Bangladeshi workers demonstrate against fire deaths

Posted on November 27, 2012 by petrel41

This video is about protests after a Bangladesh factory building collapse trapped workers, killing them.

Garment workers protest after Bangladeshi fire

27 November 2012

Thousands of Bangladeshi garment workers from the Ashulia industrial zone north of Dhaka took part in angry protests yesterday over the Tazreen Fashions factory fire that claimed at least 112 lives on Saturday night.

The protesters demanded justice for the victims, the punishment of the factory’s owners and improved safety conditions. Police set up a roadblock on the main Dhaka-Tangail highway to prevent the workers from marching towards the city. …

One worker, Shahida, told Reuters: “I haven’t been able to find my mother. I demand justice, I demand that the owner be arrested.” On Sunday, some 40 garment worker organisations held a rally in front of the Jatiya Press Club in Dhaka.

Clearly aware of the widespread anger over the fire, managers closed many of the hundreds of garment factories in the Ashulia zone yesterday. Police sources told the Daily Star that the closures were “to avoid any untoward incident”.

Fearful of wider unrest, the government declared that all garment factories would be closed today in a national day of mourning. … Successive governments have taken no action over the appalling safety standards in the lucrative garment industry, which accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports, generating earnings of $US19 billion.

Desperate to deflect attention from the government and employers, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, without a shred of evidence, yesterday claimed that the fire was an act of sabotage. Pointing to the arrest of two people who allegedly set fire to a different factory on Sunday, Hasina declared that the Tazreen Garment fire was undoubtedly “pre-planned” and accused “a vested quarter” of committing “acts of sabotage to destabilise the country”.

Dhaka police superintendent Habibur Rahman Khan also claimed Saturday’s fire was “likely to be an act of sabotage”. He announced that law enforcement agencies had beefed up their presence at garment factories “to look after their security”. This police build-up is clearly aimed at suppressing protests by garment workers who have previously participated in large-scale strikes and demonstrations over pay and conditions.

Senior fire fighters have already indicated that the likely cause of the Tazreen Garment blaze was an electrical fault. Regardless of how the fire started, the reasons for the high death toll lie in the lack of basic safety standards in the eight-storey building. Workers had no means of escaping, as doors were either locked or led to the ground floor, where the fire started.

One survivor, Mohammed Ripu, told Associated Press that he had been stopped from leaving the building after the fire alarm went off: “Managers told us, ‘nothing happened.’ The fire alarm had just gone out of order. Go back to work. But we quickly understood that there was a fire. As we again ran for the exit point, we found it locked from outside, and it was too late.”

Many of the injuries and some of the deaths occurred when workers jumped to escape the fire. Bangladesh’s chief factory inspector Habibul Islam said that the factory, which was built in 2009, had only been given permission for three storeys. “They expanded the building without our approval,” he said.

The building lacked adequate fire fighting equipment. Another worker, Yeamin, told the Associated Press that the fire extinguishers in the factory didn’t work, and “were meant just to impress the buyers or authority.” TV footage showed investigators finding unused fire extinguishers inside the factory, the news agency reported.

Employers have paid limited compensation to the families of victims. The government has set up several inquiries. Labour Minister Rajiuddin Ahmed Raju yesterday declared that he would shut down garment factories that did not have at least two fire exits. Similar promises have been made previously, only to be broken.

Amirul Haque Amin, president of the Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers Federation, told Reuters: “This disastrous fire incident was a result of continued neglect of workers’ safety and their welfare. When a fire or accident occurs, the government sets up an investigation and the authorities, including factory owners, pay out some money and hold out assurances to improve safety standards and working conditions. But they never do it.”

… Labour costs in Bangladesh are lower than in rivals such as China, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

Global corporations that source their garments in Bangladesh have been quick to try to distance themselves from the fire. PVH, Nike, Gap, American Eagle Outfitters and the French company Carrefour have all released statements declaring that their products were not made at the Tazreen Garment factory.

Walmart issued a statement declaring that it was “trying to determine if the factory has a current relationship with Walmart or one of our suppliers.” However, Kalpona Akter from the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity, found labels at the site for Walmart’s Faded Glory brand, as well as for leading European retailers.

Associated Press has reported that inspections of the factory conducted for Walmart had given it a “high risk” rating in May 2011 and a “medium risk” rating in August 2011.

Anxious to protect their brand names and profits, and avoid any legal liability, international corporations have established various supposedly independent factory audits for safety and working conditions. But such inquiries are often perfunctory.

A spokesman for the European retailer C&A said that Tazreen Fashions had been due to deliver 220,000 sweatshirts over the coming three months. He explained that the company normally conducted an audit for standards and working conditions before entering a business relationship, but acknowledged it had not been carried out in this case.

The global corporations are well aware of the atrocious pay, conditions and safety standards throughout much of Bangladesh’s garment industry. While buyers insist on the most exacting standards when it comes to price, manufacture, quality and deadlines for their products, similar conditions do not apply when it comes to the wellbeing of the workforce.

The result has been one tragedy after another, with at least 500 deaths from garment factory fires in Bangladesh since 2006.

Yesterday another fire broke out in the first floor of a 12-storey building that houses three separate garment factories in the Uttara area of Dhaka. No casualties have been reported, in large part due to the efforts of construction workers in a neighbouring building, who quickly made a bamboo ladder to allow trapped garment workers to escape.

From Associated Press:

Wal-Mart said the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory was no longer authorized to produce merchandise for Wal-Mart but that a supplier subcontracted work to it “in direct violation of our policies.”

“Today, we have terminated the relationship with that supplier,” America’s biggest retailer said in its statement Monday. …

Wal-Mart did not say why it dropped the Tazreen factory. …

For more than a day after the fire, Wal-Mart said it could not confirm whether it was still doing business with Tazreen, which was making T-shirts and polo shirts. …

Tazreen Fashions is a subsidiary of the Tuba Group, a major Bangladeshi garment exporter whose clients include Wal-Mart, Carrefour and IKEA, according to its website. Its factories supply garments to the U.S., Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, among other countries. The Tazreen factory opened in 2009 and employed about 1,700 people.

Neither Tazreen nor Tuba Group officials could be reached for comment.

Garment Workers Stage Protest in Bangladesh After Deadly Fire (nytimes.com)
Garment factory workers protest as new blaze erupts in Bangladesh (dawn.com)
At Least 124 Killed in Fire at Bangladesh Garment Factory (bloomberg.com)

Bangladeshi Walmart supplier fire kills workers

Posted on November 26, 2012 by petrel41

This video is called After Clothes Factory Fire, Anger in Bangladesh.

By Peter Symonds:

Worst factory fire in Bangladeshi history

26 November 2012

At least 112 workers died and 150 were injured in Bangladesh’s worst-ever factory fire, which gutted the eight-storey Tazreen Fashions building in the Ashulia industrial zone on Saturday night. The fire began in the ground floor, trapping hundreds of workers on the upper storey. Several died and more were injured as they jumped to escape the blaze.

Fire fighters took hours to bring the fire under control and to remove the badly burned bodies of those who died in the upper floors. Major Mohammad Mahbub, the fire department’s operations director, told the Associated Press that there were no escape exits leading outside the building.

“The factory had three staircases, and all of them were down through the ground floor. So the workers could not come out when the fire engulfed the building,” Mahbub said. “Had there been at least one emergency exit through outside the factory, the casualties would have been much lower.”

The factory opened in May 2010 and employed about 1,500 workers, making T-shirts, polo shirts and fleece jackets. While the exact cause of the fire is not known, Fire Service Director General Abu Naim Mohammad Shahidullah told reporters that it might have originated from an electrical short circuit.

Firefighters rescued workers who managed to clamber onto the roof. Others escaped using bamboo scaffolding used by construction workers making modifications to the building. An estimated 600 workers were in the factory, working overtime at the time of the blaze.

Speaking to the Guardian, a survivor, Mohammad Shahbul Alam, explained: “It was 6.45 p.m. when the fire alarm was raised. I rushed out. I heard that [grills blocking the way to] the second and third floors were locked. When I came down, I saw fire at both the stairways that the ladies used. I still have not found any trace of my sister-in-law.”

Another worker, Abu Taleb, told the Bangladesh-based Independent that fire fighting equipment inside the factory was inadequate and most staff received no fire safety training.

Sabina Yasmine told Associated Press that her daughter-in-law died in the fire and her son was missing. “I want the factory owner to be hanged,” she said. “For him, many have died, many have gone.

Bangladeshi authorities sent in police, army soldiers and border guards, including the notorious Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), to control the thousands of anxious and angry relatives gathered outside the factory for any news. Industrial Police official Moktar Hossain told bdnews24.com that the security forces baton-charged the crowd and fired teargas after relatives denounced authorities for delays in the rescue operation.

The government, employers and officials are already mounting a damage control operation aimed at deflecting public anger in Bangladesh and minimising the impact on the country’s lucrative garment industry, which has been repeatedly criticised for its low wages and poor health and safety record.

The industry, which operates some 5,000 sweatshops, produces clothes for major corporations in the United States and Europe. Garments comprise around 80 percent of Bangladesh exports, with earnings of around $19 billion for the last financial year. More than 2.2 million people, mostly women, are employed in the industry.

The Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) has announced compensation of 100,000 Bangladeshi taka ($1,200) to the families of each victim. The Hong Kong-based giant Li & Fung, which sources garments for major companies, declared that it was “distressed” and promised a matching amount. These pitiful sums amount to nothing more than hush money to buy the silence of the victims’ families.

BGMEA President Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, claimed that most buyers carry out regular safety audits. “If we didn’t comply with labour laws and safety regulations, we would lose our business,” he declared. These comments are a sham. The lack of inspectors means that the country’s fire safety regulations are routinely flouted.

Western corporations, concerned about their public image, have initiated a system of safety audits, but their cosmetic character was exposed by Saturday’s fire. According to Associated Press, an audit conducted by “an ethical sourcing assessor” for Wal-Mart in May 2011 gave Tazreen Fashions an orange or “high risk” safety rating. Following a further inspection in August 2011, the company was given a yellow or “medium risk” report and another audit was due in a year.

Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Gardner said it was not clear if this year’s inspection had been conducted, or if the factory was still making products for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart will only suspend orders if a factory is rated “orange” three times in a two-year period. “There was no indication whether the violations had been fixed since the May [2011] inspection. Neither Tazreen’s owner nor Tuba Group officials could be reached for comment,” Associated Press stated.

Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the Amsterdam-based Clean Clothes Campaign, said that global clothing brands like Tommy Hilfiger and the Gap and those sold by Walmart had “known for years that many of the factories they choose to work with are death traps. Their failure to take action amounts to criminal negligence.”

The Tazreen Fashions’ blaze is just the latest and worst of a series of factory fires in Bangladesh and other countries used as cheap labour platforms, According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, more than 500 Bangladeshi workers have died in factory fires since 2006.

In February 2006, at least 54 workers were killed and over 100 seriously injured when a textile factory burned down in Chittagong. Many of those killed or badly injured were unable to escape because the main entrance and other gates were locked. In September, nearly 300 workers died in a garment factory owned by Ali Enterprises in the Pakistani city of Karachi—again the high death toll was due to locked exits and grated windows.

An assistant to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed issued a perfunctory statement expressing shock over loss of lives in the factory fire. Her government, however, is not concerned about the victims, but in ensuring the continued “international competitiveness” of the Bangladeshi industry over its cheap labour rivals.

The security forces have repeatedly been deployed to suppress strikes and protests by textile workers fighting for better pay and conditions. Some 300 factories in the Ashulia industrial zone shut down in June after violent clashes between workers and police. …

The government’s response to the latest fire will be to ensure that the exploitation of Bangladeshi garment workers continues unabated, resulting in further human tragedies.

Locked in and left to die: Bangladeshis demand justice for fire dead: here.

USA: Protests were held at Walmart stores around the United States on November 23 opposing management abuse, irregular working hours and the poverty wages the giant retailer pays its 1.4 million workers. The protests were timed for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year: here.

At Least 124 Killed in Fire at Bangladesh Garment Factory (bloomberg.com)
Bangladeshi workers protest deadly factory conditions (ctvnews.ca)
Fatal Bangladesh blaze lays bare lack of safety measures (thehimalayantimes.com)

WalMart ‘Black Friday’ protests in the USA

Posted on November 22, 2012 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Walmart Black Friday- Why Workers Are Striking.

By Phyllis Scherrer and Jerry White in the USA:

The “Black Friday” protests at WalMart

22 November 2012

A series of pickets and other protests are scheduled throughout the US against the giant retailer WalMart for “Black Friday”—the day after Thanksgiving and traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year.

OUR WalMart (Organization United for Respect at WalMart), launched by the United Food and Commercial Workers last year, is behind the protests, along with a coalition of unions, liberal organizations and church groups.

While it is not clear how many WalMart workers the protests will attract, there is deep and growing dissatisfaction over management abuse, irregular hours and the poverty level wages paid by the company that netted $15 billion in profits last year. The exploitation of the company’s 1.4 million so-called associates has provided vast riches for the Walton family, with the top six heirs of founder Sam Walton accumulating a fortune greater than the bottom 30 percent of all Americans.

Retail workers at WalMart are particularly angered over being forced to give up time with their families on the Thanksgiving holiday in order to stock shelves and prepare stores for Black Friday sales. Over the last few years, as the economic crisis has cut into consumer spending, WalMart has led the drive by the big retailers to open their stores ever earlier to get an edge on the holiday sales season.

Last year, workers at Target delivered petitions with 190,000 signatures protesting the company’s decision to open stores just after midnight on Black Friday. This year, WalMart plans to open its stores as early as 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

Over the last several months these and other indignities have sparked growing opposition and the call by OUR WalMart for wage increases to $13 an hour, full-time and flexible work schedules, health benefits, and the freedom to air grievances has gained some support.

On October 4, a group of 60 WalMart workers walked off the job in Los Angeles, California to protest the company’s poverty wages and unfair treatment. The following week a group of 88 workers at 28 WalMart stories nationwide walked off the job in solidarity.

The protests have spread to stores in Dallas, Miami, Seattle, Maryland, Oklahoma, and California. Most have been one day actions and demonstrations, including a protest outside company headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Riot police armed with a sound cannon were deployed against non-violent protestors in the latter case.

WalMart has responded with intimidation, victimizations and threatened firings. Earlier this week the company sought, but failed to receive, an injunction from the National Labor Relations Board, charging that its workers were not members of the United Food and Commercial Workers and therefore any picketing would be “illegal.”

One of the strikers at a Pico Rivera WalMart in Los Angeles, Monique Velasquez, told Huffington Post that after being involved in protests she had her hours reduced from 30 hours a week to 8.

Velasquez, a single mom with five children said without her regular pay she “can’t even pay one bill. It’s very, very hard.” She added, “Anyone who goes against management, you’re pretty much putting a target on your back. They intimidate you by cutting hours or picking on you in any way they can.”

Black Friday Creep Costs Retail Workers Their Thanksgiving: here.

Walmart Strikes: Lone Worker Walks Out, Receives Trespass Warning Ahead Of Black Friday: here.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has suspended a “few associates” at its joint venture in India amid an ongoing probe into bribery allegations: here.

Wal-Mart workers prepare for Black Friday protest; feds not likely to stop it (bizjournals.com)

Walmart strikes in the USA

Posted on October 13, 2012 by petrel41

Striking Walmart workers

From daily News Line in Britain:

Saturday, 13 October 2012

Walmart strike wave in USA

This week has seen the biggest strike wave of low-paid retail workers at Walmart in the US – the first-ever strike in the 50-year history of the largest private employer in the world.

The strike began last Friday week when about 30 Walmart employees walked off the job for a day at the Pico Rivera store in Los Angeles.

By Tuesday it had spread across the US to stores in at least a dozen cities.

Walmart workers walked off the job in Dallas, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay area, Miami, the Washington DC area, Sacramento, Chicago, Orlando and other Los Angeles stores. Workers also went on strike in parts of Kentucky, Missouri and Minnesota.

Even though the workforce is entirely union-free in North America, the strikes are the culmination of a year of organising by OUR Walmart, an organisation of Walmart workers backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) campaign, Making Change At Walmart.

The UFCW says the workers are protesting against company attempts to ‘silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job’ after long complaining of low pay and a lack of benefits.

Southern California has been a focal point for Walmart worker activism, but it isn’t the only one.

Two weeks ago, OUR Walmart members in Dallas held a hundred-strong rally protesting against Walmart’s wages and benefits.

This week saw them strike with colleagues and community supporters, and outside the Dallas store they held up signs reading, ‘Stand Up, Live Better, Stop Retaliation’ and ‘Stop Trying to Silence Us’.

Colby Harris, 22, who works in the produce department in Lancaster, Texas, said: ‘I make $8.90 an hour and I’ve worked at Walmart for three years.

‘Everyone at my store lives from cheque to cheque and borrows money from each other just to make it through the week.’

In contrast, the six heirs to Walmart founder Sam Walton are worth $89.5 billion, or as much as the bottom 41.5 per cent of Americans combined.

Harris said it’s not just the wages that bother him. Walmart harasses and fires workers who join labour groups or complain about company policies, he said. ‘But I’d rather lose my job than be treated like this.’

He added: ‘I’m not being paid for these days. We’re taking off work to protest – obviously there must be something wrong.’

Walmart workers have recently filed more than 20 charges of unfair labour practices across the country with the National Labour Relation Board.

The charges, mostly filed in recent weeks, allege that workers have either been fired or had their hours reduced after activity with OUR Walmart.

Workers also allege that they have been told not to talk to OUR Walmart organisers and that doing so could shut down stores, leaving employees without a job.

One of the charges was filed on behalf of Monique Valesquez, a Pico Rivera Walmart employee who participated in the strike last week.

After becoming active with OUR Walmart, her hours were cut from 30 hours a week to eight.

‘I’m striking because I was retaliated against for speaking out,’ said Valesquez, a single mother of five children.

She said that with eight hours worth of pay, she ‘can’t even pay one bill. It’s very, very hard.’

Her Pico Rivera colleague, department manager Evelin Cruz, said about her decision to join the strike: ‘I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared.

‘But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tired of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.’

Cruz said her store is chronically understaffed: ‘They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.’

Although standing up to their employer has won some modest improvements, it has mainly inspired a wave of illegal retaliation unleashed by the retail giant, which strikers charge is more concerned with suppressing activism than complying with the law.

This retaliation has led many Walmart employees to file Unfair Labour Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labour Relations Board, alleging further punishment of activists.

Photo department worker Victoria Martinez said: ‘Every time I go into work, I get panic attacks . . . I’m always wondering what are they going to try to do to me when I come in.’

‘The bottom line,’ former NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebman said, ‘is non-union people, as well as unionised people, have a right to concertedly walk off the job in protest.’

The walk-outs are only the latest in a series of strikes in the Walmart supply chain, all by non-union workers.

Eight guest workers at CJ’s seafood in Louisiana walked off the job in June, alleging violent threats and forced labour.

After initially saying it had investigated the workers’ claims and couldn’t substantiate them, Walmart suspended CJ’s.

Then, in the second week of September, warehouse workers who move Walmart goods went on strike in Mira Loma, California, and in Elwood, Illinois three days later.

Both groups of workers alleged that management had retaliated against employees for protesting abusive conditions.

The West Coast warehouse workers struck for 15 days, and joined a six-day 50-mile march to Los Angeles, before returning to work September 28. Their Midwest counterparts are still on strike.

Last Monday, they were joined by supporters for a 600-strong rally at which 17 people were arrested by police in riot gear for nonviolently blocking the entrance to the major Walmart distribution hub.

Cruz said she believes the warehouse workers’ strikes are ‘what really led us to do something’ .

On Monday in New York, OUR Walmart members expressed total solidarity with the striking warehouse workers.

‘We see what’s happening to them as part of the same process, of the lowering of standards, that’s happening to us,’ said grocery worker Mary Pat Tifft.

The striking store workers make up just a tiny percentage of Walmart’s 1.6 million US employees.

But their strike, and those of their contracted counterparts, signals a new stage in what activists and UFCW backers consider Walmart’s labour wars.

The strike wave also comes as the company faces new challenges on other fronts, including a congressional investigation of its Mexican bribery scandal and the failure of its latest bid to breach New York City limits after outspoken mayoral candidates called the company a ‘bad actor’ for not addressing labour and community relations’ problems.

This month, the city’s largest developer announced an agreement with a union-grocery store at a site that Walmart had hoped would be its first location in New York.

In Los Angeles, mayoral candidates are refusing to accept campaign donations from the deep pockets of Walmart, and in Boston, Walmart was forced to suspend its expansion into the city after facing significant community opposition.

The company is also facing yet another gender discrimination lawsuit on behalf of 100,000 women in California and in Tennessee.

Rampant wage theft and health and safety violations so extreme in the company’s warehousing system have led to an unprecedented $600,000 in fines.

The Department of Labour fined a Walmart seafood supplier for wage and hours violations, and Human Rights Watch has spoken out about the failures of controls in regulating suppliers overseas, including a seafood supplier in Thailand where trafficking and debt bondage were cited.

No wonder then, when asked if the strikes could spread further, Cruz replied: ‘I think it will. I hope it will.’

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein sheds light on the new surge of Walmart protests: here.

Wal-Mart Mexican bribery scandal

Posted on April 23, 2012 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Walmart Mexico bribery scandal, tip of the iceberg in Walmart illegal and unethical acts.

By David Barstow, The New York Times News Service in the USA:

Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle

Sunday, 22 April 2012 09:54

Mexico City – In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

Neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified. None of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders were disciplined. Indeed, its chief executive, Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Wal-Mart in 2008. Until this article, the allegations and Wal-Mart’s investigation had never been publicly disclosed.

Walmart Scandal in Mexico Points to U.S. Hypocrisy: here.

Walmart Bribery Scandal Under Investigation By Department Of Justice Since 2011: Report: here.

Walmart Bribery Scandal: Retailer Took Part In Lobbying Campaign To Amend Anti-Bribery Law: here.

Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: “If you haven’t heard that Walmart paid out about $25 millions dollars in bribes to build parking-lot-size stores in Mexico, you have probably been listening to a slave-wage-made Apple iPod too long. In fact, Walmart didn’t just pay the bribes; it covered up an investigation in 2005 and thereafter into the practice. The problem for Walmart is that this makes them highly likely to be in violation of a 1977 law, known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act”: here.

Walmart to Pay More Than $4.8 Million in Back Wages for Overtime Wage Theft: here.

Walmart and art: here.

Walmart: Fifty Years of Gutting America’s Middle Class: here.

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world who sells the products that become litter along our waterways and on our beaches. Wal-Mart stores themselves also directly contribute to the litter problem. Because of the number of customers and employees outside their stores everyday, Wal-Mart’s direct litter contribution can only be estimated to be in millions of pieces: here.

US economic crisis, but not for the rich

Posted on February 18, 2012 by petrel41

This video from the USA says about itself:

How the 1% Exploits America: Rob Walton, Walmart

Want to see who’s using their wealth to exploit the 99%? This series of 1-minute videos reveals the methods of the worst of the 1%.

Nearly 30,000 long-term unemployed workers in Michigan—those out of work for more than six months—had their extended benefits assistance terminated February 18: here.

Wal-Mart ‘organic’ meat fraud

Posted on October 10, 2011 by petrel41

This video from the USA says:

Did you know that Wal-Mart’s products are labeled organic yet they aren’t?

China: Beijing has ordered US retail giant Wal-Mart to temporarily close some stores in Chongqing and pay 2.7 million yuan (£270,000) in fines after it tried to pass off tons of ordinary pork as “organic”: here.

Same Wal-Mart con job as in the USA.

Authorities Shut Wal-Mart Stores in Southwestern China: here.

Female Wal-Mart Employees File New Bias Case. Andrew Martin, The New York Times News Service: “Four months after the Supreme Court tossed out their national class action lawsuit, lawyers representing women who claimed that Wal-Mart Stores had discriminated against them filed a new lawsuit on Thursday that narrowed their claims to the California stores of the retail chain”: here.

United States women Wal-Mart workers’ court case

Posted on June 4, 2011 by petrel41

This video from the USA says about itself:

The decade-long struggle surrounding Dukes v. Wal-Mart represents a functional and highly effective model on how to change the odds in favor of common people facing much more powerful corporate interests.

Whether the Supreme Court rules in favor of class action status or not, the case has already forced Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer and employer, to recognize that its employment practices have been biased against women. Initiated by Impact Fund and Equal Rights Advocates, along with three private firms, the case has forced a process of fundamental change within Wal-Mart‘s corporate culture that otherwise never would have happened.

These legal efforts, along with years of commitment by the six named plaintiffs, have empowered well over a million women to stand up to a corporate giant and demand their rights under the law.

Wal-Mart vs. Karl Marx

Posted on November 22, 2008 by petrel41

Wal-Mart in Karl Marx street in Berlin, Germany

This is a photo of Wal-Mart in Karl Marx street in (West) Berlin, Germany.

Naomi Klein on Obama and Chicago Boys economics

Posted on June 14, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called Naomi Klein: Disaster Capitalism.

From British daily The Guardian:

Beware the Chicago boys

Obama‘s vow of love for free markets gives reason to fear a replay of Bill Clinton’s 1993 U-turn

o Naomi Klein

o Saturday June 14 2008

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC: “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.” Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed the 37-year-old Jason Furman, one of Wal-Mart‘s most prominent defenders, to head his economic team. On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged: “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, Wal-Mart’s critics are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy … for me to sit by idly and sing Kum Ba Ya in the interests of progressive harmony”.

Obama‘s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counter-revolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago. And here there are more problems, because Obama – who taught law at Chicago for a decade – is embedded in the mindset known as the Chicago School.

Obama chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the centre-right. Goolsbee, unlike his Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education – a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan.