WalMart has a rap sheet longer than Al Capone’s, so almost any account of its assorted misdeeds is bound to leave out some of the more heinous acts. But on a teacher union blog with an educational focus, it is well worth recalling that the UFT and our national union, the AFT, have some very good educational reasons to be campaigning against America’s largest corporation.
For starters, the late John Walton, one of the four children of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, was a major backer of school vouchers, tuition tax credits and other similar privatization, anti-public school schemes. Largely through his efforts, the Walton family foundation has already given over $700 million to efforts in this area, with promises to dramatically increase such spending — to as much as $1 billion a year, according to some reports. Wal-Mart money dwarfs all other contributions to the far right campaign against public education.
And if that is not enough, consider the fact that America’s largest corporation has a record of numerous violations of child labor laws – including having young people under eighteen working during the school day and working longer hours than the law allows and having young people under eighteen using dangerous and hazardous machinery prohibited by law. In 2000, Wal-Mart had to pay $205,650 to resolve a case involving 1,436 violations of Maine state child labor law — the largest such fine in state history. In 2004, Wal-Mart’s own internal audit of 128 stores over a single week showed 1371 instances in which young people were working during school hours or longer hours than allowed by law. But amazingly enough, Bush’s Department of Labor entered into a sweetheart deal with Wal-Mart in January of this year which required Wal-Mart to pay only $135,540 in fines for its continuing child labor law violations — not even as much as they were fined in the state of Maine alone. With Wal-Mart’s $285 billion in annual sales, that DOL fine is chump change. Over at Nathan Newman’s Labor Blog, where I blog occasionally, my good friend Nathan produced a scathing report on this deal, which rewarded one of the largest corporate donors to the Bush presidential campaigns. Those are our students working during the school day and working for so long they can not do homework or stay awake in class. These child labor law violations are part of an extraordinary string of violations of law — racial and sexual discrimination law, Americans with Disability Act, labor law, and more.
And finally, consider the fact that the Wal-Mart business model is dependent upon paying their workers so poorly with such poor health care coverage, that many of their workers are forced to go on Medicaid and other forms of public assistance to receive necessary medical care. The state and local government ends up subsidizing health care for Wal-Mart employees, and Wal-Mart profits. And that is taxpayer money that could be going to public schools, or to improve health care for all.
So the campaign against Wal-Mart is a campaign for the educational needs of American youth.
4 Comments:
1 redhog
· Aug 24, 2005 at 12:10 am
To slander the already sullied name of Al Capone by comparing his rap sheet with the documented sins of the collective hit-men of a trillion-tentacled corporate family is plain but excusable defamation. To use a modern reference, the Gambino Family is not a patch on the Walton Family.
Leo Casey’s combination of meticulous and irrefutable research and focused analysis makes for a devastating indictment. But Leo: $135,000 fine to a family whose half-dozen top execs have a portfolio of 20 billion each, sounds plenty onerous to me!
Anybody hear the Walmart-promotion spots on radio lately? All the fallacies about the corporate family as an intimate loving clan breezily dramatized with brutal Madison Avenue unctuousness.
The Walton “special interest” has a war-chest for reactionary causes that reminds me of the military budgets of us and our big bad adversaries of the Cold War. Maybe our schools should hold shelter drills when a Walton corporate evangelist is in the area. It’s been a long time since I ducked under a desk.
But as Casey makes clear: the Walton agenda is no joke. If it were, it would be gallows humor on which Lord knows what is hanged. The exploitation is of many kinds and on several levels. Among the most damaging is the message, part naked and part clothed in subliminal prompts, that Wal-Mart is the paradigm of the American Way of Life. It is the new millennium’s “Apple Pie.” How quaint! How fetid!
Maybe Wal-Mart is just practicing “tough love” on its workers, to make sure ( like any good parent would) that its chldren don’t get soft like those European socialist nations whose citizens have the temerity to develop expensive-to-treat tumors that they haven’t worked hard enough in the free marketplace crucible to afford.
Leo Casey cites the many laws that Walmart has been found to have violated. Such violations are like “paper losses” to a tycoon who needs tax shelters. They carry neither sting nor stigma. They are winks of de facto approbation. Citizens should not expect the Law to be the public’s advocate. The institutions of government don’t work that way any more, if they ever did. Of course we should not storm the streets to bring down Wal-Mart. But surely we can abandon their aisles!
2 nycparent
· Aug 24, 2005 at 9:14 am
“So the campaign against Wal-Mart is a campaign for the educational needs of American youth.”…..Now, cmon. I can agree the UFT reacts adversely to school reform like school choice and I can agree that the WalMart model for employee pay and benefits is a tragedy but this UFT campaign is mostly about supporting labor and has very little to do with “the educational needs of American youth”….This is the kind of rhetoric which sends a parent over the edge. I am a democrat and absolutely support labor making a case against Walmart but the UFT is using children in this case. You are supporting your own political brethren and interests….and that’s ok. JUST SAY IT. It makes me second guess all your stances, some of which actually do support the educational needs of American youth.
3 Leo Casey
· Aug 24, 2005 at 10:25 am
I am afraid, NYCParent, that if you think that campaigns against corporate law breakers like Wal-Mart are simply about our economic self-interest, you understand very little about teacher unions, American trade unions and the history and traditions of which we are quite proud.
It was the tireless work of labor unions and our close friends, and virtually no one else, that won the passage of child labor laws in the US when all of the leading spokesmen of business were talking about how such legislation was an unfair ‘restraint of trade’ and a body blow against the free market. Today, it is teacher and other unions which are the main campaigners in the US against widespread child labor and worse [such as child soldiers and child prostitution] in the poor nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. We believe in protecting children from exploitation as a matter of principle, one deeply embedded in what leads us to become teachers. It outrages us that the wealthiest of American corporations, one doing $285 billion in sales a year, would be hiring school age youth to work during school hours and to work far more hours than allowed by child labor laws, simply because it does not want to pay a living wage for an adult with a family to support. We believe that trade unionism is as much about as creating a just economic order, one that among other things, does not exploit children, as it is about the economic needs and security of our members. If you don’t understand that, you understand very little about what makes a teacher and a teacher unionist tick. And if you don’t think that child labor laws are, among other things, an educational issue, you understand very little about both child labor laws and education.
The whole point of a campaign against a corporate law breaker like Wal-Mart is that when they violate the law in one area, such as the right of their workers to unionize, they break it in many areas, such as laws discriminating against racial and sexual discrimination, child labor laws, and laws protecting workers’ health and safety.
In point of fact, teachers and teacher unions have no more direct economic self-interest in the practices of Wal-Mart than any other American citizen — we certainly recognize that their low wage business model has repercussions throughout the economy which hurt all American working people, and we certainly disapprove of the Walton family’s campaign against public education, but Wal-Mart’s business practices hurt us directly only as much as they hurt you [assuming you are not an employee of Wal-Mart]. We are taking on Wal-Mart because it is the right thing to do, for our students, for public education and for all Americans.
4 dave44
· Aug 26, 2005 at 3:09 pm
I love Wal-mart and the more you socialists rant against it, the more I support it. I never went to one until I heard about these complaints, now I love the store.
Thanks, I’ve saved enough to hire tutors for my kids to compensate for their public school education. They won’t survive in college otherwise.