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Demonising Wal-Mart: what do the facts tell us?

Article Excerpt
SINCE THE EARLY 1990s, WAL-MART, THE No. I mass merchandising retailer in the United States, has been the primary target of environmental activists protesting against urban sprawl and the demise of small-town business districts across America. In more recent years, however, the American labour movement has actively entered the anti-Wal-Mart fray, vehemently protesting about Wal-Mart's strong resistance to union organising of employees in its expanding grocery business, its alleged lack of adequate healthcare benefits for its employees, and the company's ostensibly low wage scale. Two of the most vocal of the anti-Wal-Mart non-profit activist groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake-Up Wal-Mart, have strong union ties: Andrew Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union (a union that left the larger umbrella of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) in 2005), is chairman of the board of Wal-Mart Watch, while Wake-Up Wal-Mart is funded by the Food & Commercial Workers Union, the union representing organised grocery workers.

As the US economy has shifted from manufacturing to service-sector employment, the percentage of the working population that is unionised has continued to decline. According to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (2008), 12.1% of the working-age US population (or 15.7 million wage and salary workers) were union members in 2007, compared with 20.1% of all US wage and salary workers who were members of a union in 1983 (the first year for statistically comparable comparisons to be made). Of the total US working-age population in 2007, only 7.5% of private-industry workers are presently unionised. Not surprisingly, the future existence of the American labour movement is now focused on organising the service sector, and not the declining manufacturing sector, of the US economy. Wal-Mart, an employer of 1.3 million non-union Americans, represents a major challenge to these service-sector unions, and generally to the future of the labour movement in the US.

Given the shrill vocal tenor of the labour critics of Wal-Mart, there has been a recent trend among economists and journalists to investigate...

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