From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   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."   
      
      
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