Wal-Mart: The High Cost Of Low Price (DVD)

With the slave trade debate raging last year during the 200 commerations its always important to note that not only is that particular trade is still alive and well in the third world but its as good as here in its modern form in companies like Wal-Mart. Well meaning and angry people may well protest alongside some vegetarians banging a drum in London about what happened 200 years ago but most of the labeled clothing we are wearing will have been ...
...the products piled high in the huge shopping arenas of Wal-Mart and the like are the products of cheap and exploited labor somewhere around the world and when the documentary explores those sweat shops in South East Asia our arguments of reparation begin to fragment. In one segment you see young Chinese girls living in cramped dorms in a grubby factory, the gates locked at night, weekly rent and utilities deducted from their meager pay packets, whether ... more

With the slave trade debate raging last year during the 200 commerations its always important to note that not only is that particular trade is still alive and well in the third world but its as good as here in its modern form in companies like Wal-Mart. Well meaning and angry people may well protest alongside some vegetarians banging a drum in London about what happened 200 years ago but most of the labeled clothing we are wearing will have been made by some level of slave labor. The bulk of the products piled high in the huge shopping arenas of Wal-Mart and the like are the products of cheap and exploited labor somewhere around the world and when the documentary explores those sweat shops in South East Asia our arguments of reparation begin to fragment. In one segment you see young Chinese girls living in cramped dorms in a grubby factory, the gates locked at night, weekly rent and utilities deducted from their meager pay packets, whether they live in or not, pushing them further under the thumb of the company’s pandering to the Wal-Marts of the world unrealistic bottom-line demands.

Wal-Mart is Americas Tesco, a huge no nonsense bottom-line hypermarket that piles it high and sells it cheap, usually to a likewise demographic. It’s so full of Chinese goods that it hardly deserves the rosette of being America’s biggest company. Did you know that at any one time one in three cargo ships on the ocean are transporting their stuff from China to America?

In the best tradition of American horror movies you will know the Mall is at the centre of America’s capitalist neurosis, the guilt of being able to buy stuff so cheap, the public drawn in to buy useless crap for no real reasons. Most of that useless crap you really don’t need (the clockwork yoghurt maker...) is made by today’s slave labor.

Because US government welfare programs are tied in with employment at places like Wal-Mart then there’s no shortage of job applicants, one of the company’s most vulgar tactics being to deliberately under staff the stores so the ‘associates’ (the employees) have to work unpaid to make it Americas richest retailer. Workers without jobs for jobs without workers etc. In the richest retail company in the world they have some of the worst wages. If employees don’t do the ‘extra’ hours then there’s plenty more ready to pick up the rifle. If cheap government labor and the exploitation of state healthcare plans aren’t enough they openly employ illegal immigrants all night in some stores to save even more money, adding to their annual 12.7 billion turnover. The fines that follow for their constant rule breaks are a miniscule percentage of that. Gordon brown has just announced a similar workfare initiative with four UK supermarkets.

Firstly this documentary looks at how these guys operate with absolute power in America, and increasingly around the world, swamping small town American communities with new stores, so quickly closing down family and local businesses, all of this with public subsidy and welcoming arms from the local councils, effectively turning their retail communities into ghost towns. In the UK in the last budget we have seen something very similar where big business corporation tax has fallen and small business rates have risen by the same percentage, effectively a subsidy for.

To a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack we witness Wal-Mart’s cancerous spread over America through the eyes of those small business owners, closing down one after another, their local tax contribution handed over to Wal-Mart by the local council as subsidy to throw up a hypermarket in and around their towns and so effectively force them under and out. Why are governments so obsessed with pandering to corporations and so crushing healthy small business is one of the bigger questions asked here.

The backbone of the 90 minute film is an evangelical speech by Lee Scott-the Wal-Mart CEO-at one of those awful conventions where the staff gets the cattle prod if they don’t cheer and holler. The director of the film freezes the head honcho speech after every declaration from the podium; the team then dissecting his claims of the company’s ethics and healthy statements through the narrative.

It is an unashamed hatchet job on the company and they get no right-of-reply, and the fact no current employees contributed either means they are happy to be Wal-Mart associates or s**t scared of contributing, fearing the sack. After twenty minutes of the film it’s clearly the later. When you see the way the company deals with any employees trying to improve their personal conditions and pay by joining a union then you don’t blame them for not appearing. Any store that successfully carries a majority vote to bring in a union is mysteriously closed down as non profitable, and so the employees are under constant pressure to do long hours and forget about improving pay and conditions. Recent UK reports may state that we are seeing many more children in poverty here but in America if you lose your job, your social security runs out after six months and you are on the street. I fear that’s what’s coming here.

It also looks at things you don’t think about when a satellite shopping mall arrives in a small town. Firstly the property prices collapse. No ones going to want to buy new business or houses here as they jobs and custom goes.
Secondly, Wal-Marts car parks have the highest crime rate in America, literally everyone in town drawn to the huge concrete lakes to shop and browse, however unscrupulous. If everyone is working and shopping there then that’s where the action is. Wal-mart has continuously been dragged through court to make them protect shoppers with security patrols and CCTV on their premises.

There’s a fairly meaningless section-in context-dedicated to Wal-marts purchase of Asda in the UK, a big fat traditional East-End barrow boy declaring not over my dead body son as the company try to bulldozer his market stall in Upton Park.
The more serious issues of race discrimination and bullying inevitably rise and Wal-Mart apparently don’t like to promote female employees, which I couldn’t understand and wasn’t explained. The only good news story on the DVD is how protesters have stopped Wal-Mart building in their communities.

Any good?

A polemic against an America supermarket is not going to interest many in the UK, especially as theses hypermarkets have driven down the middle class shopping basket by quite a tidy sum. As I say it is very one-sided affair and I am sure there are just as many positives for having one of these Malls in your back yard, especially as they encourage other big brand stores into the area.

The documentary DVD is effectively one more protest badge to a student’s lapel and sends you away thinking about things. Most of us have, or at least know someone who has worked at Tesco and the like, know its exploitative labor. But for our goods to be cheap and affordable someone has to suffer, be it a spotty slow kid shoving trolleys around huge car parks for minimum wage or children chained to machines in the Philippines, and that’s what we need to remember when we needlessly buy three for two 100 watt light bulbs because they are on special. Imagine working on that particular conveyor belt with no shoes in the middle of the night for 50p a day. If you don’t buy pointless crap the Cebu City kids don’t put plasters on their feet and Wal-Mart doesn’t make 12 billion a year, and so destroying small towns in America. Q! Springsteen…

Special Features
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-Deleted scenes-

Deleted bits from the English ASDA bit; deleted scenes from the American bit: deleted scenes from the sermons. Religion sells DVDs in America.

-Behind the scenes-

More from disgruntled employees and why the director chose this project. He had previously done documentaries on Iraq and Foxx News.

-Victory for Queens Market-

They didn’t build an Asda on the barrow boys plot. Lovely jubbly!

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