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Walmart's Low-Wage Young Women in China
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12-15 Hour Days At the Sewing Machine
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By Bobbi Murray ~ LA City Beat ~ June 9, 2005
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Billy Hung is a young man with a quick smile, a twenty-something activist from China dressed in black. As he ducks into a room at UCLA’s Ackerman Union, it’s Saturday, June 4, which happens to be the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. But it’s the living who are now on Hung’s mind. He’s come to Los Angeles as a representative of Students Against Corporate Misbehavior, for a conference organized by the UCLA Labor Center called “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?”
Maybe the question should be “Is Wal-Mart Good for The World?” Hung was one of several international participants to put Wal-Mart’s business model under the microscope, developing an often scathing critique of the world’s largest retailer. As critics join forces across national lines, the conference, the first of its kind in Los Angeles and perhaps the U.S., could represent an internationally unified shot across the corporate bow of one of the world’s most aggressive mega-corporations.
Any critique of the world’s largest retailer would necessitate a worldwide effort, so joining the 500-plus participants at the confab were activists from as far as China and as near as Mexico and Canada. Wal-Mart is not the only big-box store to proliferate around the globe, but it is certainly the biggest, with 3,500-plus stores and 1.7 million employees – one out of every eight employed by the private sector – in the U.S. alone. The company has some 68,000 suppliers worldwide, and follows a business model that emphasizes squeezing wages and living standards to keep prices low. Because of its size, Wal-Mart leaves a large footprint in the market for other companies to emulate. And that, critics say, exerts downward pressure on labor and environmental standards.
Wal-Mart was invited to participate in a lunchtime debate at the conference, but declined. Cynthia Lin, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company was not asked to engage in any of the workshops to give a positive perspective, reducing the conference to “a one-sided event organized by Wal-Mart critics for Wal-Mart critics.”
The company has already established 45 stores in 20 cities across China, with an ultimate goal of 300 total. But Hung, a university research assistant in Hong Kong, is focused on the difficult life of Chinese workers who make possible the Wal-Mart slogan: “Always low prices. Always.” Two-thirds of Wal-Mart’s products are produced by suppliers in China, he explains, by a workforce that’s 70 percent women, most between the ages of 16 and 22. There’s no health care coverage, no maternity leave, but lots of overtime. “Sometimes they faint because of too much overtime,” he says. “They fall over and hurt their heads.” There’s chronic back pain and foot pain from 12-to-15-hour days working the sewing machine pedals.
The company pays suppliers at such low rates, Hung explains, that garment factories make little or no profit, but can’t afford to turn down the largest retailer in the world. “They try to balance and accept these other orders to keep the factory going,” he says. That means 80-hour work weeks – according to a government labor bureau study, compensated at about $55 a month. “It’s far below the legal standard.”
Flora Guerrero and her husband, Charles Goff, traveled from Mexico to attend the conference. As part of the Civic Front to Defend the Forests, they had joined in an unsuccessful fight in Teotihuacan to prevent construction of a Wal-Mart just under a mile away from the Pyramid of the Sun – what Goff called “ancient Mexico’s most important religious site” in his keynote address. A megastore atop Mount Rushmore might be an approximate analogy.
Wal-Mart opened in Teotihuacan in November 2004 despite a 14-day hunger strike and an audacious 55-day blockade by a handful of traditional healers at the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City. The institution could have denied permits for the Teotihuacan construction, Goff says, given the area’s clear potential as a protected anthropological site, but didn’t. Instead, Goff said, sections of wall built in the time of Christ were dredged up and carted away in trucks to make way for Wal-Mart. Now the Civic Front is fighting construction of a new store close to the volcanos Ixtaccihautl and Popocatelpetl – think Wal-Mart at the Grand Canyon – and big-box stores in Cuernavaca, long a bastion of Mexican arts and culture. “There’s a rainstorm of megastores,” Guerrero says. “Cuernavaca is losing its identity as a city.”
But it’s the Wal-Mart business model that worries many conference participants. It emphasizes, as Hung points out, pressure on suppliers to cut wages and speed up work, as well as swallowing up smaller retail establishments in a given area. The company’s anti-labor practices are notorious. A federal grand jury in Arkansas is presently investigating allegations that Wal-Mart’s former vice-chairman, Thomas Coughlin, conducted an anti-union campaign through a “union project” fund; the “project” is alleged to have included pay-offs to employees to identify pro-union employees to management.
In Canada, the United Food and Commercial Workers are engaged in a protracted fight to unionize Wal-Mart. Paul Meinema, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers local 1400 in Saskatchewan, Canada described for conference-goers how the company reacted when a majority of the workers at the Jonquiere, Quebec Wal-Mart signed union cards. After Wal-Mart first took the union to arbitration and lost, the company shut the store down, claiming that it was underperforming. The Canadian UFCW persists, with 19 applications for union certification in three years, three successful, three in arbitration, and 11 pending. Earlier this year, thousands of Canadians in 200 communities came out in a National Day of Protest against Wal-Mart’s anti-labor policies. “We keep plugging away,” says Meinema.
In the U.S., Wal-Mart’s reputation has recently taken several black eyes over allegations of unsavory labor practices. The company is the target of what could be the largest class action suit in U.S. history for alleged discriminatory practices against women. There have been other dust-ups over the use of child labor in stores and an $11 million settlement after federal authorities discovered 275 undocumented janitors working for Wal-Mart.
In 2004, The New York Times reported on the Wal-Mart policy of “lock-ins,” which amounts to locking the doors during the night shift and leaving no one on-site with a key. Michael Rodriguez, an employee of the Wal-Mart-owned Sam’s Club, described a 3 a.m. accident at the Corpus Christi, Texas store that smashed his ankle. It took an hour just for someone to arrive to unlock the door, while Rodriguez “was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that had been hit by a car,” as he told the Times. Workers have also been locked in at night after their shifts – and off the clock – to clean up work stations.
Despite a ubiquitous media campaign touting Wal-Mart’s satisfied workers, the employee turnover rate was recently pegged at 44 percent by a report on Frontline .
In California, Wal-Mart has plans to build 40 “Super Centers,” huge stores of 190,000 square feet that include grocery sections, and battles have already erupted in several communities in the L.A. area. Last year, Wal-Mart was defeated in a company-sponsored “welcome Wal-Mart to Inglewood” ballot initiative, which would have circumvented local environmental and planning reviews for a Super Center adjacent to Hollywood Park. The company still purchased the land and may be planning another run at it.
A Super Center remains on track in Rosemead, 12 miles east of downtown L.A., despite a long fight led by Save Our Community (SOC), which objects to the potential 14,000 car trips a day the store could bring through residential areas. SOC is now pursuing the recall of two council members who it says have disregarded community opposition.
Wal-Mart, meanwhile, is on the offensive nationally with commercials about happy, upwardly-mobile workers, along with a second theme: Busy moms can find all they need under one roof at super-low prices. Hung says he leaves it to Americans to decide whether Wal-Mart offers “a good deal for you. But you should know that many women in other countries are paying the hidden costs.”
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