Wal-Mart Is Not a Business,
It's an Economic Disease


Not since the days of the British East India Company as the cornerstone of the British imperial system, has one single corporate entity been responsible for so much misery. At the core of its policy, Wal-Mart demands of its suppliers that they sell goods to Wal-Mart at such a low price, that they can only do so by outsourcing their work to low-wage factories overseas. This causes the exodus of millions of production jobs from the United States and the setting up of slave-labor concentration camps around the globe. Wal-Mart's policy includes crushing living standards in America, forbidding its workers from unionizing, bringing in workers illegally from abroad, and bankrupting tens of thousands of stores and outlets on Main Street, ripping apart communities and their tax bases.


Destruction of Labor


The company is militantly anti-union. Reportedly it has instructed its managers never to hire workers who once belonged to a union. It also reportedly fires workers who score too high on a "union probability index." When a union tries to unionize a Wal-Mart cluster of stores, "labor experts" are flown in from Bentonville to counterorganize. Workers are ordered to sit in on weekly "labor relations classes," where management tells them why they should not join a union, and gives them badges saying, "We can speak for ourselves." At one store in Texas, where a union tried to organize, 15 surveillance cameras were installed.


Overseas Slave-Labor


Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is operating slave-labor camps overseas. It does this through its suppliers and, increasingly, in its own name. One of the most infamous slave-labor camps is that in American Somoa—the Daewoosa Factory, where 230 workers, mostly young women from Vietnam and China, worked under conditions of indentured servitude. According to records, they were cheated of their meager wages, beaten, starved, sexually harassed, and threatened with deportation if they complained. On Feb. 21, 2003, in a court in Hawaii, the proprietor of the factory, Kil Soo Lee, was found guilty of 14 of 18 counts brought against him for indentured servitude. This factory sewed clothing for Wal-Mart, under Wal-Mart's "Beach Cabana" label (as well as producing for other retailers).

Wal-Mart has plundered the productive functions of the U.S. economy. It's time to shut down Wal-Mart!

 http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3044wal-mart.html