It seems a little too easy for Walmart to brush off safety upgrades
at their supplier factories. Their reasoning is that the cost is too
high. The dead factory workers in Bangladesh, and their families, might
have viewed the safety issues differently.Whether it’s the appalling work conditions at Apple supplier factories in China
where workers are available 24×7 and given a cup of tea and a biscuit,
the Chinese factories that previously produced lead-tainted children’s
toys for the US market or the garment factories throughout Asia, there’s
a distinct lack of accountability by too many Western companies.
Walmart is only the latest.
Bloomberg:
At a meeting convened in 2011 to boost safety at Bangladesh garment
factories, WalMart Stores Inc. (WMT) made a call: paying suppliers more
to help them upgrade their manufacturing facilities was too costly.The
comments from a Wal-Mart sourcing director appear in minutes of the
meeting, which was attended by more than a dozen retailers including Gap
Inc. (GPS), Target Corp. and JC Penney Co.
Details of the meeting have emerged after a fire at a Bangladesh
factory that made clothes for WalMart and Sears Holdings Corp. killed
more than 100 people last month. The blaze has renewed pressure on
companies to improve working conditions in Bangladesh, where more than
700 garment workers have died since 2005, according to the International
Labor Rights Forum, a Washington-based advocacy group.
Walmart is claiming that it cut ties with that factory months before
the fire, and blamed any connection to the plant to a supposed rogue
supplier.
CNN:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Monday that the Tazreen Fashion
factory in Ashulia, near the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, was no longer
authorized to produce merchandise for its stores.
But one of its suppliers “subcontracted work to this factory without
authorization and in direct violation of our policies,” Wal-Mart said in
a statement. “Today, we have terminated the relationship with that
supplier,” it said, without identifying the company in question.
But documents from the factory, as
reported by the Nation, appear to shoot possible holes in Walmart’s defense:
[T]here were multiple Walmart suppliers using the Tazreen
Factory as recently as April of this year, and at least one when the
fire broke out. … [T]here are “strong indications in the documents, but
short of certain, that it was still multiple suppliers at the time of
the fire,” rather than the single rogue supplier implied by Walmart’s
statement. … (Some of the Tazreen documents are posted below; they were
provided to The Nation by the Corporate Action Network, which also posted them on its own website.)
For Western consumers, this callous bargaining can often mean cheaper
prices (unless you’re buying an Apple product, where everyone but Apple
gets screwed in all directions – but smile, ’cause it’s trendy to own
something that cost two to four times the competition , with next to no
warranty) but there’s a cost. Just as there’s a cost at home in the US
when Walmart wants to deny workers bargaining rights, cut wages and benefits, there’s a price to pay for cutting costs with suppliers and it can even have deadly consequences.
What’s also disturbing about companies like Walmart cutting corners
for workers at home, and suppliers abroad, is that the benefits are all
focused on the top of the food chain. Whereas companies used to have a
more level playing field where everyone prospered, now the benefits all
go to the top. Workers are supposed to be impressed when they receive a
few crumbs from three day old, stale bread tossed their way. Look at
Hostess. In bankruptcy, and the workers are asked to take a pay cut while the management gets millions in bonuses.
Everyone can accept that times and business models change, but do we
really want to be reinforcing bad behavior with businesses that show
such little concern for their direct or indirect workers? Giving them
your money might save you in the near term, but it’s clear that you
could be next in line to get hit with cuts.
At some point, consumers need to stop rewarding bad behavior. We see that the anti-Obamacare extremists of Papa John’s, Denny’s and Applebees are feeling the pinch for their bad behavior, so we know it’s possible to have an impact when we choose to spend our money elsewhere.
As I’ve said before,
the free market can work. Giving tax
breaks and bailouts to those least in need is not the free market, but
choosing to spend your own hard-earned cash with businesses that do the
right thing is absolutely the free market. As consumers, we have a lot
more power than people realize, and it’s time to start using it.
That
all-American food, peanut butter, began with the devastation of
American cotton by the boll weevil and the cultivation of peanuts as an
alternative cash crop. As America advanced in the world, so did peanut
butter. Jon Krampner wrote Creamy and Crunchy, a history of peanut butter. In the New Yorker, Jon Michaud summarized and reviewed it. Here's how two of the three major brands developed:
The
Shifters was a name of a group of young people who called themselves
that for a few months in 1922. Some considered them a subset of
flappers, but men were welcome to be Shifters. Newspapers covered the
group as if they knew what the culture meant. No one knows who started
the fad, and there was no organization behind it. And, like many fads
among young people, the Shifters died out as soon as the media paid
attention to them. It was a sort of "secret society" of cool, hep people
"in the know," but we still know rather little. One of the fascinating
things about the Shifters was their method of recruiting new members.