What kind of people are they?
by Tom Sullivan
Walmart is a store my wife refuses to set foot in. We have that luxury. Then again, there are plenty of Walmarts in rural areas heavily frequented by poorer shoppers who don't. Then again, Walmart does not seem to have learned what Henry Ford knew: unless you actually pay your employees a decent salary, they won't be able to buy your products. Walmart's (and others') answer is to cheapen everything, customers and employees included. Can't afford to shop elsewhere? Tough luck.
Since 2000, Public Eye has staged a counter-event to the World Economic Forum to highlight bad corporate actors. Walmart is in their sights again:
Walmart workers in 10 countries joined a global day of action on Wednesday to demand better wages and treatment for employees, as a public interest group nominated the retailer for a Lifetime Award as “worst corporation in the world”.
Organizers with the group OUR Walmart estimated that about 300 protesters would march on Walmart’s headquarters in India and block the gate. Another 200 people were expected to protest at the company’s headquarters in Mexico City. Workers in Argentina, Brazil and Canada were also expected to participate.
Public Eye has nominated Walmart for "worst corporation in the world." They will have company:
In 2005, Walmart received a Public Eye award in the labor category for “lack of respect for human and labor rights along its supply chain in places such as Lesotho, Kenya, and Thailand”. This year, Public Eye will give a lifetime achievement award to one of its previous winners. Goldman Sachs and Chevron are also among those nominated. Consumers can submit their votes over the next two months.
In an op-ed awhile back, I explored how Sam Walton, the pickup-driving, underdog owner of a small, American-flag-draped chain of five-and-dime stores from Bentonville, AR, went from being Everyman Sam to selling cheap, plastic crap from China as the downtown-killing Prince of Darkness. How many stores did that take? Can you be too successful? How big is too big?
The best I could figure it was when he took his company public. In privately held or closely held companies, one man (or woman) with a vision is its guiding light. He/she has as much of himself/herself invested as money. How the company comports itself is a direct reflection of its founder’s character, and those with any moral compass take the reputation of their firm personally. But once the company goes public, once it is sold to nameless, faceless absentee-landlord investors, that connection is broken. It’s no longer personal. The visionary loses control, the soul and any morality he/she brought to the company is lost, and like a great white shark, its eyes go black and dead. All that remains is appetite and instinct.
Like Walmart, the thing that’s wrong with business today is not the corporation per se, but the disconnected, amoral nature of the public corporate “person”. Writing about megabanks, Matt Taibbi puts it more bluntly:
... what we’ve found out in the last years is that these Too-Big-To-Fail megabanks like Goldman no longer see the margin in being truly trustworthy. The game now is about getting paid as much as possible and as quickly as possible, and if your client doesn’t like the way you managed his money, well, fuck him – let him try to find someone else on the market to deal him straight.
The Public Eye protest in Miami was mostly rained out, but a few people showed up nevertheless:
“I’m standing with protesters all over the world today to send a message to Walmart and the Waltons that we need better pay,” said Emily Wells, one of the protesters. Wells makes $9.50 an hour and relies on food stamps to make ends meet. “As the richest family in America and one of the richest in the world, we all know the Waltons can afford to pay $15 an hour to the workers that make them richer every day.”
Maybe. But that's not the new business model.
If corporations are people it's legitimate to ask, what kind of people are they?