Oh No He Didn't

Over at the Trenches, Mick dares to remember something I wrote in a comment at his place over thirty years ago and then adds insult to injury by disagreeing with it.   Look, I'm the first to admit that I am always wrong, but in this case - the case wherein I claim that a boycott of WalMart is the best way to get them to cave on their kill-the-worker business model - in this case, I'm right. 

Mick read this:

The new Wal-Mart in Landover Hills doesn’t sell alcohol or guns. It does have skylights to cut down on energy use. It does not operate 24 hours.

Such concessions were unheard of at Wal-Mart’s cookie-cutter stores several years ago. But they are just a few of the compromises the world’s largest retailer reached with Prince George’s County residents and community leaders concerned about the store’s impact on the neighborhood.

It’s a new way of doing business for the company, whose hopes for domestic growth lie in conquering urban areas such as Landover Hills, where it has faced strong opposition from labor unions and small businesses. The store symbolizes how far Wal-Mart was willing to go to gain a foothold….

and wrote:

I knew this was coming, and I knew it would work. The only question was: would the community be willing to co-ordinate its opposition with unions?  That question is still to be answered, but the Good News is that at least unions themselves are beginning to realize that they can’t beat Wal-Mart without it.

Well, of course, he's right.  Community is important.  Gotta have community.  Can't have a good boycott without community involvement for heaven's sake.  But we have seen what happened when a community tried to do the right thing and drag big box retailers along with them.  Last year Chicago's City Council passed a living wage ordinance, Lowe's and Target backed out of a big development deal, Daley used his first veto in seventeen years to squash the ordinance and then didn't get overidden. 

Skylights and gun-free stores are great and they, along with the stocking of energy efficient lightbulbs and "organic" food, show that WalMart will respond to what they identify as market trends.  But health care and a living wage are another thing altogether.  Getting concessions on WalMart's class war as business model strategy is going to require causing stockholders real pain.  Happily, I think that WalMart runs on such a razor-thin margin and has a stockprice that's so important to the market in general that a serious single-day boycott would shake them up pretty severely.  Keep it going for a week and they'll blink.  The apparently insurmountable trick is to get it going.  God bless America.

Comments

[mick arran]

Good gravy Marie but one is touchy after midnight, isn't one?

Look, I never said "instead of a boycott". The first two words in Prong 1 are in fact "A boycott". I agree with you. Where I disagree is with the idea that they're so paranoid that a boycott alone would do the trick and, more importantly, that they would actually change their business model instead of making a few PR moves and then going back to BAU as soon as the cameras were turned off. There needs to be an infrastructure in place to keep them in line. You can't keep a boycott going forever, you know. WM can't be trusted, you know that, and there needs to be an agreement in place featuring a watchdog with very large pointy teeth.

My point about the article you cite was certainly NOT that it was sufficient. I was only noting that the lines of communication are finally open between unions and local businesses and that they need to be used. So will the unions use them for something other than lightbulbs? Can they?

Obviously this requires more discussion. I feel another post coming on....