(Writer George Orwell's passport picture when he was in Burma in the 1920s)
Walmart publicly preached “Buy America” three decades ago,
and the Arkansas-based retail giant imported less than 6 percent of the
products it sold in the United States. By 2006 four-fifths of its suppliers
were based in China.
Then China’s workers began protesting their conditions and
eventually got the attention of the Communist Party leadership in Beijing,
which feared rising worker militancy in the workers’ paradise. Over the past 10
years, blue-collar workers’ wages have risen some 400 percent.
So like other U.S.-based corporate bottom-feeders, Walmart
looked beyond China for suppliers that could meet Walmart’s stringent cost
demands through low wages and poor working conditions. They found their new
partners in Bangladesh, home of the world’s lowest wages. The cost of those
minimal conditions became clear last November with the Tazreen garment factory
fire near Dhaka that killed 112 workers and again, even more so, in the Rana
Plaza factory collapse in April that killed 1,129 workers.
A result of those tragedies has been a global spotlight on
the U.S. companies fed low-priced products by suppliers in Bangladesh that
could care less about safety conditions or workers’ livelihood. Even as major
European companies responded by agreeing to a new, legally binding accord requiring
independent inspections of supplier factories, Walmart, J.C. Penney, Sear’s,
Macy’s, Target, Gap, and other U.S. firms resisted. American greed countenances
little or nothing that stands in the way of its insatiable appetite. And
neither do its defenders in Washington.
Expect Walmart and Co. to be looking even farther beyond China and beyond Bangladesh now
in the “race to the bottom.” Cambodia has already been a beneficiary, but now
workers are protesting there, too, and wages are rising. The New York Times recently reported that
industrial wages in Cambodia have grown 65 percent in the last five years.
“The race to the bottom has hurt workers all over the
world,” Hong Kong’s top independent labor leader and Labour Party chair Lee
Cheuk-yan told me during an interview in Hong Kong in June. “The ability of
capital of moving to the cheapest labor is very efficient from their point of
view, but from our point of view it is a race to the bottom. Even Chinese labor
now is seen as too expensive, and they are moving to Bangladesh, Cambodia.
Myanmar will be next. When will it end? The ability of capital to move around
so easily is hurting workers everywhere.”
Myanmar, also known as Burma, indeed will be next. With military rule in
that long-tortured country now allowing greater democracy and
outside investment to aide its disastrous economy, the corporate bottom-feeders are licking their chops. "Foreign governments and multinationals have converged on a country that occupies a unique geostrategic position between the new Asian superpowers of India to the west and China to the east," said The Economist in a special report in May. "Private companies are jostling to capture a share of an almost virginal consumer market of some 60 (million) people" - and, let us not forget, cheap, really cheap, workers.
Workers at the Japanese-owned Famoso garment factory in Yangon earn the equivalent of $100 a month, "a quarter of the going rate in China," The Economist reports. "The mix of low wages, a plentiful supply of labour and access to American and European markets should mean that many more Famosos will be set up in Myanmar."
Workers at the Japanese-owned Famoso garment factory in Yangon earn the equivalent of $100 a month, "a quarter of the going rate in China," The Economist reports. "The mix of low wages, a plentiful supply of labour and access to American and European markets should mean that many more Famosos will be set up in Myanmar."
Walmart probably doesn’t yet have an image problem in Yangon
(Myanmar’s capital, once known as Rangoon). Not like it does here in the United
States.
Back in May the retailer agreed to pay $82 million in fines
after admitting guilt in the improper dumping of hazardous wastes in Missouri
and California. Walmart workers and
warehouse workers for Walmart suppliers have staged walkouts and strikes in
recent months to protest the litany of worker abuses that have made Sam
Walton’s corporate creation infamous.
Adding insult to injury, the District of Columbia Council in
Washington passed a “living wage” bill that would require Walmart to pay its
employees a minimum of $12.50 an hour if the retailer opens the six stores it
has planned there. Walmart was aghast, of course.
Can you blame the city’s leaders? Remember this
multi-billion-dollar company has been so chintzy with its workers that 46
percent of their children had no health insurance or were dependent on Medicaid
in 2006. A congressional report at the time showed that each Walmart store
generated an average $420,750 in Medicaid, Food Stamps, and public housing
costs to taxpayers.
Don’t know whether members of the Walton family--or other corporate leaders--are reading
George Orwell’s Burmese Days (a book about Britain's colonial rule of that country) to
prepare for their next adventure, but
folks in Yangon better get ready. The corporate colonialists and imperialists are
planning a major comeback.
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