“The race to the bottom” is becoming increasingly associated with Wal-Mart. The retail behemoth leads the pack in driving down wages and working conditions. No retailer can match Walmart’s single-minded drive for the world’s cheapest labor.
Flory Arevalo, a garment worker in the Philippines, earns just 62 cents an hour after 15 years in the factory. Arevalo sews clothes for Wal-Mart as well as for The Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic.
For most, Wal-Mart is perceived as the consummate American corporation. In the 1980s, Wal-Mart was among the major corporations urging consumers to purchase U.S.-made products. It went so far as to drape its stores with red-white-and-blue “Buy American” signs.
“Asian procurement rose steadily all during the hey-day of the “Buy American” program as Wal-Mart’s buying staff resident in East Asia more than doubled in size,” writes historian Nelson Lichtenstein in the forthcoming Spring 2006 issue of “New Labor Forum,” a publication of New York City’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.
“I SUPPORT MY MOTHER, MY DAUGHTER AND MYSELF ON 39 CENTS AN HOUR.”
Lichtenstein notes that Wal-Mart also used the “Buy American” campaign as a negotiating club to force domestic manufacturers to reduce the costs of their goods to compete with foreign suppliers.
The cost cutting helped boost Wal-Mart’s profits, but was unable to prevent the suppliers from going under. Few were able to compete with maquiladoras – duty-free factories on the Mexican border – or factories in other low-wage countries. To survive in the face of Wal-Mart and other big retailers’ pricing demands, U.S. manufacturers have had to lay off employees and close their domestic plants in favor of outsourcing production.
Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest importer of foreign-produced goods. Among its suppliers are factories in the Ivory Coast employing children as young as nine and Guatemalan factories in which women are forced to sew one shirt sleeve every 15 seconds for $35 per week. Even worse, young women in Bangladesh must work 14 hours a day, often seven days a week, for wages as low as 13 cents an hour.
In September 2005, workers at Wal-Mart suppliers in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Swaziland, China and Nicaragua filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles to force Wal-Mart to implement its Code of Conduct and ensure basic rights for employees of its suppliers.
“I support my mother, my daughter and myself on 39 cents an hour,” says Damaris Meza Guillen, who sews Faded Glory Jeans at Mil Colores factory in Managua, Nicaragua. Guillen was in New York City in February with Stella Ines Orjuela, who has worked for seven years on a Colombian flower plantation, and Flory Arevalo, who produces Wal-Mart shirts at the Chong Won Fashion, Inc. factory in the Philippines.
The women were brought to the U.S. by the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) to expose Wal-Mart’s oppressive practices.
“I am a leader in our independent union,” Guillen says. “Only half of the 400 workers in the plant are in the union. The others are in a company union that undermines our efforts. The problem is that many of the workers are afraid because they have no where to go if they lose their job.”
She says that Wal-Mart turns a blind eye to illegal practices at her plant.
Arevalo also is a leader of the union at her factory, which in addition to Wal-Mart produces clothing for the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic.
“After 15 years in the factory, I earn about 62 cents an hour,” she says. “Our factory is hot and congested and has no ventilation. We work six days a week and get five paid holidays a year.”
The situation for Chinese factory workers is worse. More than 80 percent of the 6,000 factories that supply goods to Wal-Mart are based in China. If Wal-Mart were a separate nation, it would rank as China’s eighth-largest importer, ahead of Germany and Great Britain.
Robert Greenwald’s film expose of Wal-Mart, “The High Cost of Low Price,” features a Chinese couple, both of whom work for a Wal-Mart supplier. Each works about 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for $3 a day. In the film, they ask U.S. consumers to consider their plight whenever they purchase Wal-Mart products.