Working Assets, the progressive long distance provider, has initiated an electronic petition to walmart, backed up by a pledge not to buy from Wal-mart during the holidays until they change their business practices. Their goal is 100,000 particpants. This is their messasge:

Wal-Mart engages in some of the worst labor practices in the country: paying its employees substandard wages, forcing unpaid overtime on its workers and refusing to provide affordable health insurance.

This holiday season, pledge not to shop at Wal-Mart and to ask your friends and families not to buy you gifts from Wal-Mart until the chain:

• Pays its one million workers a living wage
  
• Provides affordable health insurance to its employees
  
• Stops discriminating against women
  
• Stops attacking employees who want to be represented by a union
  
• Ceases forcing unpaid overtime on its employees
  
• Stops pressuring suppliers to lower their labor costs
  
  

Tell Wal-Mart that until it changes its ways, you will take your holiday shopping to other stores and will urge your friends and family to do the same.

Click on this address to join the campaign:
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/petition.cfm?itemid=16041&ms=di

Rubbermaid is shriveling and 850 of our neighbors are soon to be out of work.

I blame Wal-Mart.

If you shop there even if you could afford to shop someplace else, then I blame you, too.

In 1993 and 1994, Rubbermaid Inc. was named America's most admired company by Fortune magazine. Its descent into mediocrity is a sad, sad story that is used routinely in college classrooms to illustrate the immense power and vicious corporate culture of Wal-Mart.

Rubbermaid's been dying since late 1994, when it found itself in a war of wills with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest company.

At that time, Rubbermaid wanted to raise the prices of some of its products because the cost of raw materials had risen suddenly by 80 percent. (Rubbermaid lost $250 million on resin costs alone in 1995, according to the company's annual report.)

Rubbermaid executives traveled numerous times to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to plead their case. Wal-Mart kept saying no.

Look-alikes substituted

When Rubbermaid refused to go along with Wal-Mart's hard line on price, the retailer pulled Rubbermaid products off the shelf and replaced them with those manufactured by Sterilite, a little-known Massachusetts company adept at making Rubbermaid look-alikes at lower cost.

Sterilite, a closely held company with a manufacturing plant in Massillon, saw double-digit sales increases in 1995, according to industry estimates at the time; Rubbermaid'searnings fell 30 percent that year, according to its annual report.

When Rubbermaid finally made peace with Wal-Mart, it was by succumbing to the retailer's demands for cheaper products made to Wal-Mart specifications.

Rubbermaid planned to introduce a line of housewares in a shade it called Euro Blue. Rubbermaid designers had seen the color's emerging popularity abroad and believed it would catch on in the United States.

It manufactured the Euro Blue line, but Wal-Mart refused to carry it, forcing Rubbermaid to return to making its country blue and hunter green for Wal-Mart.

Euro Blue soon became one of the hottest hues in housewares, and Wal-Mart executives were frustrated and ashamed.

Wal-Mart has brought some good things to retailing. It has forced inefficient operations to get their acts together. It pioneered just-in-time inventory and expanded the use of technology to improve the flow of products. It has taught other retailers how to demand accountability from their suppliers.

But, as one former Rubbermaid executive told me, Wal-Mart ``squeezed too hard.''

By 1997, the floundering Rubbermaid was widely seen as takeover bait -- just three years after it was named the most admired company.

In 1999, Rubbermaid was purchased by Newell Inc., a lesser-known company with a reputation for whipping weaklings into shape.

Suppliers succumb Rubbermaid is hardly alone in bowing to Wal-Mart pressure.

Wal-Mart represents the largest chunk of business -- anywhere from 10 percent to 35 percent of annual revenues -- of all of the major consumer products companies.

About 450 suppliers have opened offices in tiny Bentonville and 800 more plan to do so in the next five years.

Wal-Mart, by all accounts, played a big role in Kellogg's purchase of Keebler in 2001: The company wanted as much muscle as it could develop to deal with the retailer.

Procter & Gamble sold its Crisco and Jif peanut butter brands to the J.M. Smucker Co. of Orrville so it could focus on peddling heavy hitters such as Tide detergent to Wal-Mart.

Many, many other companies have changed their products to please Wal-Mart. Most major manufacturers make special products for sale at Wal-Mart and nowhere else. Those who make large products, such as plastic backyard toys, have had to alter their products or packaging to make it easier for Wal-Mart to shelve them.

Sometimes the changes seem small, but they are insidious.

Planet Moon Studios altered a video game by coloring blood green instead of red, toning down the language and putting a bikini on a topless character -- all to win Wal-Mart's approval.

Newell Rubbermaid Inc. insists that it is still committed to the Rubbermaid brand. After all, it incorporated the name.

But as Wal-Mart grows more powerful, as it does every single day, the chances of the brand's survival in any recognizable form are diminished greatly.

So next time you elbow your way into Wal-Mart to get a dirt-cheap television or bargain shoelaces, think about the price you, and the American economy, are really paying.

Mary Ethridge can be reached at 330-996-3545 or methridge@thebeaconjournal.com
Copyright 2003, Akron Beacon Journal. All rights reserved.

Joseph E. Stiglitz (winner of 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics) in "Globalization and Its Discontents" p.69 ((W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2002).

MEXICO CITY, Dec. 5 - The company that ate America is now swallowing Mexico.

Wal-Mart, the biggest corporation in the United States, is already the biggest private employer in Mexico, with 100,164 workers on its payroll here as of last week. Last year, when it gained its No. 1 status in employment, it created about 8,000 new positions - nearly half the permanent new jobs in this struggling country.

Wal-Mart's power is changing Mexico in the same way it changed the economic landscape of the United States, and with the same formula: cut prices relentlessly, pump up productivity, pay low wages, ban unions, give suppliers the tightest possible profit margins and sell everything under the sun for less than the guy next door.

"This is the game that Wal-Mart has played in the United States," said Diana Farrell, director of McKinsey Global Institute, a policy research group run by the international business consultancy McKinsey & Company. "They've changed the name of the game in Mexico."

In the United States and Western Europe, Wal-Mart has been accused of driving down wages, introducing cut-throat business practices and bankrupting local companies.

But in Mexico's dreary economy, foreign investment, especially American investment, is about the only bright light, and many Mexicans know it. Cries of economic and cultural imperialism, rampant 10 years ago, when the North American Free Trade Agreement took hold, are more muted now.

"Part of globalization is adopting the methods and customs of another country," said Francisco Rivero, an economic analyst in Mexico City.

Though it came to this country only 12 years ago, Wal-Mart is doing more business - closing in on $11 billion a year - than the entire tourism industry. Wal-Mart sells $6 billion worth of food a year, more than anyone else in Mexico. In fact, it sells more of almost everything than almost anyone. Economists say its price cuts actually drive down the country's rate of inflation.

Last year, 585 million people - nearly six times the population of Mexico - passed through its check-out lanes. With 633 outlets, Wal-Mart's Mexican operations are by far the biggest outside the United States.

Its sales represent about 2 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product - almost the same as in the United States. Analysts say it now controls something approaching 30 percent of all supermarket food sales in Mexico, and about 6 percent of all retail sales - also about the same as in the United States.

Though Wal-Mart is not the only game in town, it is the biggest, and its bigness is crushing its supermarket competitors. Its methods are creating "a radical change" in the way business is done here, Ms. Farrell said.

"Wal-Mart has changed the retail market in Mexico," said Raúl Argüelles, a Wal-Mart vice president in Mexico City. "Every store manager has authority to lower prices if he sees the store across the street selling for less. If you have to lower the price, you lower it."

For Mexicans trying to compete with Wal-Mart, a new business culture is emerging, based on those hard-nosed, sometimes cut-throat tactics. For Mexicans with money to spend, a new consumer culture is rising, along with the sales of McDonald's hamburgers and Domino's pizzas (the three favorite toppings here are jalapeño peppers, ham and pineapple).

The marketplace is making Mexico look more like the United States, like it or not.

"From the commercial point of view, it's a total convergence," said Luis de la Calle, who was a chief Nafta negotiator. "If you go to a supermarket in Mexico, the type of products, the service they give you, it's just like you find in the United States or Canada, in terms of variety, quality and price."

Wal-Mart shoppers here have become attuned to the company's smiley-face logo and its mantra of "Everyday Low Prices." At a Mexico City shopping center, Plaza Tepeyac, José Carrillo, 36, wended his way through the aisles on a weekday morning, admiring how neatly the merchandise was displayed.

"Sometimes I go to the street markets and sometimes I come here," said Mr. Carrillo, an administrative aide, who lives three blocks from a Wal-Mart. "Sure, I know Wal-Mart is a multinational company, but what are you going to do? That's globalization, and Mexico has to play the game, right? Maybe some of the profit leaves Mexico, but Mexico gets back some foreign investment, right? That's how things work. It doesn't matter to me if I'm buying from a multinational company, as long as they give me what I want."

Wal-Mart opened its first American store in 1962 and started its international expansion in 1991, when it began to build and buy its way into Mexico. Half its Mexican operations now are here in the capital, the other half in cities across the country, from Tijuana to Cancún.

Its 81 Wal-Mart stores and 52 Sam's Club outlets now ring up close to $6 billion a year. Annual sales at its Superama and Bodega supermarkets approach $4 billion. Wal-Mart also runs 52 Suburbia department stores and 267 Vips restaurants, with close to $1 billion a year in sales.

Wal-Mart has also become the largest retailer in Canada, and has outlets in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Puerto Rico and Britain. The global expansion has helped make it the world's biggest company in terms of revenues, with $245 billion in sales last year - a sum greater than the economies of all but 30 of the world's nations. Nowhere outside the United States are its stores as numerous as in Mexico, where the scope and scale of its operations have grown to resemble its dominion in the United States.

Wal-Mart says that it treats its Mexican employees so well that the workers want no union, and that it pays its workers better than do its Mexican competitors.

However, in the United States, a unionized supermarket worker makes, on average, about $19 an hour. At Wal-Mart, where there are no unions, that worker makes about $9 an hour. In Mexico, for a newly hired Wal-Mart cashier, the pay stub reads about $1.50 a hour.