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Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Angela Saini
13 - 1 - 2006

The success of Robert Greenwald’s documentary on the American retail behemoth holds an inspiring lesson, says Angela Saini

Work just isn't what it used to be. There was a time you could get up in the morning, go down to the office and be happy in the knowledge that you had a job for life, and you'd be home in time for dinner. Not any more.

Facing global competition, companies in the west have started chipping away at working conditions to lower costs. Freelance contracts, long and unsociable hours, low pay, and zero benefits are leaving millions of workers helpless.

Robert Greenwald captures the desperate situation in his latest film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. He tells the shocking tale of working conditions in America's biggest supermarket. Wal-Mart is the epitome of stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap warehouse-style chain stores, which are scattered across the country like Lego bricks in a playroom.

Greenwald's film comes hot on the heels of his last corporate attack, on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. In Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Greenwald used news clips and interviews with ex-employees to mount an incredible attack on the broadcaster. His new film is structured in exactly the same way, and carries as much of a punch.

There is something bizarrely manic about the smiling faces in Wal-Mart's recruitment adverts. They are the same smiling faces that warn you in a company video, after you have been recruited, not to join a union. Wal-Mart's strict anti-union policy has been one of the reasons why it has managed to slash wages and gradually remove benefits like health insurance. Union membership is already low in the United States, running at just above 12% of all waged workers. But the casual nature of retail work, combined with a deliberate anti-union strategy, forces that proportion down to almost zero among Wal-Mart employees

"It is incredible that an independent filmmaker can wield such power over the largest retailer in the world. But his example holds a lesson for us all - consumers, workers and voters - we have the power to change the way the world works."

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This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. To view the original article, please click here.

posted by Annamarie at 4:07 PM