The hostility many liberals and progressives show toward Wal-Mart is nothing more than an ideological manifestation of their anti-capitalist sentiments. Sure, the company is also sued more often than any other entity in the country, save the federal government. It's hard to imagine why considering the fact that one of the nation's richest companies feeds self-destructive sprawl, causes serious environmental degradation (in addition to the sprawl) and receives huge tax breaks which it uses to drive out smaller, locally-owned businesses. But Wal-Mart is good for consumers, good for communities and, most of all, good for workers. Anyone who doesn't loathe the American way of life clearly realizes this.
Some Wal-Mart employees (well, almost 116,000 of them) with first hand experience of the company's labor practices take a dimmer view than that offered by the corporation's cheery commercials. They filed a lawsuit claiming that the company denied employees lunch breaks and forced them to work overtime without compensation.
So the employees couldn't eat lunch and were forced to work for free. Must be a bunch of capitalism haters!
You can bet that competitors who treat their employees decently and within the law hope Wal-Mart gets what's coming to it.
6 comments:
I concur.
I have no problem w/ how Walmart does their business. But I do object to how they treat their workers. That's why I WILL NEVER submit my application to them...at least while I still have job options.
Well, how they treat their workers IS part of how they do business.
you forgot to mention the Wal Mart has direct manufacturing contracts with prisons in China. A breach of international law (but who cares about that, we Americans are above the restrictions that we help to impose on the rest of the world). Anyhoo, these aren't just rapists and murderers we're that are being used as slave labor. thses are , in many cases, political prisoners (people who said the wrong thing in front of the wrong people). The fact is, Wal Mart willingly endorses slavery. Not cool.
(just so you know, the bryan above is a friend of mine who i thought would be interested in your writings. let me know if you'd like to know more about him, he's doing a lot of cool stuff in regards to working on freeing slaves.)
:)
Thanks for the endorement, Alyssa.
endorsment*
(probably still spelled wrong)
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