XPost: soc.history
From:
hayesstw@telkomsa.net
On Wed, 5 Jan 2022 22:58:37 -0800 (PST), Jeffrey Rubard <
jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com> wrote:
CHAPTER 1
Wal-Mart: A Template for Twenty-First-Century Capitalism
Nelson Lichtenstein
Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world, provides the template
for a global economic order that mirrors the right-wing politics and
imperial ambitions of those who now command so many strategic posts in
American government and society. Like the conservatism at the heart of
the Reagan-Bush ascendancy, Wal-Mart emerged out of a rural South that
barely tolerated New Deal social regulation, the civil rights
revolution, or the feminist impulse. In their place the corporation
has projected an ideology of family, faith, and small-town
sentimentality that coexists in strange harmony with a world of
transnational commerce, stagnant living standards, and a stressful
work life.
Founded less than fifty years ago by Sam Walton and his brother Bud,
this Bentonville, Arkansas, company is today the largest profit-making enterprise in the world. With sales over $300 billion a year, Wal-Mart
has revenues larger than those of Switzerland. It operates more than
five thousand huge stores worldwide, 80 percent in the United States.
In selling general merchandise, Wal-Mart has no true rival, and in
2003 Fortune magazine ranked Wal-Mart as the nation's most admired
company. It does more business than Target, Home Depot, Sears, Kmart,
Safeway, and Kroger combined. It employs more than 1.5 million workers
around the globe, making Wal-Mart the largest private employer in
Mexico, Canada, and the United States. It imports more goods from
China than either the United Kingdom or Russia. Its sales will
probably top $1 trillion per year within a decade. Sam Walton was
crowned the richest man in America in 1985; today his heirs, who own
39 percent of the company, are twice as wealthy as the family of Bill
Gates.
The competitive success and political influence of this giant
corporation enable Wal-Mart to rezone our cities, determine the real
minimum wage, break trade unions, set the boundaries for popular
culture, channel capital throughout the world, and conduct a kind of international diplomacy with a dozen nations. In an era of waning
governmental regulation, Wal-Mart management may well have more power
than any other entity to legislate key components of American social
and industrial policy. The Arkansas-based giant is well aware of this
leverage, which is why it is spending millions of dollars on TV
advertisements that tout, not its "always low prices," but the
community revitalization, happy workers, and philanthropic good works
it believes come when it opens another store.
Wal-Mart is thus the template business setting the standards for a new
stage in the history of world capitalism. In each epoch a huge,
successful, rapidly emulated enterprise embodies a new and innovative
set of technological advances, organizational structures, and social relationships. It becomes the template economic institution of its
age. At the end of the nineteenth century the Pennsylvania Railroad
declared itself "the standard of the world." U.S. Steel defined the
meaning of corporate power and efficiency for decades after J. P.
Morgan created the first billion-dollar company in 1901. In the
mid-twentieth century General Motors symbolized bureaucratic
management, mass production, and the social, political enfranchisement
of a unionized, blue-collar workforce. When Peter Drucker wrote the
pioneering management study The Concept of the Corporation in 1946 it
was the General Motors organization, from the Flint assembly lines to
the executive offices in Detroit and New York, that exemplified
corporate modernity in all its variegated aspects. And in more recent
years, first IBM and then Microsoft have seemed the template for an
information economy that has transformed the diffusion and production
of knowledge around the globe.
Wal-Mart is now the template business for world capitalism because it
takes the most potent technological and logistic innovations of the twenty-first century and puts them at the service of an organization
whose competitive success depends upon the destruction of all that
remains of New Deal–style social regulation and replaces it, in the
U.S. and abroad, with a global system that relentlessly squeezes labor
costs from South Carolina to south China, from Indianapolis to
Indonesia. For the first time in the history of modern capitalism the
Wal-Mart template has made the retailer king and the manufacturer his
vassal. So the company has transformed thousands of its supplier firms
into quaking supplicants who scramble to cut their costs and squeeze
the last drop of sweated productivity from millions of workers and
thousands of subcontractors.
The Wal-Mart Phenomenon
Snapshots from the lives of four women help us understand the impact
of the Wal-Mart phenomenon upon the lives of tens of millions of
ordinary people.
Chastity Ferguson kept watch over a sleepy three-year-old late one
Friday as she flipped a pack of corn dogs into a cart at her new
favorite grocery store: Wal-Mart. At this Las Vegas supercenter, pink
stucco on the outside, a wide-isled, well-lighted emporium within, a
full-scale supermarket is combined with a discount megastore to offer
shoppers everything they might need in their daily life. For Ferguson,
a harried twenty-six-year-old mother, the draw is obvious. "You can't
beat the prices," said the hotel cashier, who makes $400 a week. "I
come here because it's cheap."
Across town, another mother also is familiar with the supercenter's
low prices. Kelly Gray, the chief breadwinner for five children, lost
her job as a Raley's grocery clerk late in 2002 after Wal-Mart
expanded into the supermarket business in Las Vegas. California-based
Raley's closed all eighteen of its southern Nevada stores, laying off
1,400 workers. Gray earned $14.98 an hour with a pension and family
health insurance. Wal-Mart grocery workers typically make less than
$10 an hour, with inferior benefits. "It's like somebody came and
broke into your home and took something huge and important away from
you," said the thirty-six-year-old. "I was scared. I cried. I shook."
Halfway around the world, twenty-year-old Li Xiao Hong labors in a
Guangzhou factory that turns out millions of the Mattel toys that
Wal-Mart sells across America. She is part of an army of 40 million
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