In article <bnqdr4$1ehb$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Michael Givel says...

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17060

Wal-Mart Gets Greedy

By Stan Cox, AlterNet October 28, 2003

With 300 of its contract cleaners having been hauled off by immigration
authorities, with a truckload of files seized from its corporate
offices in Arkansas, and with a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania
listening to wiretaps of its executives' phone conversations,
Wal-Mart's red, white and blue image is fast fading to mop-bucket
gray.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) caught
Wal-Mart red-handed as it contracted to have the overnight cleaning
of its stores done by undocumented workers. Federal officials have
told the Associated Press that company executives knew what the
contractors were up to.

Wal-Mart has responded by declaring that it will now scrutinize the
documents of every single one of its employees (hasn't that been
done already?), and the company most certainly will be shocked,
shocked! if it finds more deportable people among them.

The Washington Post reported that the Wal-Mart raids were part of
an aggressive enforcement campaign by the newly beefed-up ICE
(formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service). The Post
story ended with a lament by Elizabeth Stern, an immigration lawyer
who got to the heart of the matter:

"That's the wrong attitude when you are trying to foster a national
economic recovery."

It's an open secret that U.S. business has become hooked on the
profits generated by illegal immigration. In its remorseless drive
toward Always Low Prices, Wal-Mart, it appears, is no exception.
It's hard for a company to resist the temptation offered by a large
pool of workers willing to put in long hours for minimum or sub-minimum
wage, with no overtime pay - workers whose fear of deportation
ensures that they'll do whatever is asked of them.

As you doubtless have noticed, most everything sold by your local
Wal-Mart was manufactured far beyond U.S. borders - also by contractors
paying low wages to often-desperate people. Unlike manufacturing
firms, retail chains like Wal-Mart can't pump up their profits
further by moving their operations overseas. But now that Wal-Mart
is the nation's biggest private employer, with 1.3 million workers
worldwide (triple the number employed by #2 McDonald's), it is able
singlehandedly to drive retail wages down to a level it can be
comfortable with.

Through its sheer bulk (and with a little help from its cleaning
contractors), Wal-Mart is having the same negative effect on
retail-sector wages that companies in China and Mexico have had on
U.S. manufacturing wages. Currently, the most obvious effect is
being seen in the grocery industry.

But Wal-Mart's PR slogan "Our People Make the Difference" does
capture a truth. Based on the company's profit and employment
figures, I calculate that each employee generates more than $11.20
in new wealth for every hour she works. The average U.S. employee
is paid an average hourly wage of $7.50, and the balance - about
$3.70 - goes back to Arkansas as profit. (The actual hourly profit
is higher, because the average wage of employees in the growing
number of overseas stores is lower.)

If a little over half of that hourly profit, say $2, were shifted
to the workers who generated it, the average wage would rise to
$9.50, which is considered a living wage in most U.S. communities.
That could happen if Wal-Mart decided to be satisfied with being
the world's biggest corporation and stopped its headlong expansion.

Now that $7.50 wage is an average, not a minimum. Hundreds of
thousands of Wal-Mart workers are paid less - so much less that
some cannot even obtain the bare necessities of life for their
families without government assistance.

We don't know how many contract workers are cleaning Wal-Mart's
stores, distribution centers, and corporate offices each night
across America. But their number is dwarfed by the million-plus
people on its official payroll.

You'd think that Wal-Mart would be satisfied to pay a relatively
few cleaners the same bare-bones wages it pays its cashiers, stockers,
and greeters. But its executives, taking Sam Walton's penny-pinching
philosophy to its extreme, have found a way to pay cleaners even
less, via the contract system.

Wal-Mart spokespeople claim that they have forbidden their contractors
to hire workers who have inadequate documents. If so, they must
have wondered at the seeming miracle the contractors had managed
to pull off. How could they have convinced people to work in a
Wal-Mart store for even less than the stingy Wal-Mart wage? Now we
know how, and it seems likely that the company's executives have
known all along that it was no miracle.

All wages affect all others, through something like a gravitational
force. It pays for corporations to rely on dollar-a-day workers
when the job can be done overseas or on too-cheap-to-be-legal
contract workers when the work is to be done within our borders.
At the next level, when businesses find it necessary to hire employees
directly for U.S. jobs, the Wal-Mart wage is fast becoming the
center of gravity.

Tough living-wage laws and anti-sweatshop treaties would accomplish
what immigration crackdowns cannot, while curtailing the exploitation
of workers who live life on the run. Wal-Mart and the other
corporations that benefit from the lack of such laws would howl,
but don't feel sorry for them - they can afford to pay more.

Stan Cox (t.stan@cox.net) works in Salina, Kansas as a plant breeder
and writer.