IS WAL-MART GOOD FOR ASIA…?
Two headlines caught my attention this morning. The first was, Wal-Mart targets South Asian market. The second was, Is Wal-Mart Good For Asia? The former touts a Bollywood inspired clothing line. The latter explores Wal-Mart’s role in the diverse Asian market.
Greg Rushford, editor of the Rushford Report, an online journal that tracks the politics of trade and diplomacy the Far Eastern Economic Review, quickly makes it clear that he isn’t a Wal-Mart enthusiast; referring to Sam Walton as a hillbilly entrepreneur and writing my favorite passage in the third paragraph:
“…opinions differ greatly as to whether that beast has economic beauty. There’s a sort of yin and yang as one begins to sort out the criticisms. The contradictions begin with those decidedly downscale big-box stores, which are to beauty what Josef Stalin was to architecture.”
Granted, Rushford shows his age here since most readers will have no idea what Josef Stalin had to do with architecture, but most will get the idea that Stalin is not remembered for his ascetics influences.
But as a primer to a part of the world that has not yet had a chance to come to grip with All Things Wal-Mart, Rushford Doe’s a good job of laying out aspects of Wal-Mart’s yin and yang.
The company is eager to publicize its giving, particularly that aimed at showing its more saintly side to its liberal critics–a $1 million grant to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, an equal amount to a medical college center to support research into “minority women’s health issues,” assistance to small-scale farmers and indigenous peoples in Brazil’s rain forests, etc.
But when asked about whether Wal-Mart’s global-sourcing model encourages sweatshops, the spinmeisters say the company has “zero tolerance” for abuses–and then clam up when asked for details.
Earlier this year, there were various newspaper accounts of labor strife at the Korean-owned Chong Won Fashion, Inc., a Wal-Mart supplier of T-shirts, pants and baby blouses in Rosario, Cavite, a gritty Philippine town a bumpy two-hour drive outside of Manila.
When I asked Wal-Mart officials for their side of the story, spokesman Kevin Gardner referred me Verite Inc., a respected Amherst, Massachusetts-based nonprofit firm that specializes in fact-finding “social-compliance” audits of overseas clothing factories, and had investigated the situation for Wal-Mart.
But when I called Verite officials, I learned that Wal-Mart had instructed [them] not to discuss what they had found. When I asked why he would do that, Mr. Gardner said in an e-mail that Wal-Mart would not be “participating” in “this story opportunity.”
Little wonder. When I visited Rosario in July, I heard a sad story. Chong Won had folded, after a long struggle with workers, who said they had earned two or three dollars a day and had been pressing for a better deal since the mid-1990s. I was told how the company would offer a one peso-per-day raise for each year they worked.
As one peso–depending upon varying exchange rates–is worth pennies, it could take perhaps 40 to 50 years to get a raise of $1 dollar a day. And to avoid even that prospect, Chong Won hired many of the factory’s workers, which at one time numbered about 1,000, as five-month contract employees.
Isn’t that the true meaning of saving money and living better, if you’re a Walton?