Submitted by arlenegloria on Mon, 07/05/2010 - 19:57

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It's not just the low wages or the near-scientific union busting. It's the preference for poverty, the business model built on turnover, the manipulative PR. Is this really the best way to bring jobs and food to the south and west sides?    --Chicago Reader

What Else You Should Know About Walmart

By Max Brooks

Nelson Lichtenstein, a crusading labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has written books on the history of unionism and the automobile industry, but over the last few years he's spent much of his time thinking about Walmart. To research his 2009 book on the corporation, The Retail Revolution, which is newly out in paperback, he combed through scores of articles from Discount Store News, thousands of pages of legal filings and memoirs produced by Walmart employees, and piles of transcripts of in-house management videos recorded by a production company Walmart fired in 2006. Lichtenstein even bought ten shares of Walmart stock so he could attend a stockholders' meeting. From his efforts came an excellent treatise that details the company's well-oiled distribution system, its generally shabby treatment of its workers, its rabid anti-unionism, and its evangelistic corporate culture (instead of a board of directors, the company once had a board of "servant leaders").

As Walmart has grown into one of the largest corporations in history—it's currently number one on the Fortune 500 list of top earners in the world—its business and labor practices have come under intense scrutiny. Defenders note that the company's

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http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-walmart-low-wages-unions/Co...