Local 400, Working Families
"Send Wal-Mart Back to School"
Local 400 leaders and members were joined by fellow activists from UFCW Local 1994 and other working families in telling customers to “Send Wal-Mart Back To School” at a Back to School rally in front of the Germantown, Md., Wal-Mart store.
The protestors distributed hundreds of pledge cards to shoppers asking them not to purchase back-to-school supplies from Wal-Mart until it promises to pay its employees living wages, provide affordable health care, end discrimination against women, and stop taking advantage of child labor. Many would-be Wal-Mart customers signed the cards and agreed to buy their school supplies elsewhere.
“Wal-Mart is bad for children in America and all over the world,” said Local 400 President Jim Lowthers, “When making purchasing decisions for our children, we shouldn’t be sanctioning Wal-Mart’s immoral behavior and making life worse for the youngest among us.
“The children of Wal-Mart employees suffer from the company’s poverty-level wages and its refusal to provide affordable family health-coverage,” Lowthers explained. “Children in ChinaAmerica suffer because Wal-Mart has sold hundreds of thousands of Chinese-made toys (links to internal website) contaminated with toxic lead paint that had to be recalled. suffer because they are forced to work or because their parents are paid pennies a day by Wal-Mart’s suppliers. Children across
“Adding insult to injury, taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart to the tune of well over $1 billion a year to provide health care coverage for employees and family members not insured by the company,” Lowthers charged. “That’s money that would be better spent improving our schools rather than helping the world’s largest retailer make over $10 billion in annual profits.”
The Germantown rally was part of a national campaign organized by WakeUpWalMart.com (links to outside website). A focus of the campaign involved television ads airing in 26 markets across the country, including Charleston-Huntington, W.Va. The ad opens with a chalkboard and colorful, hand-drawn images of a school, a taxpayer, and a Wal-Mart store. The taxpayer’s dollars steadily inflate the Wal-Mart store while the school shrinks smaller and smaller, dramatically illustrating that, “Every tax dollar that comes out of your pocket to subsidize a company with billions in profits… Is a dollar that isn’t being spent to build better schools, hire more teachers and help children learn.”
Campaigns such as these are steadily focusing public outrage against Wal-Mart’s unethical practices, causing the company to report disappointing earnings in the second quarter of 2007 and leading its stock price to fall the most in five years this past August. “It’s a war of attrition and we’re slowly but steadily wearing them down,” said Mark Federici, Local 400’s executive assistant to the president and director of strategic campaigns, at the Germantown rally.
In response, Wal-Mart recently tried to improve its image by announcing the introduction of a new employee health care plan. While an improvement over Wal-Mart’s past substandard health benefits, the new package remains unaffordable for most employees, who make less than $20,000 a year, and maintains long waiting periods before coverage kicks in.
“Rather than accept the responsibilities of good corporate citizenship and giving something back to the country that made its unprecedented wealth possible, Wal-Mart is trying to do as little as humanly possible to rescue its plummeting public image,” Lowthers said. “The American people know this because fewer and fewer customers are willing to spend their hard-earned money to make Bentonville billionaires even wealthier than they already are.”
###
This article was also found in the UFCW Local 400 Union Leader newsletter. Are you missing your newsletter? Click here (links to internal form) to confirm that Local 400 has your correct address on file.
