Wal-Mart brings with it a hidden price that we are all paying

CITIZEN-TIMES.com

April 11, 2006

By Lotte Meyerson

The problems with Wal-Mart begin with its supply chain, where many of the workers who make its products pay the price for low-cost items by toiling in sweatshop conditions. The reason it uses 3,000 factories in China, for instance, making products that go on its shelves, isn’t that U.S. workers can’t do the work; it’s because China is home to more cheap labor than anyplace else on earth. Wal-Mart is a large part of the global downward pressure of companies seeking lower labor costs and fewer workplace protections, environmental regulations or child labor laws. We know all about the effect of that in WNC.

Many U.S. suppliers have gone out of business when they could not meet Wal-Mart’s demands.

Study after study shows the devastation wrecked on local businesses when Wal-Mart comes to town. For instance, by 1995, University of Iowa researchers found that between 1983 and 1993 the homegrown businesses of Iowa communities lost between 16 and 46 percent of their sales after Wal-Mart arrived, causing many of them to collapse.

A year after the company came to Independence, Iowa, a dozen local businesses had closed their doors.

In Georgia, Wal-Mart employees are six times more likely to rely on state-provided health care for their children than are employees of any other large company.

All else being equal, U.S. counties where new Wal-Mart stores were built between 1987 and 1998 experienced higher poverty rates than other U.S. counties.

A 2005 study by the University of California-Berkeley found that from 1992 to 2000, the total earnings of U.S. urban workers in the general merchandise and grocery sectors were reduced by 1.3 percent after Wal-Mart showed up in their areas. In 2000 alone, study authors estimated that Wal-Mart depressed total earnings of retail workers nationwide by $4.7 billion.

In the March 13, 2006, issue of Asheville Citizen-Times, Mandy Stone, the Buncombe County Social Services Director, is quoted telling county commissioners, when they were discussing changes in economic incentives for new companies, to encourage a higher wage scale, “We’re paying for that (low wages) on a human services side when people bring those jobs that don’t pay a living wage.”

We have a thriving business community in West Asheville. How many stores — some of them newly established — will go out of business if a Wal-Mart Superstore is built on Smoky Park Highway? Some of the downtown stores, which help make Asheville unique, will undoubtedly be effected by a second Wal-Mart Supercenter in our town.

Shouldn’t an economic impact study be part of what Council takes into account as it makes its decision, originally scheduled for tonight’s meeting?

Major cities of the Northeast and West Coast have thwarted Wal-Mart’s attempts to open stores. The sweatshop conditions in which thousands of employees of Wal-Mart suppliers work and the depressive effect the company has on working-class living standards here in the United States are receiving increasing scrutiny. Wal-Mart’s stock was down 13 percent last year.

So Asheville would be in very good company if it just said “no.”

Lotte Meyerson lives in West Asheville. She is an active member of West Asheville Wal-Mart Watch, which is striving to keep a Wal-Mart Superstore out of West Asheville.