intellectual properties

bix box mentality

people often think those of us who are anti-Wal-Mart exaggerate when we discuss the evils of the world’s largest retailer – and America’s largest privte employer. exaggerate the wide-reaching affect of their import/export policies, their human resources policies, and their environmental impacts.

well, i think this serves as proof that your “neighborhood Wal-Mart” cares less about you, your family, your community and your country than it does about profits, and is actively working to maximize profits and minimize reponsibility to its employees and customers.

“An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer’s reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

In the memorandum, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits. The memo voices concern that workers with seven years’ seniority earn more than workers with one year’s seniority, but are no more productive….

…She wrote that “the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity. Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart.”

so you go into a small town, build a sprawling complex on a wetland, tout your committment to community building and praise yourself for providing jobs in rural areas, price your goods to beat all the local competition and put everyone out of business, but then put policies in place designed to keep people from working there for more than one or two years because to you, it’s too expensive to give people a long-term source of income. while they do work there, pay them only minimum wage and the thinnest benefit packages possible. spout a “Buy American” ideology, but outsource and import the majority of your goods from the cheapest places in southeast asia, and even the factories that used to hold the small town together soon close. so then we have a small town in which people are trapped into shopping at your store, but they can’t work there and other businesses in town are gone. thanks, Wal-Mart!

for a cartoonish take on this subject, enjoy Bix Box Mart, a fantastic musical from Jibjab.com.

for previous posts and info on Wal-Mart, see “Shopping Ourselves Out of House and Home“.

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