Wal-Mart’s dirty partners

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/06/doing_walmarts_dirty_work/singleton/

Friday, Jul 6, 2012 10:12 AM CDT

Does the retail giant turn a blind eye to subcontractors that abuse their employees?
By Josh Eidelson


Shopping carts are photographed outside the Wal-Mart store in Mayfield Hts., Ohio on Monday, Nov. 14, 2011. Wal-Mart is reporting that the third-quarter profits slipped 2.9 percent and offered a conservative fourth-quarter outlook. But the world's largest retailer announced its first quarterly gain in its U.S. namesake business, reversing a more than two year sales slump. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)(Credit: AP)


Wal-Mart’s low prices come at a high cost. You can measure it in environmental impact, crowded-out competitors or its employees’ miserly benefits. Or you can consider Wal-Mart’s other army: workers employed by Wal-Mart’s contractors and subcontractors, whose labor makes Wal-Mart possible and whose working conditions are shaped by the company’s lust for savings. As Wal-Mart celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, some of them are raising alarms.

Take C.J.’s Seafood, which provided seafood sold at Wal-Mart subsidiary Sam’s Club. Last month, some C.J.’s workers in Louisiana – non-union temporary guest workers from Mexico – went on strike. They charged the company with violating wage laws and locking them inside the plant. The National Guestworker Alliance helped workers organize and bring a complaint to the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor monitoring organization. The WRC found that employees worked up to 24 consecutive hours, were paid less than 60 percent of minimum wage and lived in vermin-infested trailers on company property. One worker told the WRC, “It was forced work. They would come to the trailers and made us go back to work … We were screamed at and had to go to work. I felt like a slave.” According to the WRC, workers’ complaints to management were met with threats of deportation or violence.

In an emailed statement, WRC Executive Director Scott Nova called the conditions “among the worst we have encountered.” A week before the WRC issued its report, a Wal-Mart spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the company had completed its own investigation and was “unable to substantiate claims of forced labor or human trafficking at CJ Seafood.”

But last week, Wal-Mart announced it had suspended its contract with C.J.’s. Company spokesperson Lorenzo Lopez told Salon that whether the contract was resumed would depend on the results of investigations. “As it relates to the National Guestworker Alliance and their representatives,” Lopez said, “we see this as a union-funded and union-backed report that has little to do with solving real issues.” The NGA released a report tallying federal labor law citations at a dozen U.S. Wal-Mart suppliers employing guest workers.


FULL story at link.


Josh Eidelson is a freelance journalist and a contributor at The American Prospect and In These Times. After receiving his MA in Political Science, he worked as a union organizer for five years. More Josh Eidelson.