For those who have seen the Wal-Mart Film: the High Cost of Low Price, you will remember that Wal-Mart has been involved in several kinds of litigation. There are claims of employment discrimination, in one of the largest class action lawsuits in the country. There are claims of knowing use of cheap but illegal employees, through hiring subcontracting firms that use undocumented workers. There are safety issues, as Wal-Mart installs cameras in its parking lots to surveil union activism but doesn't use them to protect its customers. (One way that it is getting around that at a new store in Urbana Illinois is to have the city build and maintain the parking lot as an enticement to get Wal Mart to open its third (or is it fourth) store in the metropolitan area. That means, of course, that city dollars will subsidize the Wal-Mart heirs multi-billion dollar fortunes.....)
And there are even criminal probes of Wal-Mart's treating of its toxic wastes. See Kris Hudson, Wal-Mart Faces Criminal Probe over Waste Rules, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 21, 2005, at B3. Seems that retailers are supposed to designate materials that constitute hazardous waste and package and transport appropriately. Wal-Mart has apparently been taking a cheaper way out. It delays the sorting and special packaging. Instead, it ships its returned paints, aerosol cans, cosmetics, pool chemicals, and fertilizers on trucks from its various California stores to its Las Vegas warehouse and only then does it consolidate and examine the goods to comply with the hazardous waste rules. Federal and California officials are investigating these practices.
Shouldn't this be making the local news? Instead of another discussion with somebody who knew something about Laci Peterson's murder, why don't we hear more about what Wal-Mart is doing with its immense power as the largest corporation in American with more than 1.2 million employees? What are its hiring and buying policies? What are included in the many subsidies that it gets from local governments? What happens when it builds a mega store and then abandons that site to build an even larger store just a few blocks away?
These are important issues that affect how communities thrive and how individuals work. It is incumbent upon the local and national media to delve into these questions and pay much more attention to them.
