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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Welcome to Wal-Martland |
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by Madison Capital Times Editorial
(No verified email address) |
09 Apr 2002
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By battering Main Streets and depressing wage rates, Wal-Mart stores take more from communities than they give. If Wal-Mart is the No. 1 company in America, then America has an Alice-in-Wonderland economy that offers the fantasy of productivity and progress rather than real jobs, real wages and real public policies to benefit working families and their communities. |
America is fast developing an "Alice in Wonderland" economy in which reality is trumped at every turn by manufactured fantasies. In fact, fantasy is just about the only thing America is still manufacturing in large quantities.
That became obvious this week when Fortune magazine released its annual list of the 500 biggest companies in the United States. Long gone from the No. 1 slot was General Motors, the car manufacturer that topped the list most frequently from the 1950s to the 1990s.
What company replaced GM in the No. 1 slot? Here's a hint: The top of the Fortune list is no longer reserved for companies that actually make goods or that pay their American workers a living wage. In the new American economy, corporate success is measured by the ability of a company to sell goods made elsewhere while squeezing the pay and benefits of American employees.
Thus it should come as little surprise that, according to the National Association of Purchasing Management, U.S. manufacturing employment has been declining for the past 18 months. Nor should it come as any surprise that the No. 1 U.S. company, according to Fortune, is Wal-Mart, the Arkansas-based retail chain that packs stores with Chinese-made goods and sells them at cut-rate prices to run Main Street stores out of business.
With revenues of almost $220 billion in 2001, Wal-Mart easily outdistanced other top 10 companies. That's not exactly a dramatic accomplishment, as the No. 5 company on the Fortune list - Texas energy-trader Enron - has provided a cautionary tale of where the new American economy is leading us.
The rise of Wal-Mart to No. 1 status has not been a natural phenomenon. Wal-Mart's success is a product of decades of Washington policy-making that has undermined U.S.-based manufacturing and limited the opportunity for working Americans to obtain high-wage jobs. Democratic and Republican administrations have implemented free trade, business development and tax policies that actually encourage the shuttering of factories in the United States and the shifting of jobs to foreign lands.
Instead of recognizing - as many European countries do - that high-wage manufacturing jobs are essential to the health (and wealth) of national economies, the U.S. government has embarked on a fool's mission designed to replace those high-wage jobs with minimum-wage positions at Wal-Mart.
By bending to the lobbyists from Wal-Mart and other retailers, successive Congresses have passed trade legislation that allows Wal-Mart to pack store shelves with cheap imported goods. The people selling those goods might once have been able to demand a living wage, but with the decline of manufacturing - especially in Wisconsin - Wal-Mart's non-union wage rates are replacing General Motors' union rates as the model.
The Wal-Marting of America is bad news for working families. Sure, retailers like Wal-Mart sell some imported products for less. But they will never sell anything for less enough to fill the income gap created by the loss of family-supporting manufacturing jobs.
By battering Main Streets and depressing wage rates, Wal-Mart stores take more from communities than they give. If Wal-Mart is the No. 1 company in America, then America has an Alice-in-Wonderland economy that offers the fantasy of productivity and progress rather than real jobs, real wages and real public policies to benefit working families and their communities.
Copyright 2002 The Capital Times |
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