers there often earn less than their peers in shadier factories because their employers confine them to shorter workweeks to avoid paying overtime. Another: You may rightly hate the idea of child labor, but firing a fourteen-year-old in Indonesia from a factory job because she is fourteen does nothing but deprive her of income she is understandably desperate to keep. (She'll find worse work elsewhere, most likely, or simply go hungry.) A third: Small village factories may break the rules, but they often operate in a humane and basically sensible way, and I didn't enjoy lecturing their owners about the necessity of American-style time cards and fifteen-minute breaks. But labor standards anywhere have a tendency to create such problems. They're enacted in the hope that the good outweighs the bad.

One final thought: If you're like me, part of you feels that Peru's labor standards are basically Peru's business. It's our job to worry about standards here at home. But that sort of thinking doesn't work well in an era of globalization. We are, like it or not, profoundly affected by the labor standards of our trading partners. If their standards are low, they exert a downward pressure on our own. That's why monitoring and enforcement have such an important role to play. We don't expect developing nations to match us in what their workers earn. (A few dollars a day is a fortune in many nations.) But when a Chinese factory saves money by making its employees breathe hazardous fumes and, by doing so, closes down a U.S. factory that spends money on proper ventilation and masks, that's wrong. It's wrong by any measure. And that's what we can do something about if we try. It's the challenge we face as the walls come down, the dolls, pajamas, and televisions come in, and, increasingly, the future of our workers here is tied to that of workers who are oceans away.

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Wal-Mart's perfect storm paying off

By Kimberly Morrison,
The Morning News
April 29th, 2008                              [back to top]      

Wal-Mart was hesitant to credit a tough economy and penny-pinching consumers with its solid performance in recent months, but said it plans to capitalize on cash-strapped shoppers by continuing to focus on low prices.

"I feel like we are well positioned to take advantage of the current market," Eduardo Castro-Wright, executive vice president and CEO of the Wal-Mart Stores division for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., said during a Tuesday morning Lehman Brothers retailing conference broadcast online.

The retailer announced the same morning plans to cash economic stimulus checks for free, enhance rollbacks through July and offer money-saving tips to consumers.

Castro-Wright downplayed the role of the economy in better-than-expected comparable store sales and increased earnings guidance in February and March, instead crediting improvements in merchandise assortment, management changes and a better store experience.

"I'm not going to say that (the economy) has not played a factor, but I'd like to think fundamentally the business is a lot stronger than it was six months ago," Castro-Wright said.

The economy is also considerably weaker.

Gas prices have increased almost 25 percent in the first quarter, reaching $3.59 this week. That's pushing squeamish consumers also facing increased food prices, job worries and plummeting home values to trade down, said Patricia Edwards, fund manager with Seattle-based Wentworth, Hauser and Violich.

"They couldn't have known this was coming, but they got to the right place at the right time, and the economy decided to help them out with that," Edwards said.

Castro-Wright said the retailer continues to see declines in its shoppers using credit for payment at U.S. stores, and that's clamping down on discretionary purchases.

"People don't have as much credit as they used to, and clearly this is having an impact on how they behave," Castro-Wright said. "Price matters today more than ever before."

New York-based Citigroup said 72 percent of consumers it surveyed gave Wal-Mart credit for the lowest grocery prices, a perception that will pay off for the retailer, according to a purchasing behavior study the company released last month.

"We believe Wal-Mart's business will benefit from the challenging consumer environment due to its strong value proposition," Deborah Weinswig, Citi analyst, said in the report.

Analysts are also confident the retailer's improved merchandising and inventory management is paying off, making it easier for Wal-Mart to attract affluent shoppers.

Castro-Wright reported that traffic at affluent-traited Wal-Mart stores outpaced the rest of the chain.

"We are very well-positioned, because first of all, we have credibility in price leadership, and you don't build that overnight," Castro-Wright said.

The retailing executive outlined Wal-Mart's growth strategy, a plan that is the brainchild of merchandising head John Fleming, who the company hired in 2005 as part of a management shake-up to turnaround lagging categories like apparel.

The company will focus on growth categories including entertainment, apparel, pets, and seasonal. Castro-Wright said the company's site-to-store program, a concept introduced in 2007 that allows consumers to circumvent shipping costs by sending online purchases to the store, has been "incredibly successful" with doubled online sales in one year.

"I know you've been hearing about how bad apparel is for us, and that is starting to turn around," Castro-Wright said.

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Wal-Mart to cash economic stimulus checks for free

Associated Press
04.29.08                               [back to top]      

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Wal-Mart says it won't charge a fee to cash customers' economic stimulus checks.

The world's largest retailer said Tuesday that no purchase will be required. Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) typically charges up to $3 to cash payroll or government checks.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. says customers can also, without charge, load the stimulus checks onto the company's Wal-Mart MoneyCard, which acts as a prepaid debit card. The company's Sam's Club warehouse stores will also cash the checks at no charge.

The tax rebates are expected to reach 130 million households. The payments range up to $600 for individuals and $1,200 for married couples, plus $300 per child for eligible parents.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

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Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL,
New York Times
April 26th, 2008                              [back to top]      

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to “All year!� now that Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of New Zealand’s national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

Food has moved around the world since Europeans brought tea from China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.

Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of mega-markets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe — like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco — has accelerated the trend.

But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.

Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

“We’re shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre,� said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a recent European Union report on food imports.

He noted that Britain, for example, imports — and exports — 15,000 tons of waffles a year, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia. More important, Mr. Watkiss said, “we are not paying the environmental cost of all that travel.�

Europe is poised to change that. This year the European Commission in Brussels announced that all freight-carrying flights into and out of the European Union would be included in the trading bloc’s emissions-trading program by 2012, meaning permits will have to be purchased for the pollution they generate.

The commission is negotiating with the global shipping organization, the International Maritime Organization, over various alternatives to reduce greenhouse gases. If there is no solution by year’s end, sea freight will also be included in Europe’s emissions-trading program, said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Commission’s Environment Directorate. “We’re really ready to have everyone reduce — or pay in some way,� she said.

The European Union, the world’s leading food importer, has increased imports 20 percent in the last five years. The value of fresh fruit and vegetables imported by the United States, in second place, nearly doubled from 2000 to 2006.

Under a little-known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.

Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated. The debate has put some companies on the defensive, including Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain, known as a vocal promoter of green initiatives.

Some of those companies say that they are working to limit greenhouse gases produced by their businesses but that the question is how to do it. They oppose regulation and new taxes and, partly in an effort to head them off, are advocating consumer education instead.

Tesco, for instance, is introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product’s carbon footprint.

Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products, like flowers grown in the tropics instead of in energy-hungry European greenhouses.

“This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose weight,� a spokesman for Tesco, Trevor Datson, said.

Better transportation networks have sharply reduced the time required to ship food abroad. For instance, improved roads in Africa have helped cut the time it takes for goods to go from farms on that continent to stores in Europe to 4 days, compared with 10 days not too many years ago.

And with far cheaper labor costs in African nations, Morocco and Egypt have displaced Spain in just a few seasons as important suppliers of tomatoes and salad greens to central Europe.

“If there’s an opportunity for cheaper production in terms of logistics or supply it will be taken,� said Ed Moorehouse, a consultant to the food industry in London, adding that some of these shifts also create valuable jobs in the developing world.

The economics are compelling. For example, Norwegian cod costs a manufacturer $1.36 a pound to process in Europe, but only 23 cents a pound in Asia.

The ability to transport food cheaply has given rise to new and booming businesses.

“In the past few years there have been new plantations all over the center of Italy,� said Antonio Baglioni, export manager of Apofruit, one of Italy’s largest kiwi exporters.

Kiwis from Sanifrutta, another Italian exporter, travel by sea in refrigerated containers: 18 days to the United States, 28 to South Africa and more than a month to reach New Zealand.

Some studies have calculated that as little as 3 percent of emissions from the food sector are caused by transportation. But Mr. Watkiss, the Oxford economist, said the percentage was growing rapidly. Moreover, imported foods generate more emissions than generally acknowledged because they require layers of packaging and, in the case of perishable food, refrigeration.

Britain, with its short growing season and powerful supermarket chains, imports 95 percent of its fruit and more than half of its vegetables. Food accounts for 25 percent of truck shipments in Britain, according to the British environmental agency, DEFRA.

Mr. Datson of Tesco acknowledged that there were environmental consequences to the increased distances food travels, but he said his company was merely responding to consumer appetites. “The offer and range has been growing because our customers want things like snap peas year round,� Mr. Datson said. “We don’t see our job as consumer choice editing.�

Global supermarket chains like Tesco and Carrefour, spreading throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, cater to a market for convenience foods, like washed lettuce and cut vegetables. They also help expand the reach of global brands.

Pringles potato chips, for example, are now sold in more than 180 countries, though they are manufactured in only a handful of places, said Kay Puryear, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, which makes Pringles.

Proponents of taxing transportation fuel say it would end such distortions by changing the economic calculus.

“Food is traveling because transport has become so cheap in a world of globalization,� said Frederic Hauge, head of Norway’s environmental group Bellona. “If it was just a matter of processing fish cheaper in China, I’d be happy with it traveling there. The problem is pollution.�

The European Union has led the world in proposals to incorporate environmental costs into the price consumers pay for food.

Switzerland, which does not belong to the E.U., already taxes trucks that cross its borders.

In addition to bringing airlines under its emission-trading program, Brussels is also considering a freight charge specifically tied to the environmental toll from food shipping to shift the current calculus that “transporting freight is cheaper than producing goods locally,� the commission said.

The problem is measuring the emissions. The fact that food travels farther does not necessarily mean more energy is used. Some studies have shown that shipping fresh apples, onions and lamb from New Zealand might produce lower emissions than producing the goods in Europe, where — for example — storing apples for months would require refrigeration.

But those studies were done in New Zealand, and the food travel debate is inevitably intertwined with economic interests.

Last month, Tony Burke, the Australian minister for agriculture, fisheries and forestry, said that carbon footprinting and labeling food miles — the distance food has traveled — was “nothing more than protectionism.�

Shippers have vigorously fought the idea of levying a transportation fuel tax, noting that if some countries repealed those provisions of the Chicago Convention, it would wreak havoc with global trade, creating an uneven patchwork of fuel taxes.

It would also give countries that kept the exemption a huge trade advantage.

Some European retailers hope voluntary green measures like Tesco’s labeling — set to begin later this year — will slow the momentum for new taxes and regulations.

The company will begin testing the labeling system, starting with products like orange juice and laundry detergent.

Customers may be surprised by what they discover.

Box Fresh Organics, a popular British brand, advertises that 85 percent of its vegetables come from the British Midlands. But in winter, in its standard basket, only the potatoes and carrots are from Britain. The grapes are South African, the fennel is from Spain and the squash is Italian.

Today’s retailers could not survive if they failed to offer such variety, Mr. Moorehouse, the British food consultant, said.

“Unfortunately,� he said, “we’ve educated our customers to expect cheap food, that they can go to the market to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. All year. 24/7.�

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Most Grocery Chains Not Jumping On Buying-Limit Bandwagon

By Rebecca Townsend
and Ian Berry,
Dow Jones
April 25th, 2008                                            [back to top]      

CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- The move by some wholesale food outlets to restrict purchases of certain food staples caught the public's attention, but major supermarket chains aren't following suit, and food industry analysts say U.S. consumers shouldn't be worried about shortages.

Food prices have risen sharply this year, driven by increased global demand, drought and biofuel production. The March consumer price index reported food prices up 4.5% versus a year ago.

On Wednesday, Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) indicated it had decided to limit bulk rice purchases in some stores. Likewise, Sam's Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), said it was limiting customers to four bags at a time of some types of rice.

However, the purchasing restrictions on staples like rice are limited to wholesale outlets, as several retail grocery store chains said Friday they weren't taking similar action.

Publix Super Markets Inc. (PUSH) has no plans to limit purchases of rice or any other items, said Dwaine Stevens, spokesman for the Florida-based grocery chain. Stevens called the possibility that the company would ever have to consider limits "not very likely at all."

Likewise, Food Lion LLC stores are "not limiting sales whatsoever," said spokeswoman Karen Peterson.

The Salisbury, N.C.-based grocery chain, which is a subsidiary of the Delhaize Group (DEG), maintains continuous contact with suppliers and hasn't heard anything from them to indicate rice purchase limits are necessary, she said.

While limits were placed on rice purchases at Sam's Club stores, spokeswoman Ashley Hardie said Wal-Mart's retail stores were not affected.

Safeway Inc. (SWY) and Kroger Co. (KR) were not immediately available for comment.

The Food Situation Is Not Dire - Industry

Ron Sterk, an editor at trade publication Milling and Baking News, said the food supply situation is not as dire as some have portrayed it. For instance, he rejected any comparison between the present situation and World War II.

"That's not a fair characterization," he said. "In World War II, there actually were food shortages."

That's not the case now, he said. Despite the actions of wholesale stores, there's no rice shortage "certainly not" in the U.S., Sterk said.

Sufficient supplies of other commodities such as wheat and rye are available, and prices for both are well off their peaks from earlier this year, he noted. For instance, Minneapolis Grain Exchange wheat prices hit $25 a bushel earlier this year, but forecasts for bigger crops this spring have pushed prices to around $11.20 a bushel.

"There's no doubt that wheat supplies are tight," Sterk said. "But no one's saying we're going to run out of wheat. It's just tight."

Bakers can also find the flour they need, "they just don't like paying what the price has shot up to," he said.

Tight Supply Doesn't Equal Shortage

There's no doubt grain supplies are tight. Wheat and rice supplies in the U.S and globally are at multi-decade lows and soybean supplies are also down sharply. Last year corn production was expanded to devote more acreage to ethanol production.

But it's not just biofuel usage that is lifting corn demand. Growing economies in China and India mean more sophisticated palates and demand for food there has grown. Livestock production continues to be the No. 1 user of corn in the U.S. Grain trade is dollar-based, and a weak dollar means greater buying power for foreign buyers, which has lifted U.S. agriculture exports.

Further, two years of bad weather in wheat-producing countries hammered output across the globe as demand rose. Poor rice harvests in Vietnam and other rice- producing countries combined with little advancement on acreage has limited global production.

Worldwide, demand for rice has outstripped demand for several years, said Bob Cummings, senior vice president of the USA Rice Federation, an industry group.

The U.S. rice industry is "confident there's enough rice in the U.S. to meet domestic demand as well the demand of our traditional export customers," Cummings said. But, he added, due to tight global supplies and higher production costs "it's fair to say that we don't see any slackening of cost pressure side." Cummings also said his group had not seen any across-the-board change in demand.

A significant factor in food costs is transportation. Crude oil prices are hovering just under $120 a barrel and the high energy costs reflected in manufacturing and transportation of packaged food items -- will sustain some level of inflation.

Consumers paid about $1.78 for a 20-ounce loaf of white bread in the first quarter of 2008, about 20% more than a year earlier, according to American Farm Bureau's market basket survey. During the same period, the farm-gate wheat cost reflected in that loaf's price increased to 7%, or 14 cents, from 4%, or 6 cents, a year earlier.

Consumers who are stocking up at wholesale outlets simply might be seeing a bargain.

"Most Americans have never really experienced absolute hunger; it's more likely a case of basic level arbitrage -- buy it while it's still cheap," said Michael Swanson, an agricultural economist at Wells Fargo. "Don't confuse disappearance (of supplies) with demand."

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Wal-Mart Plays Politics with Charity

David Nassar
HuffingtonPost
April 24, 2008               [back to top]      

New video footage of Wal-Mart manager meetings released by the Center for Public Integrity and aired on Dan Rather Reports Tuesday evening, provide a rare and disturbing glimpse into the private culture of the world's largest company.

The footage features several Wal-Mart executives at various meetings using a hard sell approach to convince their managers to contribute to the company's PAC. As an incentive for PAC contributions, executives offer a 2-for-1 company donation in the managers' names to the Wal-Mart Associates in Critical Needs Fund. It's a "win-win" they say. The managers look like they care about their employees, Wal-Mart grows its PAC, and everybody goes home happy. So, what's wrong with this program? Most experts say it's legal, if not totally ethical. And, don't a lot of companies do the same thing - offer charitable contribution incentives for PAC contributions just like Wal-Mart?

Well, yes and no...and here's where it gets a little dicey. Certainly, employee incentives for PAC contributions are not new - although this is the first time we've actually seen it on video - thank you Flagler. But, the first major difference in the Wal-Mart circle of money is that typically the corporations' incentive programs include charitable contributions to independent, third party organizations such as the American Red Cross or United Way. In this case, the Wal-Mart Associates in Critical Needs Fund is a Wal-Mart-controlled foundation, which means all decisions regarding fund management and expenditures are made by Wal-Mart, not an independent organization. So, Wal-Mart gets its PAC money and it makes itself look good to its employees with its "generous" contributions to the Fund, which - unbeknownst to the employees - are based on PAC contributions. Indeed, if we are to take Becky Reithemeyer at her word, the company may base its entire contribution to the Fund on PAC contributions. Now, that's a lot of pressure to get those managers to give.

The second major difference in Wal-Mart's program is the twisted hypocrisy of using donations to the Wal-Mart Associates in Critical Needs Fund as an incentive for PAC contributions.. If 2007 typifies an average year, the Wal-Mart Associates in Critical Needs Fund helps less than 1% of Wal-Mart's 1.3 million employees, while the PAC actively fights against legislation that would help all of the low-wage, hourly workers, such as the Patient's Bill of Rights and workplace safety requirements. So, the managers are in effect giving to an organization - Wal-Mart's PAC - which fights against legislation that would protect and help the employees they manage in exchange for doling out one-time, small contributions for a tiny number of employees during a time of hardship.

Wal-Mart is absolutely playing politics here while feigning concern for its employees - at the expense of its employees. For years, Wal-Mart has promoted the idea that it has a family culture, but these videos reveal that the Walton family circle absolutely does not extend to its low-wage, hourly employees in stores across the country - employees who are struggling to make ends meet. The videos show Wal-Mart is more concerned with its image and immediate bottom line than with the company's long-term sustainability, which would have to include the well-being of its employees.

Wal-Mart has always resisted any real change to its company policy because it fears the immediate costs . The company's health care model relies on poor benefits to cut costs and it does just about anything to suppress wage costs, including forcing employees to work off the clock. But, the company is finding that lawsuits, public relations disasters, and high employee turnover cut deeply into those savings. Wal-Mart could save money in the long run - and improve the economic well-being and quality of life for its employees - by turning its attention to company policy, instead of DC lobbyists and political influence.

These latest PAC videos are just a tiny sample of the Wal-Mart video library; Wal-Mart might want to consider cutting its losses and doing the right thing.

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Report ties U.S. retailers to sweatshop shrimp

By Zain Verjee, Elise Labott,
Justine Redman and Kocha Olarn,
CNN
April 24th, 2008                                           [back to top]      

(CNN) -- Americans on average eat three pounds of shrimp a year, but can U.S. shoppers be sure the shrimp they love was produced without slave labor?

A three-year investigation by the AFL-CIO affiliated Solidarity Center found several leading U.S. retailers received shrimp from plants in Thailand and Bangladesh where workers as young as 8 are subject to sweatshop conditions.

The center's findings were supported by the State Department, which shares concerns about human trafficking in Thailand and worker abuse in both countries.

The report makes clear not all shrimp imports into the United States from Thailand and Bangladesh come from problem plants.

However, with shrimp imports from those two nations totaling $1.5 billion annually each year, the report suggests U.S. consumers are in a position to put pressure on producers to improve worker conditions.

The report names some of the most popular retailers in America, including Wal-Mart, Costco and Trader Joe's.

But only Wal-Mart responded to CNN inquiries about the shipments and pledged to examine allegations of abuse in plants which supply some of its shrimp.

"Safety is a top priority at Wal-Mart," spokesman Deisha Galberth said in a written statement to CNN. "We hold our shrimp suppliers to the highest safety and quality standards -- including maintaining processing plants and packaging facilities that meet or exceed Best Aquaculture Practices standards set by the Global Aquaculture Alliance.

"Although we have not seen the Solidarity Center's report, we are working with our suppliers to investigate the allegations shared by CNN. We're not aware of any issues in our supply chain," the company said in the statement.

The center's 40-page report found sexual and physical abuse, debt bondage, child labor and unsafe working conditions are common in Thailand and Bangladesh's shrimp processing factories, and that Thai plants often use trafficked workers.

"There's so much slime on the floor you can hardly stand up, and that just keeping your bearing and footing while you are trying to do work that involves using sharp knives," Ellie Larson, the executive director of the Solidarity Center, told CNN.

"They are treated in ways I'm sure most American people think went by in the days of slavery. In fact that's the kind of conditions these workers are engaged in -- slave conditions," Larson said.

In the past two years Thai police have raided several shrimp processing plants and rescued hundreds of trafficked workers.

Mark Lagon, the State Department's ambassador at large for trafficking in persons, visited Thailand and met a young Burmese girl rescued from one of the plants.

Lagon said guards at the factory made an example of her and a handful of other who tried to escape.

"Her head was shaved. She was beaten. You can't describe this in other fashion except slavery," he said.

The State Department and the International Labor Organization are working with both countries to improve the conditions for workers in their shrimp industries. The Department of Labor told CNN it has been working with the Thai government on a project aimed specifically at eliminating child labor from the shrimp industry.

In interviews with CNN, diplomats from both countries said their governments are working to address problems in the shrimp sector but stressed their economies were still developing.

"We proceed from the same common premise that this thing is evil. This thing has to be tackled squarely," Krit Granjana-Goonchorn, Thailand's ambassador to the United States told CNN. "I don't think you will find anyone more willing than the government of Thailand in that regard."

Bangladesh's ambassador to the United States, Humayun Kabir, said about 15 cases have come to the country's labor court since 2006. About half of them have gone to trial, he said and those responsible have been punished.

"So the government is taking those legal measures," he said.

The shrimp industry's global trade group, the Global Aquaculture Alliance, says it is not aware of its member plants operating under the conditions the Solidarity Center report describes, but said it is going to take a harder look and the offenders could be cut out from the global marketplace.

"We absolutely will investigate any specifics that come forth from this report," GAA's Executive Director Wally Stevens told CNN. "If those plants are in any way conducting themselves in an inappropriate way, they'll be dropped from our program"

The Solidarity Center says it is publishing this report in an effort to raise consumer awareness.

The State Department also hopes the report will force consumers to think before they buy, Lagon said.

"If consumers are concerned about the tuna they buy and if dolphins were harmed, surely the consumer would care about potential slavery."

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Wal-Mart workers to remove, turn off radio tags

By JON GAMBRELL
Associated Press
04.23.08                                      [back to top]      

LITTLE ROCK - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. promised state legislators Tuesday that any product with a radio tag would be clearly labeled, as the retail giant tries to put the inventory-tracking devices on all products sold at Sam's Clubs by 2010.

Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ), based in Bentonville, wants to place scanners reading the tags as they come off delivery trucks and head out to customers at the warehouse stores, said Simon Langford, director of retailer's electronic product code strategies. Langford said readers would even be placed by box crushers and trash compactors.

The tags, installed by manufacturers on every pallet and containers, would allow the world's largest retailer to quickly track back any defective or harmful product to its source, Langford said. The tracking also will help Wal-Mart cut down on theft, which an analyst suggested could have been as high as $3 billion last year. The company's overall revenues last year hit $378.8 billion.

"It's reduced out-of-stocks, increased sales for our suppliers and more importantly, lowered the cost of goods for our customers," Langford told the state Legislature's joint committee on advanced communications and information technology.

Langford said the technology, known as radio frequency identification tags, should be in place by 2010, something that's caused complaints among Wal-Mart's 60,000 suppliers. Some have criticized Wal-Mart for forcing them to adopt the technology without more information on impact on costs.

Others have raised concerns about privacy issues. Langford said the tags would only be able to be read from 10 to 15 feet away and only would contain numbers identifying the product. The company may experiment with tags that actively transmit information, but that would only be to track temperatures for produce and vegetables, Langford said.

After checkout, customers would have the option of removing the labels containing the tags. If a manufacturer installed the tag inside a container, workers would be able to deactivate it before a customer leaves the store, Langford said.

"Tags don't contain any customer information, it's simply a product number and a serial number," Langford said. "We don't tie anything, nor will we, (to) any customer information as the product is sold."

Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, D-Crossett, sponsored a bill last year making it illegal for the radio tags to gather or release any information related to "the demographics of the purchaser" after an item is removed from a store. Jeffress, whose bill was recommended for interim study, said Langford's explanation comforted him.

"I think a lot of my concerns have been alleviated and eased," he said.

Langford said the company continues to ask manufacturers to put the tags on containers and pallets heading to Wal-Mart stores, but has not set any deadline for suppliers.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Wal-Mart Rations Rice

By Kiera Butler
The Blue Marble Blog
April 23rd, 2008                                  [back to top]      

Shoot! You were planning a rice-and-beans dinner party for 100, and you thought for sure your local Wal-Mart would meet all your bulk rice needs.

Think again. Because of rising rice prices around the globe and worries about shortages, the biggest big box has announced that it will ration long grain, jasmine, and basmati rice, allowing customers to purchase only four bags per visit.

Since the beginning of 2008, rice prices have risen 68 percent worldwide. This is one of the main reasons that food riots have broken out recently all over the developing world.

Saint Louis Meriska's children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry,' and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."

In light of this two-spoonfuls anecdote, Wal-Mart's four-bag limit sounds downright decadent, but rice rationing in the U.S. means that whatever is going on with supply and demand trends is not good. Once land-o'-plenty retailers start fretting about global food shortages, you can be sure it's time to worry.

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Wal-Mart CEO gets $29.7 million for 2007, up 27 percent

By Staff,
Associated Press
April 22nd, 2008                                [back to top]      

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Chief Executive Lee Scott received compensation valued at $29.7 million in 2007, up 27 percent in a year when company profits rose 12 percent, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday by the world's largest retailer.

Scott was paid a salary of $1.4 million, up from $1.3 million in 2006. The bulk of his compensation came in options and restricted stock that the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer valued at $19 million when they were granted.

The CEO also received $8.4 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation and $431,446 in other compensation, including $101,208 for corporate air travel and $64,874 in a deferred compensation plan.

Wal-Mart reported net income of $12.73 billion for the past fiscal year, which ended January 31. Net sales totaled $374.5 billion, up 8.6 percent from the year before.

The Associated Press calculations of total pay include executives salary, bonus, incentives, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year.

The calculations don't include changes in the present value of pension benefits, and they often differ from the totals companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wal-Mart listed Scott's total compensation as $31.6 million.

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Wal-Mart beats Exxon Mobil to remain atop Fortune 500 list

By STEVENSON JACOBS
Associated Press
04.21.08                                         [back to top]     

NEW YORK - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. shrugged off weak consumer spending to remain atop the 2008 Fortune 500 list, edging Exxon Mobil Corp. for the second straight year in the magazine's annual ranking of the nation's largest publicly traded companies.

Fortune compiled its list based on companies' 2007 revenues. Wal-Mart raked in $378.8 billion in revenue last year, up 7.9 percent compared to 2006, and had $12.7 billion in profits, according to the list released Monday. The discount retailer has topped the list six times in the last seven years, having been unseated only by Exxon Mobil.

Though consumer spending fell sharply last year, Wal-Mart weathered the slowdown better than other retailers as shoppers have been trading down to cheaper stores amid a difficult economy, falling home values and increased unemployment.

Because the list is based on revenues rather than profits, Wal-Mart was able to come in ahead of Exxon Mobil, which was a close second with $372.8 billion but which far outdistanced the retailer in earnings, with $40.6 billion. Exxon Mobil's windfall was boosted by soaring energy demand and geopolitical instability that this year have pushed crude oil prices above $115 a barrel and gasoline prices to an average of $3.50 a gallon. Exxon Mobil last topped the Fortune 500 list in 2006.

Collectively, revenues for all companies listed reached $10.6 trillion last year, up 7.1 percent from 2006. However, profits dropped 17.8 percent over the same period, falling to $645.2 billion amid rising expenses including the price of oil.

Skyrocketing energy prices also helped other oil producers claim several of this year's top spots. ChevronTexaco Corp. moved up one place to No. 3 with $210.8 billion in revenue and $18.7 billion in profits. ConocoPhillips stayed the same at No. 5.

Declining U.S. auto sales battered General Motors Corp., which fell one position to No. 4 on revenue of $182.3 billion and a loss of $38.7 billion.

General Electric Co. came in sixth, followed by Ford Motor Co. in seventh place, Citigroup Inc. at No. 8 and Bank of America Corp. at No. 9. AT&T Inc. cracked the top 10, moving from No. 27 to tenth place.

Companies capitalizing on a global commodities boom were among the biggest winners of 2007. Freeport-MacMoran Copper & Gold Inc. shot from No. 398 in 2006 to No. 140, the biggest leap among all companies.

Among the biggest losers were homebuilders and saving institutions, which were buffeted by fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis that began rattling global markets late last year. Homebuilders and saving institutions saw revenues plummet 206 percent and 102 percent, respectively, according to Fortune.

Falling the most on the list was title insurance company Fidelity National Financial Inc., which slipped 171 spots to No. 435.

New additions to the list included Kraft Foods Inc., Symantec Corp., PetSmart Inc. and BlackRock Inc., while those knocked from the list included H&R Block Inc., Hilton Hotels, Radioshack Corp. and Lucent Technologies.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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AP funds put Wal-Mart, Chevron, Ferrovial on ethical watch list

By Cecilia Valente,
Thomson Investment Management News
April 21st, 2008                                                       [back to top]     

LONDON (Thomson IM) - Sweden's four buffer pension funds with 900 billion kroner in assets announced on Monday that Wal-Mart, Chevron and Ferrovial have been placed on their watch list over ethical, corporate governance and social (ESG) issues.

The combined Ethical Council of the AP1, AP2, AP3 and AP4 funds has also sold out of Singapore Technology Engineering over its manufacture of anti-personnel land mines.

The AP funds are all signatories of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), through the Ethical Council. Set up at the beginning of last year, the council met eight times in 2007 to screen the funds' 3,500 holdings and selected 14 companies for their violation of ESG standards.

Once the council becomes aware of an infringement, it intensifies its scrutiny and starts engaging with the company, filing suggestions and voting at AGMs. If these measures do not lead to the desired result each fund decides whether to sell the holding in question.

The 2007 vetting process has resulted in the exclusion of Singapore Technology Engineering, although the council said it will keep in touch with the company once a year. The AP funds want the company to stop manufacturing anti-personnel mines.

Sharolyn Choy, spokeswoman for the Singaporean company said its primary client is the Singapore defence force. 'Beyond Singapore, we not only observe all UN sanctions, but also abide by any treaty obligations to which Singapore is a signatory,' she said.

The council said it has removed from its watch list energy company Halliburton Corporation after the company, once run by US vice president Dick Cheney, sold Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary at the centre of a bribery investigation in Iraq and Algeria.

Energy company Chevron is still on the watch list for allegations of human rights violations in Nigeria and environment degradation in Ecuador. The council is waiting for the company's report on its voluntary framework on security and human rights and is lobbying for an environmental conscious extraction in the South American country.

On Grupo Ferrovial, which includes airport operator BAA, the joint Ethical Council has requested the company preserve a protected area as part of a road construction project in Poland and strengthen its risk analysis for the assessment of environmental risks on similar projects.

PetroChina, which the Dutch pension scheme for healthcare Pensioenfonds Zorg en Welzij excluded from its investments earlier this year, is also on the watch list for pollution through discharges of chemicals in the river Songhua.

To tackle workers' rights issues at retailer Wal-Mart, the council presented a resolution at the company's 2007 annual general meeting to request a comparison of Wal-Mart's guidelines with international standards.

The resolution was supported by 4 percent of the votes, qualifying for presentation at the next general meeting.

AP2 on its own has already attempted a lengthy engagement with Wal-Mart before exasperation prompted it to sell down its entire stake in September 2006. The fund's Head of Corporate Governance Carl Rosen said at the time that the volume of accusations against the company had led him to believe it was 'impossible to say that there have been no systemic abuses'.

AP1, AP3 and AP4 still hold Wal-Mart stock.

For companies on the watch list, disinvestment is considered to be a last resort, when discussion has failed.

In 2007, the council also said it had visited China to address workers rights and pollution issues more broadly. 'It is quite clear that foreign customers and investors play an important role in accelerating China's development in these areas,' it said.

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'Dan Rather Reports' to Broadcast Videotapes From Behind the Curtain of Wal-Mart

By Staff,
HDNet
April 21st, 2008                               [back to top]    

DALLAS, April 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Wal-Mart is the largest corporation in the world, and this Tuesday's episode of "Dan Rather Reports" on HDNet will present recently obtained videos of corporate executives soliciting money for their Political Action Committee.

For the first time on television, "Dan Rather Reports: Wal-Mart Goes to Washington" will feature segments of these videotapes recently acquired from Flagler Productions. The production company was hired by Wal-Mart to film internal meetings for more than twenty years. They were suddenly dismissed in 2006.

What the tapes reveal is how Wal-Mart used money to influence politicians in the company's favor on pending legislation, like the Patients' Bill of Rights. It is a stunning look inside a large company using money, lobbyists and Political Action Committees to gain valuable access to politicians in Washington.

"How many times have we heard lawmakers deny that money given to my campaign [gets] you a meeting with me," said Bill Hogan of the Center for Public Integrity in an interview with Rather about the tapes. "What we find in the videos, at least from Wal-Mart's perspective, that's exactly what the money does. It gets them a 90-minute meeting with a U.S. Senator."

Tuesday's episode also presents a report from India, where 167 million people -- the equivalent of half the population of the United States -- are routinely being raped, abused even murdered.

They are called the Dalits -- or the "broken people" -- and all across India they are born into a centuries old caste system that even today still assures a lifetime of poverty and discrimination.

Dalit women especially experience oppression and brutality on an unimaginable scale.

"Dan Rather Reports: Wal-Mart Goes To Washington" premieres on HDNet, Tuesday, April 22 at 8:00 p.m. ET with a re-air at 11:00 p.m. ET to accommodate West Coast Prime Time.

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Groups discuss alleged ills of Wal-Mart purchasing

By Jason Carmel Davis,
Press & Guide Newspapers
April 20th, 2008                                                  [back to top]    

DEARBORN - Giant purchasers like Wal-Mart should implement policies that protect the rights of workers, rather than abuse them, two sweatshop workers told several people Monday night at a town hall meeting at Dearborn's Ford Community & Performing Arts Center.

The workers have spoken at a number of events throughout the Midwest during a tour that took them to churches, universities, and community centers in 10 cities. Wal-Mart last month opened a Supercenter on Ford Road in Dearborn near the Southfield Freeway.

The tour is co-sponsored by a number of local community groups, the International Labor Rights Forum and SweatFree Communities.

One of the speakers, Didier Leiton, who spent 17 years picking pineapples and bana-nas for Del Monte — Wal-Mart sells Del Monte products in its stores — in Costa Rica, said products are produced under adverse conditions.

"Because the United States imports many products from Costa Rica, I want people here, like consumers and governments, to know that their bananas and pineapples are produced under inhumane conditions with very low wages, in total violation of environmental and labor laws, and causing major health problems and other difficulties in life for the workers in these industries," Leiton said.

"The companies don't pay enough for us to buy food and support our children's education. We earn less than the minimum wage."

Savin Phal, from Cambodia, told the crowd she is paid $1.08 to $2.16 per day for the clothing she makes. She said she was fired, along with 18 other women, from her job sewing clothing for Wal-Mart because she tried to form a union at her factory.

"I would like to ask Wal-Mart and people in the U.S. to put pressure on the owner of this factory, King's Land, to negotiate with our union and respect Cambodian labor laws and our rights," Phal said as she described being forced to work overtime, and earning wages too low to cover basic living expenses.

Sharon Weber, Wal-Mart senior manager of corporate communications, said the company does not tolerate sweat shop conditions in any of its supplier's factories.

She said that to ensure adherence to the chain's Code of Conduct, Wal-Mart employs 200 people in its Ethical Standards Group — the largest compliance program of its kind in the world. Last year, Ethical Standards conducted more than 16,000 audits at more than 8,800 factories to make sure the code was being implemented, Weber said.

"To ensure this, we ask each supplier to sign a Code of Conduct which requires suppliers to comply will all local laws and practices, and prohibits the use of child labor or forced/prison labor," Weber said.

"The code additionally protects the right for freedom of association and collective bargaining, and requires suppliers to have a safe work environment."

Groups formed to aid worker's rights

To combat what they believe are substandard working conditions, the workers have joined human rights and community groups to call on Wal-Mart to address ongoing problems by enforcing policies that require fair wages, a healthy workplace, and a voice on the job.

Kenwah Dabaja, a Dearborn resident who helped coordinate the town hall meeting, said it's important for residents in communities that have welcomed Wal-Mart to understand the adverse affects the store has on smaller businesses in those areas.

Dabaja said Wal-Mart is able to stock their items for such low prices primarily due to the wages paid to workers like Leiton and Savin.

"When I found out the Dearborn Wal-Mart was going to be selling Arab-American foods, it set something off because I know they'll sell the items for much lower than other stores," Dabaja said. "It's important for people to shop local because the local businesses are put in jeopardy when Wal-Mart comes in."

Dabaja added that she and other concerned individuals have asked to meet with the people responsible for bringing Wal-Mart to Dearborn. She said she hopes to educate people through a consumer/business survey, publish ads stressing the importance of shopping local and make people aware of the treatment of employees who make and farm Wal-Mart products.

"We're not just picking on Wal-Mart, because other companies follow similar models, but Wal-Mart is the largest private company in the U.S., Canada and Mexico," said Trina Tocco, campaigns coordinator for the International Labor Rights Forum.

"It is essential that companies like Wal-Mart take seriously their responsibility for ending sweatshop conditions around the world. Wal-Mart must commit to paying a just price for its products so the workers who depend on the jobs can afford to pay for their most basic needs."

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Wal-Mart Recalls Charm Key Chains Due to Risk of Lead Exposure

By Staff,
Consumer Product Saftey Commision
April 18th, 2008                                                    [back to top]    

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer product. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.

Name of Product: "Hip Charm" Key Chains

Units: About 12,000

Distributor: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., of Bentonville, Ark.

Importer: FGX International Inc., of Smithfield, R.I.

Hazard: The charms on the key chain can contain high levels of lead, which is toxic if ingested and can cause adverse health effects.

Incidents/Injuries: The Illinois Attorney General informed Wal-Mart and CPSC on April 16, 2008, that the key chain was found in the home of a 9-month-old child who was discovered to have high blood-levels of lead. The child was observed mouthing this key chain.

Description: The recalled key chain has several charms including a button, clover, leaf, heart and a sand dollar. The charms hang from a silver-colored chain. The words �Hip charm� and UPC (#31568 11017) are printed on the product�s packaging.

Sold at: Wal-Mart stores nationwide from April 2005 through April 2008 for about $6.

Manufactured in: China

Remedy: Consumers should not allow children to handle the key chain and return it to any Wal-Mart store for a full refund.

Consumer Contact: For further information, contact Wal-Mart at (800) 925-6278 between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. CT Monday through Friday, or visit the firm�s Web site at www.walmartstores.com

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Wal-Mart settles with applicant with disability

By JIM SALTER
Associated Press
04.17.08                               [back to top]   

ST. LOUIS - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of a job applicant who claimed he wasn't hired because he has cerebral palsy, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Thursday.

Steven J. Bradley Jr. of Hardin in northwest Missouri applied for a job at a new Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) Supercenter store in Richmond, Mo., in 2001. The EEOC said Bradley applied for any available position.

But in a suit filed in 2004 by the EEOC, Bradley claimed he was questioned during an interview about his ability to work using his wheelchair. He was allegedly told he was "best suited" for a greeter position. Ultimately, he was not hired.

The EEOC lawsuit claimed the world's biggest retailer violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2005, a federal judge in Kansas City granted summary judgment to Wal-Mart, saying that the EEOC didn't present sufficient evidence on Bradley's behalf. But last year, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

In addition to the financial settlement, Wal-Mart agreed to provide ADA training to managers at its Richmond store; notify job applicants about the settlement; and inform several Kansas City-area job service agencies that the company seeks to employ qualified persons with disabilities.

"This case sends an important message to employers that they cannot allow stereotypes or assumptions about disabled people to interfere with those people's right to work in jobs for which they are qualified," said Jean Kamp, acting regional attorney for the EEOC's St. Louis district office.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., did not respond to an interview request, but the company has previously said Bradley's condition was not a factor in the hiring decision.

Andrea Baran, the EEOC attorney who handled the case, said Bradley became interested in working at Wal-Mart after seeing TV ads showing disabled employees.

"We're very hopeful that this settlement signals Wal-Mart's strengthened commitment to employing people with disabilities," Baran said.

In December 2001, the EEOC and Wal-Mart agreed to a $6.8 million national settlement of a discrimination suit. In that case, the agency accused Wal-Mart of using a pre-employment questionnaire that violated the ADA between Jan. 1, 1994, and Dec. 31, 1998.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved

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No Wal-Mart seen in low-key Bharti launch

By Sindhu Bhattacharya,
Daily News & Analysis
April 17th, 2008                                     [back to top]   

NEW DELHI: You may not get to shop at Wal-Mart, after all. The Bharti Group made a rather low-key entry in the retail sector on Wednesday by opening three neighbourhood format stores in Ludhiana.

Spread over 2500-4000 square feet and stocked with most daily use items, they do not refer to ‘Wal-Mart’ anywhere. Instead, they are called ‘Easy Day’.

So for now, the partnership between Bharti and Wal-Mart appears to be restricted to wholesale cash & carry format, which means selling to other retailers and providing back end support to Bharti’s front-end stores.

Wal-Mart’s cash & carry stores are slated for launch only by the end of the year but the retailer has provided most of the retail expertise - such as information technology back-up, retail practices and training guidelines - for Easy Day stores. Then, Bharti’s low-key retail entry prompted some experts to ask whether this was a deliberate strategy to deflect any protests.

Many big corporate houses, Reliance Industries prominent among them, have faced the music after launching front end retail stores with much fanfare.

Perhaps taking a cue from these incidents, Bharti was careful to announce that Easy Day stores would employ people from the local communities in Ludhiana and would be trained at the Bharti Academy of Retail set up specifically for the purpose.

A company spokesperson brushed aside any suggestions of protest apprehensions, saying this was a “soft launch” and the consumer response was “phenomenal” on the first day itself.

Easy Day stores stock personal care products, stationery, household articles, hosiery items, daily-need groceries including staples, processed foods, bakery and dairy products, meat and poultry and fresh produce.

Though there was no word on how Bharti has priced its wares at Easy Day, Wal-Mart’s reputation of driving down prices is well-known and the Giant of Bentonville always works on “Every Day Low Prices” concept.

It remains to be seen whether Bharti is as successful as its partner at offering products at the lowest possible price points.

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Wal-Mart director expects 'real boost' from tax rebates

By Staff,
Bloomberg News Service
April 11th, 2008                                     [back to top]   

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. director Jack Shewmaker said a U.S. economic stimulus plan that includes tax rebates for 130 million households will give a "real boost'' to sales at the world's biggest retailer.

Customers who cash rebate checks at the discount chain will probably spend them there, Shewmaker said in an interview in Barcelona Thursday. He joined Wal-Mart's board in 1977 and is a retired vice chairman of the company.

The rebates start in May, part of a $168 billion government package to spur the economy. Sales at many U.S. retailers have slowed as consumers grapple with fuel prices, and soaring oil costs will make the industry "reconsider its model,'' Shewmaker said in a speech today. Wal-Mart raised its profit forecast Thursday after its price cuts lured cash-strapped shoppers.

"I think Wal-Mart has repositioned well,'' Shewmaker said in the interview, adding that 2008 will be a "strong year.''

The Bentonville, Ark.-based company said yesterday that March sales at stores open at least a year increased 0.7 percent, while clothing retailers Limited Brands Inc., Gap Inc. and American Eagle Outfitters Inc. posted sales declines that exceeded analysts' estimates.

Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley declined to comment on Shewmaker's remarks.

Wal-Mart fell 12 cents to $54.54 in early New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares gained 15 percent this year through Thursday, compared with the 3.5 percent drop by the Standard & Poor's 500 Retailing Index.

Spending by U.S. consumers, which has sustained the economy during housing's worst slump in a generation, rose at the slowest pace in more than a year in February, stoking concern the country will enter a recession.

A close relationship with suppliers and daily sales updates for store managers enable Wal-Mart to adapt quickly to changes in demand, Shewmaker said.

"Partnership with suppliers is more important during these times,'' he said in the interview. "If your suppliers are negative or inefficient, then guess what you're going to be.''

Retailers' same-store sales fell 0.5 percent last month, the biggest decline in almost a year and the worst March since 1995, the International Council of Shopping Centers said, based on a survey of 37 chains. The trade group had predicted sales would be little changed.

There are "hundreds of things'' Wal-Mart should consider doing differently to cut costs, Shewmaker said in a speech at the World Retail Congress in Barcelona today. Soaring oil prices will be a "huge factor'' for all retailers, he said.

The earliest Easter in almost a century may have brought forward seasonal spring sales, distorting revenue figures Wal-Mart reported Thursday, Shewmaker said.

Easter has "kicked off the spring season early'' and April sales data will bring a "clearer picture,'' he said.

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Wal-Mart Got Millions From Workers' Life Insurance Policies

By ELAINE SILVESTRINI ,
Tampa Tribune
April 11th, 2008                                     [back to top]  

TAMPA – Wal-Mart received more than $9 million from life insurance it took out on 132 rank-and-file employees in Florida, the company says in a federal court filing.

The company has been sued by the husbands of two deceased former Wal-Mart employees in Tampa and Pasco County who alleged the company profited from the policies it secretly took out on store employees.

Last month, U.S. District Judge James Moody granted a motion by Wal-Mart and dismissed a federal lawsuit by Richard Armatrout, of Tampa, because the value of the life insurance policy on his late wife, Karen, was $72,820, below the $75,000 threshold for a matter to be heard in federal court.

Anticipating Moody's ruling, Armatrout's attorney, Michael Myers of Texas, filed a suit in state court in Pasco County with Armatrout and another plaintiff, Wayne Atkinson, whose late wife, Rita, worked for Wal-Mart.

Now, Wal-Mart is asking that the new lawsuit be moved to federal court. Noting that the plaintiffs want the lawsuit to be a class action, the company is now arguing that the total value of the suit is actually more than $9 milllion.

Wal-Mart included in its court filing a settlement demand from the plaintiffs, seeking to settle the case for about $7.2 million, 75 percent of the $9.6 million life insurance policy proceeds they claimed Wal-Mart received.

The settlement demand included a list of deceased former Wal-Mart employees whose policies the plaintiffs said the company collected.

Wal-Mart says in its new court filing that it was able to confirm most of what the plaintiffs said in the settlement demand. The amounts of the payouts on each policy ranged from about $55,000 to about $90,000. The company's retired vice president of benefits, Thomas G. Emerick, says in a sworn affidavit that the company collected on policies for all but three of the 135 names on the plaintiff's demand list.

Myers said the move by Wal-Mart to move the case back to federal court after successfully having it thrown out was "blatant forum shopping." He said he wasn't sure how he will respond, but that he would research the legality of what the company did.

Wal-Mart's motion became public today, and company attorneys in Miami were unavailable for comment.

Myers, who has successfully sued the corporation in other states, says Wal-Mart secretly insured about 350,000 employees nationwide. The policies were taken out on all full-time Wal-Mart employees who, in December 1993, were between ages 18 and 70 and participated in the medical benefits plan.

Myers said if the company paid a settlement, the money would go to the estates of the deceased former Wal-Mart employees or to the state of Florida if the estates could not be located. Myers said his firm would collect about a third of the payment for costs and its fee.

He said the company stopped taking out the policies in 1995 but continued to receive payouts on employees who died, even those who had left Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, which said it canceled its policies in early 2000 because it was losing money on the arrangement, says the program was intended to reduce its income taxes to help pay rising employee health care costs. Workers were notified and given the opportunity to opt out, the company said.

The lawsuit says Wal-Mart used confidential information it received from employees for use in their employment, such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth, to obtain the life insurance policies.

Myers said this corporate practice is not uncommon. He estimates that up to 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies have taken out such policies on employees. The vast majority of the time, the employees didn't know, Myers said.

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New Canadian Film: "Wal-Mart World's Most Hated Company."

By Al Norman,
Huffington Post
April 9th, 2008                                [back to top]  

Since 1994, when Wal-Mart swallowed 122 Woolco stores, the Canadians have greeted Wal-Mart with a Big Chill. Today the giant retailer controls 305 stores in Canada, and is in the early stages of a superstore rollout across the provinces. But Wal-Mart's history north of the border has been marked by bitter union battles, and increasingly fractious encounters with local residents. It was in Canada, after all, where Wal-Mart shut down a newly-minted store---rather than see it unionized.

In the middle of his new film, Wal-Mart Nation, Toronto-based Andrew Munger quotes a member of an Arkansas group called "Against the Wal" saying, "We'd all be a lot better off if Wal-Mart was less greedy." That pretty much epitomizes Munger's film, which has been shown thus far only to Canadian audiences--but opens this coming week in a couple of American film festivals. Munger borrows a few iconic American symbols---like Miss America, and Presidential candidate John Edwards---to reveal the underside of Wal-Mart Canada.

Munger spent several years compiling this documentary, filming in 3 Ontario communities, 7 U.S. cities and towns, and 3 countries. "There's never been a company like Wal-Mart," Munger explains in the opening narration. "It's the world's most hated company." Munger's camera travels throughout America and Canada to profile what he calls "the growing army of activists" that comes "from the deep south to the chilly north." Munger says he wanted to find out, "Who are these people, and why were they so obsessed with a big box store?" He also wanted to answer the primary question, "If Wal-Mart is so bad, why do so many people shop there?"

That question is answered in the film by Diana Reid, the owner of Clubhouse Donuts, a small bakery in the town of Guelph, Ontario. She tells Munger that when she heard Wal-Mart was coming, "We were all thrilled---until all this opposition came. All of us are in a familiar position where we have to be very careful with our money." But her comments stand in contrast to the Wal-Mart worker in the Wake Up Wal-Mart TV spot shown in the film, who is told that it would take her 1,000 years to earn as much as Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott makes in a year. "A thousand years?" repeats the astonished Wal-Mart employee, Charmaine Givens. "I'm getting upset."

Among the anti-Wal-Mart army regulars tracked by Munger are: Anna Liu, a young labor organizer for a Canadian local of the United Food and Commercial Workers, who conducts undercover leafleting of Wal-Mart stores; Carolyn Sapp, the 1992 Miss America winner, who speaks nationally for the rights of women workers at Wal-Mart; Ben Bennett, the Guelph, Ontario resident who fended off Wal-Mart for a decade, before losing the end game; Chris Kofinis, Communications Director of Wake Up Wal-Mart, the multi-million campaign funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers union; and Al Norman, founder of Sprawl-Busters.

Wal-Mart Nation opens at the Fayetteville, Arkansas Annual Shareholders' meeting, with thousands of chanting employees and investors. Munger interviews Arkansas residents about the huge retailer, asking one woman in a soccer Mom t-shirt, how she feels about all the controversy surrounding Wal-Mart. "I wasn't aware there was," she says flatly. The narrator adds: "Wal-Mart's best allies are its customers: average folks in search of a bargain."

Wal-Mart Canada's Director of Corporate Communications shrugs off all the criticisms of his company. "As the world's biggest corporation, you become the world's biggest corporate target for any range of criticisms. The bottom line is, we need to tell our story better." Munger's film won't help that storyline.

Former Miss America, Carolyn Sapp, is shown working a bullhorn in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Las Vegas. "We know that they abuse women and men---their hard-working employees," Sapp says. After reading of the massive class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 1.6 million Wal-Mart female workers, Carolyn Sapp found her mission. "You know what? This is abuse. It's not physical abuse, but it's emotional abuse. Its time we as consumers say: Wait a second. Why are we all supporting the wealthiest corporation in America if they don't treat their women with dignity?" Sapp found a good use for her beauty pageant crown. "If I can use the Miss America title to entice people to learn about this, and to educate them, then it's OK. There's a good use to the Miss American title."

Munger explores the prolonged Wal-Mart controversy in Guelph, a small town in Ontario that cost the retailer 10 years of delay. Activist Ben Bennett pursued Wal-Mart in town hall, and through the courts. Bennett and his group helped collect over 12,000 names on a petition against Wal-Mart. In the end, the store is built---in between two cemeteries and a Jesuit retreat--but the victory cost Wal-Mart millions of dollars in lost sales, and gave them a public relations black eye.

Munger flew to London to capture the protests in Queens Market---one of the last open air markets in the city---a site coveted by Wal-Mart's operating front in the U.K., the ASDA chain. "My family's been here for 120 years," says one of the local British small merchants protesting Wal-Mart. And his family will remain there---because ASDA pulled out of the Queen's Market deal.

There's even some American Presidential politics in this film--though not where you'd expect it. Munger does not focus on Hillary Clinton, who sat on Wal-Mart's board of directors, and is seated in a 1990 photo between Sam Walton and David Glass as the only woman on the board. Wal-Mart Nation rolls a clip of then-candidate John Edwards recounting the day his six year old son Jack told the family his brother Alex had gotten new shoes. "That's bad," young Jack explains. "He got them at Wal-Mart. They're bad to their workers." Then Edwards adds, "If a six year old can understand it, America can understand it."

Andrew Munger carefully pieces together these clips from Wal-Mart Nation, above and below the Canadian border---knowing full well that there really is no single Wal-Mart Nation---only a deeply divided, and conflicted series of populations. There are the Wal-Mart shoppers versus the Wal-Mart Haters--and they have been hammering one another for the past twenty years.

This is perhaps best reflected in the film's end. Munger pans the camera across the huge Wal-Mart store on its opening day in Guelph, after a stormy decade of battles. The narrator explains that one week after the Wal-Mart opened in Guelph in November, 2006, every candidate up for election that was pro-Wal-Mart---was defeated. The film cuts to a hired Santa Claus in front of the Guelph Wal-Mart, whose post-election comment is simply, "Ho, Ho, Ho." But Wal-Mart's painful entry into Guelph was anything but merry, and since then, the company has continued to brace itself from the arctic blasts from union organizing and citizen's groups across Canada.

It's not likely that the Wal-Mart Canada brass who let Munger film some of their activities, still have him on their Christmas card list.

Wal-Mart Nation was produced by Ultramagnetic Productions in association with the CBC. DVDs of the film are available from www.walmartnation.com. The film will have its first American screenings at the Oxford, Ohio Film Festival, April 11 & 13, and the Independent Spirit Film Festival, Colorado Springs, CO, Saturday, April 26.

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Candid Camera: Trove of Videos

By Gary McWilliams,
Wall Street Journal
April 9th, 2008                               [back to top]  

LENEXA, Kan. -- For nearly 30 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. employed a video-production company here to capture footage of its top executives, sometimes in unguarded moments. Two years ago, the retailing giant stopped using the tiny company.

At first, the decision threw Flagler Productions Inc. into a panic. Now it's Wal-Mart that's squirming.

In recent months, Flagler has opened its trove of some 15,000 Wal-Mart tapes to the outside world, with an eye toward selling clips. The material is proving irresistible to everyone from business historians and documentary filmmakers to plaintiffs lawyers and union organizers. Since the '70s, Wal-Mart employed a Kansas video-production company to capture its corporate meetings and culture. But since that relationship has ended, things have changed. Paul Lin reports.

Among the revealing moments: A former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company's corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in its stores. In 1991, founder Sam Walton describes Hillary Clinton, then a Wal-Mart director, as "one of us."

The best part, maintains plaintiffs lawyer Gene P. Graham Jr., is that "Wal-Mart has no control over this stuff."

Wal-Mart isn't pleased. "It's difficult to understand how the company could now sell to third parties the material we paid it to produce on our behalf," says a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. "Needless to say, we did not pay Flagler Productions to tape internal meetings with this aftermarket in mind." She adds that the company is "reviewing our legal options."

The production company's founder and former owner, Mike Flagler, says he was hired on a handshake in the 1970s to help produce the events Wal-Mart holds each year for managers and shareholders, including entertainment portions of its annual meeting and important sales meetings. He filmed them as well.

He says he rebuffed Wal-Mart's suggestions that he reuse the tapes to save money. Instead, he held onto recordings of commercials, executive speeches and manager hijinks.

Corporate records typically are closely controlled through legal contracts that restrict access and use. Mr. Flagler says he never signed a contract with Wal-Mart for the production or video work. Flagler Productions says that that arrangement left ownership and control of the films with it.

In a Jan. 14 letter to Flagler, Marshall S. Ney, a lawyer for Wal-Mart, said the retailer has "claims to rights in the video library" and the film transcripts. Mr. Ney didn't return calls for comment, and Wal-Mart's spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

Unvarnished Look

Unlike the polished presentations delivered at business forums, the videos provide an unvarnished look at Wal-Mart leaders as the corporation grew into one of the world's largest, says Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has viewed some of the tapes.

The video library might have remained under wraps if a new Wal-Mart executive hadn't decided to hire another company to stage a musical production for its 2006 stockholders' meeting. The decision sharply curbed Flagler's role. Wal-Mart dumped Flagler altogether as a producer in late 2006, nine days after Mr. Flagler sold the company for an undisclosed sum to two employees, Mary Lyn Villanueva and Gregory A. Pierce.

The current owners say Wal-Mart accounted for more than 90% of Flagler's revenue. The company's bank called in a loan, and the pair dismissed their 16-person work force, Ms. Villanueva says.

Flagler offered to sell the whole video archive to Wal-Mart for several million dollars, Ms. Villanueva says, although she won't disclose the exact price. Wal-Mart countered with an offer of $500,000, arguing the footage wouldn't be of interest elsewhere, the two owners say.

They sold their 20,000-square-foot production facility and moved into an 800-square-foot rented office. They now hope to sustain the company by selling access to the Wal-Mart videos. They charge $250 an hour for video research, and additional fees for a DVD copy of film clips.

Plaintiffs attorney Diane M. Breneman stumbled across the videos while working on a lawsuit she filed in 2005, on behalf of a 12-year-old boy, against Wal-Mart and the manufacturer of a plastic gasoline can sold in its stores. Her client was injured when he poured gasoline from the container onto a pile of wet wood he had been trying to light, and the can exploded. The lawsuit alleges that the containers are unsafe because they don't contain a device that prevents flames from jumping up the spout and exploding.

Wal-Mart's lawyers have argued in court filings that the retailer couldn't have known that the product "presented any reasonable foreseeable risk...in the normal and expected use."

Ms. Breneman says that when she first laid eyes on the racks of tapes, "I thought, 'How could anyone in the world allow this to exist?'" The videos, she says, deal with "everything anyone would want on Wal-Mart....They've got 30 years of people winging it."

Parody Testimonials

Ms. Breneman says Flagler Productions located videos of product presentations to Wal-Mart managers in which executives gave parody testimonials about the same brand of gasoline can. In an apparent coincidence, one manager joked about setting fire to wet wood: "I torched it. Boom! Fired right up." In a separate skit, an employee is seen driving a riding lawn mower into a display of empty gasoline cans. A Wal-Mart executive vice president observing the collision jokes: "A great gas can. It didn't explode." The tapes were made before the lawsuit was filed. [Mary Lyn Villaneuva]

Ms. Breneman argues the footage provides evidence that the retailer could have foreseen the risk that customers would use the gas cans when starting fires. She says she plans to ask the Kansas City, Mo., federal court handling the case to allow the footage to be used as evidence. Wal-Mart's lawyer on the case didn't return calls seeking comment.

Flagler began getting calls from people all over the country -- many of them lawyers -- requesting videos on a variety of topics. "Once I know what it is they're looking for, I can find it," Ms. Villanueva says.

Washington lawyer Joseph M. Sellers is pursuing a gender-discrimination lawsuit seeking billions of dollars on behalf of past and present female Wal-Mart employees. Wal-Mart has denied discrimination and has appealed the class-action status of the case in San Francisco federal appellate court.

In reviewing the videos, Mr. Sellers's colleague found clips of Mr. Walton, the founder, lamenting the lack of women executives, and of Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott Jr. at a 1999 meeting discussing cases of sexual harassment. Mr. Sellers contends the videos bolster his argument that senior Wal-Mart executives knew about the lack of women managers and about incidents of sexual harassment, and failed to address the problems in a timely way.

Mr. Graham, the plaintiffs lawyer, learned of the archive last fall through Ms. Breneman and alerted other lawyers. One attorney says he spent $15,000 to secure copies of video clips on the chance they might be useful in future cases.

Flagler now is becoming a must stop for a variety of parties interested in Wal-Mart. Critics of the company have been looking there for clips that support their views. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and Service Employees International Union, for example, sent employees to research footage in connection with their campaigns to force Wal-Mart to change its business practices. [Gregory Pierce]

On March 31, the UFCW posted a video on YouTube that included clips from Flagler of Mr. Walton and other Wal-Mart executives telling employees they must always "do the right thing" and put integrity above convenience. The union was campaigning for Wal-Mart to drop its legal efforts to recoup monies paid for medical treatment of former employee Deborah Shank, who was seriously injured in an accident and had separately collected money for her injuries. Last week, Wal-Mart said it would drop its demand for repayment.

Sen. Clinton served on Wal-Mart's board of directors from 1986 to 1992, when she was first lady of Arkansas. During her presidential campaign, she has faced some criticism over Wal-Mart's labor record and the lack of women in upper management.

There is footage in the archive of Mrs. Clinton joining Mr. Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, on a stage at the 1991 opening of a store in Rogers, Ark. "I'm so proud of this company and everything it represents," Mrs. Clinton said. "It makes me feel real good about what we've been able to do."

Mr. Walton responded: "You're a great associate, Hillary." Turning to the crowd, he added: "She's one of us."

'Mixed Blessing'

Asked about the Flagler clip, a spokesman for her campaign cited remarks she made about Wal-Mart in a debate last year. When Sen. Clinton was asked whether Wal-Mart is "a good thing or a bad thing" for the nation, she described the retailer as "a mixed blessing."

Mr. Lichtenstein, the labor historian, says the Flagler archives provide a unique window into the company. "When they are talking to themselves, and there aren't shareholders present, you get a level of things being revealed," he says.

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Wide Net Cast by Lobby for Colombia Trade Pact

By ERIC LIPTON and
STEVEN R. WEISMAN,
New York Times
April 8th, 2008                                 [back to top]  

WASHINGTON — There have been all-expense paid trips to Colombia for more than 50 members of Congress, featuring coffee tastings and dinner at a posh restaurant inside an old Spanish fort. The Colombian president has visited Washington to make personal appeals. Major corporations like WalMart and Citigroup are taking up the cause. And former Clinton administration officials have landed lucrative lobbying contracts.

This barrage of activity is over the trade pact that cost Mark Penn, a top adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his job over the weekend. Mr. Penn had been working for a presidential primary candidate opposed to the trade deal with Colombia, while also running a public relations firm hired by the Colombian government to promote it.

The debate has been quietly brewing ever since the Bush administration finished negotiating the pact to ease trade restrictions in late 2006. Human rights groups and labor leaders have urged Congress to put off considering the deal or to reject it outright, citing paramilitary violence against labor activists in Colombia.

The behind-the- scenes dispute has now escalated to a classic Washington boil in recent weeks after President Bush, growing impatient with Democrats on Capitol Hill, decided to send the agreement to Congress anyway, an action he announced formally on Monday.

“The need for this agreement is too urgent — the stakes for our national security are too high — to allow this year to end without a vote,” Mr. Bush said.

He and others cited the need to support Colombia, which does $18 billion of trade with the United States annually and is battling leftist rebels that Colombian officials assert have received financing from the Venezuelan government.

To help make its case, Colombia had already hired at least three firms on Capitol Hill, in addition to the work by Mr. Penn’s firm, Burson-Marsteller, paying out from $15,000 to $40,000 a month. Collectively the Colombian government has paid more than $1 million to firms that have negotiated or lobbied on behalf of the deal.

They include the Glover Park Group, the fast-growing firm set up by former Clinton White House aides including Joe Lockhart, who was chief spokesman for the president. (Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign communications director, was a partner at the firm but has taken a leave of absence.)

The firm has approached more than a dozen members of Congress, focusing on moderate Democrats who the lobbyists believe might be persuaded to disregard their party leaders and vote in favor of the deal.

Lobbyists at Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart — whose partners include another former aide in the Clinton White House, Bill Danvers — have separately met with pro-business Democrats like Representative Joseph Crowley of New York. And Andrew Samet, a deputy secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has been hired under yet another lobbying contract.

Mr. Penn got into trouble last week after he attended a meeting with Colombia government officials, as they prepared for the move by Mr. Bush to force a debate in Congress. His firm had been representing the Colombian government since last April, helping it promote the deal with news media, among other tasks.

But Mr. Penn, a strategist and pollster, ended up getting blasted by both sides. The Colombian government canceled the contract with his firm after he called the meeting an “error in judgment.” Mr. Penn then stepped down from his campaign post after Mrs. Clinton was criticized for having a close adviser lobbying for a pact she opposed. Mr. Penn’s advocacy was particularly awkward because Mrs. Clinton increasingly has taken a stance opposing free trade during her campaign.

The ties between the lobbying firms and the Clinton campaign illustrate the complexity of Washington’s political world, where players are often switching positions or playing multiple roles. While Mr. Wolfson has taken a leave from Glover Park, for example, he still has equity in the firm valued at $500,000 to $1 million, according to a disclosure form.

A long list of former Clinton administration aides, including Mack McLarty, the former counsel to the president; Donna E. Shalala, the health and human services secretary; and Leon E. Panetta, the onetime chief of staff, also have come out in support of the deal. It puts them in alliance with Mr. Bush and Republican leaders.

Besides the Colombian government, the Bush administration has perhaps been the most forceful player in the fight, holding more than 400 meetings or telephone conference calls with officials on Capitol Hill to push the deal, the president said Monday. It has also paid most of the cost of the Congressional delegations, although an administration spokesman said on Monday that he could not estimate what the tab for these trips had been.

One trip, which wrapped up Sunday night, showed off Colombia to nine members of Congress, who first toured Medellín, the onetime capital of the cocaine trade, and met with the former mayor and labor leaders who support the free-trade deal. They also stopped by a flower farm and tasted Colombian coffee. The next stop was Cartagena, where they heard from other labor leaders who opposed the pact.

But the overwhelming message of the trip was that the deal would be good for Colombia and the United States, said Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, Republican of New Jersey.

“This is a nation that has recovered enormously from the scourge of violence and drug wars,” Mr. Frelinghuysen said.

To opponents of the deal, the campaign by the Colombia government, their lobbyists and the Bush administration proves how uneasy they are about the prospects for its adoption.

Bill Samuel, a lobbyist for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, “They obviously think they have a product that is going to be difficult to sell.”

The opposition cites a history of attacks in Colombia against trade union members, 39 of whom the A.F.L.-C.I.O. says were killed in the country last year after trying to stand up for worker rights. The government there, the union leaders claim, has not completely cut its ties to paramilitary organizations responsible for the attacks or taken stiff enough action against those involved in the crimes.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. intends to run newspaper advertisements this week that say, ”Don’t Reward Murder.”

Colombian officials respond that in the five years since President Álvaro Uribe has been in power, violence in the country has declined significantly, including attacks against unionists. At the same time, the economy has boomed.

Trade with Colombia is a minuscule portion of the United States’ global trade. The United States imports grains, cotton, flowers and soybeans from Colombia, and exports chemicals, plastics, cereal, heavy machinery and electronics.

Most of what the United States imports, moreover, is duty-free under trade preferences that are renewed periodically. But opponents of the deal argue that keeping products permanently duty-free might prompt American companies to transfer their manufacturing units to Colombia, costing American jobs.

The Bush administration concedes that it does not yet have enough Democratic votes to join with the overwhelming majority of Republican votes expected to endorse the Colombia deal.

“This is a very difficult issue for Democrats,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “The way the administration has handled it has made it more difficult.”

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Jamie Lynn Spears Spends 17th Birthday At Wal-Mart, And We Forgive Her

By Molly Friedman,
Defamer
April 7th, 2008                                  [back to top]  

Just as we were about to laugh a little bit at Juno Lynn Spears' decision to spend her 17th birthday at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant and going on a shopping spree at Wal-Mart, we remembered back to our 17th birthday and stopped laughing. We were in college, in suburbia, and spent the day in class, then at some chain restaurant with our boyfriend, and probably at the movies in the mall. How quickly we forget that Jamie Lynn is still just a kid! Just because she's grown up before our eyes and starred in a hit show and, well, gotten pregnant, doesn't mean the girl shouldn't abandon her awkward late teen years and all the mall-filled nights that go with them. More details on our favourite real-life Juno and her day of kicking "16 And Pregnant!!!" headlines to the curb, after the jump.

The truth is, we secretly wish our birthdays were still spent more in the fashion of Jamie Lynn's, including one of this very lovey-dovey dinners that gets noticed by other diners. As a source told People, "They were like a little adult couple, very low-key." Like an adult couple? Ahem, notice anything adult just above the waistline? In any case, JL and fiance Casey Aldridge, a very adult-sounding 18 years old, headed to the Wal-Mart near his house in Mississippi after dinner to curiously look at sleeping bags. We suggest Jamie Lynn check with big sis Britney, who's been through this twice before. Britney may have boarded a few yachts, but we don't think she was planning any camping trips at 8 months.

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Wal-Mart pays big for fuel costs

By Kimberly Morrison,
The Morning News
April 4th, 2008                                        [back to top]  

If consumers think they feel the pinch of rising gas prices, they can at least take some comfort that they don't have to foot the bill for more than 6.3 billion gallons of diesel fuel.

That's the approximate domestic fuel usage of the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which also owns one of the nation's largest private trucking fleets.

The retailer won't say much about the impact rising diesel fuel prices are having on its fleet of 7,200 semi tractor-trailers that traveled up to 900 million miles in its most recent fiscal year. In fact, the retailer declined to comment at all on how fuel prices were impacting transportation costs for this story.

But Eduardo Castro-Wright, chief executive officer for Wal-Mart Stores division, said in a fourth quarter conference call that the company was experiencing pressure from increased transportation costs. Castro-Wright said fuel prices presented a "potential headwind" if costs continued to rise above projections.

"As fuel prices spike, the relative cost of trucking to shippers also rises, causing shippers to exceed their anticipated freight transportation budgets," said John G. Larkin, a transportation and logistics analyst with Baltimore, Md.-based Stifel Nicolaus. "The nearly $4 price tag on each gallon of diesel fuel has succeeded in threatening the financial viability of many truckload carriers."

Innovations to its trucking fleet are underway, some which have already increased fuel efficiency by 20 percent to 7.1 miles per gallon. But paying more than a dollar more per gallon than this time last year on billions of gallons of gas is still a painful bill.

A gallon of diesel fuel cost $2.67 this time last year and has since risen almost 50 percent to $4 per gallon this week.

However, the open market price for diesel is higher than what a company of Wal-Mart's size pays for diesel. The retailer gets a volume discount of about 50 cents, according to transportation industry officials.

Based on those calculations, that would mean Wal-Mart's fuel bill at this time last year was up to $13.86 billion, compared to today's prices which would put the grand total as high as $22.36 billion.

Ouch.

That estimated $8.5 billion in extra diesel fuel costs is more than 66 percent of the company's net income - $12.73 billion - in its most recent fiscal year.

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. That estimated fuel cost figure could be higher or lower based on fuel surcharges, hedging costs and innovations to its trucking fleet.

In addition to Wal-Mart's massive trucking fleet that hauls general merchandise, it also contracts private carriers to transport most perishable and dry grocery materials. Those carriers are likely collecting a fuel surcharge of $1.50 per gallon in addition to standard carrier costs, transportation officials estimated.

Hedging would be another option for Wal-Mart to lower fuel costs. If they gambled on fuel prices increasing, company officials could lock in the current price of fuel for a given period of time by hedging. Wal-Mart may or may not be exercising this option.

"(Chief Executive Officer) Lee Scott came out of logistics and there has been some criticism that he should have known to buy fuel by hedging," said Patricia Edwards, fund manager for Seattle-based Wentworth, Hauser and Violich. "I've heard that they were not and should have been, and so they may be doing that at this point."

And suppliers pick up some transportation costs, according to Wal-Mart's year-end earnings report.

Wal-Mart reported that in fiscal 2008, approximately 81 percent of the Wal-Mart Stores segment's purchases were shipped through distribution centers. The balance of merchandise purchased was shipped directly to stores from suppliers.

The retailer estimates that at current fuel prices, an improvement to fleet fuel mileage of one mile per gallon would save more than $40 million per year.

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From Wal-Mart moms to Facebook independents, GOP targets voters

By TIM KORTE,
Associated Press
April 4th, 2008                                       [back to top]  

SANTA ANA PUEBLO, N.M.—Remember the soccer moms?

The top campaign official for presumptive Republican nominee John McCain on Friday identified five groups of target voters, a wide-ranging bloc that includes young people, Hispanics and what he called "Wal-Mart moms," "Rehab Republicans" and "Facebook independents."

Addressing the Republican National Committee's meeting of state chairmen at posh Tamaya Resort, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said those voters will play a major role in this fall's general election.

He urged GOP officials to familiarize themselves now.

"Go to Wal-Mart and stand next to the greeter for 20 minutes," he said. "Go see the voters we're targeting. If you see them, you'll understand them."

Such political and cultural talk rises every four years, when campaigns identify groups that are evenly divided over which presidential candidate to support, as well as the issues those people view as most important.

Political analysts during the 1990s chose America's soccer moms as the desired swing voters—middle- to upper-income women who shuttled their school-age children to activities such as soccer practice.

This year, Davis said it's not just McCain's White

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Wal-Mart chief scolds business for avoiding healthcare debate

By Jonathan Birchall
and Francesco Guerrera,
Financial Times
April 3rd, 2008                                            [back to top]  

The chief executive of Wal-Mart has criticised US business for not taking a lead in the debate on the future of US healthcare ahead of the presidential elections in November.

Lee Scott said in a Financial Times interview that he was "not particularly encouraged" by the public debate on the issues.

"I think business has been absent in this debate on healthcare. I'm not sure why," he said.

"I think government is going to be engaged after this election regardless of who wins, and I think business should be more involved in the discussion. I think it has long-term ramifications for our global competitiveness."

Mr Scott said Wal-Mart, which has more than 1.3m US employees, had not taken "a firm stand" on what a national healthcare system might look like.

The retailer has in the past argued that reforms should focus on reducing costs rather than increasing employer funding of the system.

Some US corporate leaders say they have kept a low profile on healthcare for fear of being dragged into a political debate that could end up harming their companies' image and finances.

One chief executive of a large US company said recently: "Healthcare is a minefield of problems. We don't know yet how the debate will shape up and until then we don't want to make our positions known."

Mr Scott said some business leaders might hesitate to take on the burden of entering a debate that they were not required to be in. But "in our case we were already in the debate", he said.

Union-led critics have repeatedly attacked Wal-Mart during the past three years over the level of healthcare provision for its low-wage workforce.

Its healthcare spending is below unionised competitors - principally the three leading supermarket groups - while being broadly in line with other retail competitors.

Mr Scott expressed satisfaction that in spite of the union campaign, Wal-Mart's record had not become an issue in the Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton served on Wal-Mart's board from 1986 to 1992 when her husband was governor of Arkansas, the retailer's home state.

Both Democratic presidential hopefuls say they want employers to either provide health insurance or to contribute towards costs, with Barack Obama saying he would set a percentage of payroll costs for health coverage.

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Apple passes Walmart, number 1 in US music sales

By Mat Lu,
tuaw.com
April 3rd, 2008                                   [back to top] 

Ars Technica managed to get access to unreleased data from NPD MusicWatch that shows that Apple is now the leading music retailer in the US, passing Walmart. Apparently the news was sent in an internal Apple email and Cupertino now controls 19% of retail music sales, against Walmart's 15% and number three Best Buy's 13%.

Needless to say, this is the first time a download retailer has taken the number one spot and represents a notable market share gain for Apple even since February. It will now be interesting to see if Apple can hold on to the top spot in the long run. In any case, this is a watershed moment and brings the mainstream death of the CD that much closer into view.

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MySpace Music announced, iTunes selling more than Walmart

By Julio Franco,
TechSpot.com
April 3rd, 2008                                [back to top] 

MySpace.com which remains the #1 most popular social network on the Internet has announced today a joint venture with three out of the four major music labels Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music Group, to offer "MySpace Music".

As you can guess, a digital music service, will try to use MySpace's huge reach to its advantage for monetizing music sales, merchandise, and downloads. The service which is expected to launch in the coming months will also offer ad-supported audio and video streaming, although it remains to be seen if the complete music catalog will be available through that program. Another subscription-based model that involves paying a flat monthly fee for unlimited music downloads is being looked into, but has not been confirmed.

The news come out just at the same time as some new figures that put Apple's iTunes store as the #1 music seller in the U.S. with 19 percent of sales during January 2008, overtaking Wal-Mart's in-store sales that represented 15 percent of sales, and Best Buy's 13 percent for the third spot.

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Wal-Mart Gas "Enhanced with Ethanol"...is this good?

By John Matarese,
wcpo
April 3rd, 2008                              [back to top]

Lots of gas stations add some ethanol to their fuel. They're not required by law to tell you ...So most don't. But now a big retailer is advertising the fact.

A 9 News viewer sent me a photo of the gas pumps at the Wilmington Ohio Wal-Mart store.

They now have a big picture of an ear of corn on the pumps...saying their fuel is "enhanced with ethanol."

This is actually not new...Wal-Mart, and many stations, have been adding ethanol to their fuel supply for years. But most don't bother to let you know if they do, as the law no longer requires it.

So Wal-Mart is the first major gas retailer to advertise that it adds ethanol to regular gas.

However, some critics question the term "enhanced with ethanol." They say since it reduces your car's gas mileage, why is that "enhanced?"

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Keith Olbermann Continues Feud Against Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Responds

By Staff,
The Huffington Post
April 1st, 2008                               [back to top]

Last Wednesday, Keith Olbermann introduced the story of Debbie Shank, a 52-year old former Wal-Mart employee and mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who suffered serious brain damage after getting hit by a truck and was subsequently sued by Wal-Mart to recover $470,000 in medical expenses (Shank had won a substantial settlement from the trucking company and, after legal fees, took home $417,000). Olbermann, in the clip seen below, declared Wal-Mart his "Worst Person in the World" and has subsequently named Wal-Mart to his "Worst Persons" list every night since.

Women's Wear Daily/Memo Pad's Stephanie D. Smith reports today that Wal-Mart's corporate communications director, Daphne Moore, has responded with a statement:

"This is a very sad case and we understand that people will naturally have an emotional and sympathetic reaction. While the Shank case involves a tragic situation, the reality is that the health plan is required to protect its assets so that it can pay the future claims of other associates and their family members. These plans are funded by associate premiums and company contributions. Any money recovered is returned to the health plan, not to the business. This is done out of fairness to everyone who contributes to and benefits from the plan. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear an appeal of the case, which concludes all litigation. While Wal-Mart's benefit plan was entitled to more than the amount that remained in the Shank trust, the plan only recovered the funds remaining in that trust," which according to reports amounted to about $277,000.

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Wal-Mart Drops Lawsuit

By Staff,
Associated Press
April 1st, 2008                                                            [back to top]

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is dropping a controversial effort to collect over $400,000 in health-care reimbursement from a former employee who is confined to a southeast Missouri nursing home since she suffered brain damage in a traffic accident.

The world's largest retailer said Tuesday in a letter to the family of Deborah Shank it will not seek to collect money the Shanks won in an injury lawsuit against a trucking company for the accident.

Wal-Mart's top executive for human resources, Pat Curran, wrote that Ms. Shank's extraordinary situation had made the company re-examine its stance. Wal-Mart has been roundly criticized in newspaper editorials, on cable news shows and by its union foes for its claim to the funds, which it made in a lawsuit upheld by a federal appeals court.

Insurance experts say it is increasingly common for health plans to seek reimbursement for the medical expenses they paid for someone's treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit. The practice, called "subrogation," has increased since a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that eased it.

Wal-Mart's Ms. Curran said the retailer was required by the rules of its plan to seek reimbursement from the Shank's settlement. But she said the case has made Wal-Mart revise those rules to allow for flexibility in individual cases. "Occasionally others help us step back and look at a situation in a different way. This is one of those times," Ms. Curran wrote in the letter.

Ms. Shank, 52, lost much of her memory and ability to communicate or walk in a crash between her minivan and a tractor trailer in May 2000. Her family sued the trucking company and won $700,000. Court records show that after attorney's fees and costs, the remaining $417,477 from the settlement went into a trust to care for Ms. Shank. The fund now has about $270,000, the family said.

Ms. Shanks' health insurance was through Wal-Mart, where she worked nights stocking shelves. After the Shanks won their lawsuit, Wal-Mart sued the Shank family to recover medical costs totaling about $470,000.

Wal-Mart won its case and subsequent appeals by the Shanks that went as far as the Supreme Court, which closed legal avenues this month by declining to hear the case.

The case put a spotlight on the growing use of reimbursement claims by health plans, experts say. Roger Baron, professor of law at the University of South Dakota and a specialist in health-plan law, said health plans have become "very aggressive" about subrogation since the 2006 Supreme Court decision.

"It's free money. They want the free money," Mr. Baron said.

Lynn Dudley, vice president for policy at the American Benefits Council in Washington, D.C., said the negative publicity around the case was beginning to draw the attention of lawmakers who might want legislation to stop or limit subrogation.

Mr. Baron said Wal-Mart's size -- it is the nation's largest nongovernment employer, with over 1.3 million workers -- means that its willingness to compromise in an individual case may have a wider impact on reimbursement practices by other health plans. "I'm so pleased to see an element of reason because so much of this subrogation has been about just blindly going after the money," Mr. Baron said.

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Regional Report / Lawyer: Wal-Mart owes $50M to Minnesota workers

By Staff,
Pioneer Press
April 1st, 2008                                     [back to top]

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s records show the world's biggest retailer deliberately shortchanged hourly workers in Minnesota and owes them more than $50 million for unpaid work, an employees' lawyer told a state court judge.

Wal-Mart's hourly employees weren't paid for more than 8 million missed meal and rest periods and company managers falsely recorded breaks on time cards, attorney Justin Perl said Tuesday in closing arguments for a non-jury trial that began in September. The lawsuit, brought by four women on behalf of 56,000 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club employees, claims the retailer violated Minnesota wage and hour laws.

The lawsuit is one of more than 70 in which Wal-Mart has been accused of wage-law violations.

Judge Robert King Jr. will decide on liability, back pay and willfulness. If he finds against Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart, a jury would decide damages in a second trial to start Oct. 20. King said he will issue his decision by July 1.

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VIDEOS

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Fighting Wal-Martization 25min. (2005)

A new video by The Labor Video Project 25 min. (2005)

Wal-Mart is now the largest private employer in the United States and has the same impact that General Motors had nearly 50 years ago. This 26-minute video shows why working people and trade unionists are fighting back and what Wal-Mart has in store for the communities it is seeking to build stores in. "Fighting Wal-Martization" is a hard hitting documentary that looks at how the constant price cutting not only drives local small businesses out of the community but how this ends up driving down the living conditions of the very people who shop at Wal-Mart. The video also looks at the healthcare crisis and how Wal-Mart increases its profits by sending it¹s employees to public hospitals to get treatment thereby shifting costs back onto the taxpayer. This video can be used at union meetings, community meetings and on cable TV to get the message out about the Wal-Martization of America and what it means to every working person.

Please mail your check of $20.00 and order form to

Labor Video Project
P. O. Box 720027,
San Francisco, CA 94172

For more info: lvpsf@labornet.org, (415) 282-1908

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices (www.walmartmovie.com)

Independent America: The Two Lane Search for Mom & Pop (www.independentamerica.net)

Big Box Mart (www.jibjab.com)

Garth Brooks Parody (www.walmartworkersrights.org)

"Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" Frontline, PBS Video, (www.pbs.org)
 

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BOOKS

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NON-FICTION

The Case Against Wal-Mart By Al Norman Raphel Marketing ruth@raphael.com

Wal-Mart: The Face Of Twenty-First Century Capitalism Edited By Nelson Lichtenstein The New Press www.thenewpress.com

The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement By Jacob S. Hacker Oxford University Press www.oup.com

War On The Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back By Lou Dobbs Viking, a member of Penguin Group www.penguin.com

Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age By Allison H. Fine Jossey-Bass www.joseybass.com

Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses, By Stacy Mitchell, www.beacon.org www.newrules.org

Wal-Mart: The Face Of the Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein, Published by The New Press www.thenewpress.com

 The Bully Of Bentonville - How the high cost of Wal-Mart's Everyday Low Prices is Hurting America, By Anthony Bianco, Published by Doubleday
Email: specialmarkets@randomhouse.com

 How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (and the world), By Bill Quinn, Published By Ten Speed Press, Box 7123, Berkeley, CA 94707, www.tenspeed.com (pp. 163)

Slam Dunking Wal-Mart, By Al Norman, Published By Raphel Marketing, 12 S. Virginia Avenue, Atlantic City, New Jersey 08410, www.sprawl-busters.com (pp. 237)

The Great American JobsScam, By Greg LeRoy, Published By Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94104-2916, www.bkconnection.com (pp. 257)

Nickel and Dimed, By Barbara Ehrenreich, Published By Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 115 West 18^th Street, New York, NY 10011, www.henryholt.com (pp.221)

United States of Wal-Mart, By John Dicker, Published By Jeremy P. Tarcher (Penguin Group usa), www.us.penguingroup.com (pp.257)

The Wal-Mart Effect, By Charles Fishman www.penguin.com

Megamall On The Hudson, By David Porter and Chester L. Mirsky www.trafford.com

FICTION

Death By Discount, By Mary Vermillion, Published By Alyson Publications, P.O. Box 4371, Los Angeles, CA 90078-4371, www.maryvermillion.com (pp. 275)

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