XPost: soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   On Wed, 5 Jan 2022 22:58:37 -0800 (PST), Jeffrey Rubard   
    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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)