I was terrified someone would recognize me. I'd rather be caught at a peep show than shopping at Wal-Mart. The Times' recent series by Abigail Goldman and Nancy Cleeland validated all my worst suspicions, detailing the world's biggest retailer's full-throated race to the bottom � bottom dollar and bottom line, the corporate nation that runs at the front of the pack in pushing jobs offshore, pushing prices low and wages lower. It's the Wal-Mart limbo dance: Whether it's price or public responsibility, how low can you go?
Sam Walton's autobiography is subtitled "Made in America." Sam's been dead about a dozen years, but I'd still like to take him shopping with me to find out just what there is in Wal-Mart, besides Mr. Sam, that's made in America. The grail of free trade � Greenbacks Sans Frontieres � has made it not only old-fashioned to "Buy American," but damned near impossible.
�
I didn't talk to the shoppers. They were busy, and what's the point? Just as the bus strikes pitted the working class against the working poor, Wal-Mart sucks them all up: foreign workers desperate for jobs, American workers whose real wages have dropped and left them desperate for cheap goods, and Americans who would rather work at Wal-Mart's non-union jobs, with poor benefits and lower wages, than have no work at all. It's a circle of falling dominoes: Because decent-paying working- and middle-class American jobs are harder to come by, shoppers can't afford to go elsewhere, so they buy goods made overseas for pennies an hour, which encourages manufacturers to shut factories here to send work overseas, which means that more decent-paying jobs � you see where this goes.
rerun at Village News, Bakersfield, Kern County, California, USA, and The World
Sam Walton's autobiography is subtitled "Made in America." Sam's been dead about a dozen years, but I'd still like to take him shopping with me to find out just what there is in Wal-Mart, besides Mr. Sam, that's made in America. The grail of free trade � Greenbacks Sans Frontieres � has made it not only old-fashioned to "Buy American," but damned near impossible.
�
I didn't talk to the shoppers. They were busy, and what's the point? Just as the bus strikes pitted the working class against the working poor, Wal-Mart sucks them all up: foreign workers desperate for jobs, American workers whose real wages have dropped and left them desperate for cheap goods, and Americans who would rather work at Wal-Mart's non-union jobs, with poor benefits and lower wages, than have no work at all. It's a circle of falling dominoes: Because decent-paying working- and middle-class American jobs are harder to come by, shoppers can't afford to go elsewhere, so they buy goods made overseas for pennies an hour, which encourages manufacturers to shut factories here to send work overseas, which means that more decent-paying jobs � you see where this goes.
�Patt Morrison/LA Times Dec.23.03
rerun at Village News, Bakersfield, Kern County, California, USA, and The World
