In article <c19edh$37v$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, cherie@cs.pdx.edu says...

Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 22:04:23 +0000
From: Austin Kelley <austinkelley@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: Austin Kelley <austinkelley@hotmail.com>
Subject: Remaking America in Wal-Mart's Image (Safeway and "Friends")

Remaking America in Wal-Mart's Image
By The Black Commentator
February 19, 
2004                                           www.alternet.org/story.html?
StoryID=17895

The only competition that exists among the corporate players at the 
commanding heights of the American economy is the race to determine 
who can squeeze the workers first and hardest. Nothing illuminates 
this reality more starkly than the southern California supermarket 
strike and lockout, now in its fifth month. Displaying a class 
solidarity that would make Mao Tse-tung's Army blush a deep red, a 
united front of grocery chains is determined to destroy the middle 
class dreams of 70,000 union workers. 

The Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons chains and their subsidiaries 
claim underdog status, as they grind $10 an hour workers into the 
dirt. "Wal-Mart is coming, Wal-Mart is coming!" they cry, moaning 
that the non-union retail behemoth's labor costs are about 20 percent 
lower than industry norms. Yet, according to the June, 2003 issue of 
Forbes Magazine: 

The real problem the traditional grocery chains face is weak demand 
and an inability to raise prices in a deflationary environment - not 
Wal-Mart pricing pressure. Kroger and Safeway are gaining or 
maintaining share in about half or more of the top 100 markets where 
they have a presence. The only two big chains to suffer inroads from 
Wal-Mart in 2002 were Albertson's and Winn-Dixie..."

The truth is, Wal-Mart does want to take over the world - but so do 
the managements of its strike-provoking competitors, who swallowed 
schools of smaller fish to control 70 percent of grocery sales in the 
top 100 markets. Certainly, Wal-Mart is closing fast, with $53 
billion in grocery sales and 1400 "supercenters" in 42 states, but 
the "real problem" is much deeper than the folks at Forbes can safely 
grasp without losing their capitalist minds. In the world they have 
created for themselves, in which corporate death is avoided only 
through constant increases in dividends, and having eaten nearly all 
of the smaller prey, 
the mega-grocers have no one to feed on but 
themselves - or their employees. They began chewing on the workers in 
the first week of October - all the while blaming it on Wal-Mart. 

In reality, Wal-Mart was simply leading the way down a road that 
Safeway and Kroger would soon be traveling anyway. "Wal-Mart made us 
look at ourselves and reinvent ourselves," said Dick Tillman, an 
executive in charge of five southern states for the Kroger chain, in 
an interview with the Wall Street Journal, last year. 

Let's make it plain: The problem is not that there is too much 
competition in the retail food business, even of the cutthroat, Wal-
Mart kind. Rather, the chains have loaded themselves down with debt 
to eliminate the previously existing competition, and there are not 
enough customers with enough income to buy enough goods to pay off 
creditors and satisfy the ever more ravenous demands of investors at 
the same time. So they decided to cut labor costs by forcing a strike 
and lockout of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members 
throughout southern California. Wal-Mart provided the excuse to do 
what comes naturally to the corporate class in George Bush's America. 
Wal-Mart is leader of the pack, but they are all wolves. 

It is correct to say that the UFCW strike is a "Wal-Mart strike," in 
the sense that Safeway, Albertsons and Kroger have chosen to "re-
invent" themselves as Wal-Marts - and with the ferocity of the newly 
converted. However, it would be unwise to treat Wal-Mart as some 
uniquely villainous entity. The Bentonville, Arkansas corporation is 
simply more aggressive and self-consciously ideological than its 
boardroom counterparts. But it is not another species. Wal-Mart's 
corporate "personality" operates according to the same imperatives as 
the rest of the pack, who are far more admiring of their leader than 
resentful. 

Class solidarity means the owners share a common war chest. The
re is 
not even a pretense of corporate competition when it comes to making 
war on workers. From the moment the first UFCW picket lines went up 
at Vons and Pavillion stores, in October, the companies have shared 
revenues to compensate for strike losses. The arrangement is legal, 
they claim, because the chains all have contracts with the same 
union. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has filed an 
antitrust suit charging revenue sharing hurts consumers. "This action 
is about protecting shoppers against unlawful, anticompetitive 
conduct that keeps prices artificially high," said Lockyer. The 
companies have, in effect, suspended competition to engage in price-
fixing, from which all of them benefit. The suit contends the 
agreement "essentially freezes the pre-strike market share." 

Real money changes hands, according to equity analyst Andrew Wolf. If 
pickets deter shoppers from Safeway and Albertsons locations, but 
traffic is heavier at Krogers-owned stores, then "Kroger would 
actually write checks to the other two," said Wolf. 

Safeway lost nearly $700 million in the last quarter, but only $100 
million due to the strike, say company executives - and some of that 
was covered by revenue sharing. Yet Safeway's stock rose 70 cents 
last week. How could that be? Because Wall Street is rooting for the 
home team, home being anyplace where corporate diktat is challenged. 
When issues that really matter to the corporate class are at stake, 
the rules of the game are rigged by hype-masters in the money 
markets: workers beat down, stock goes up - hip-hip, hooray! 

Business Week, like Forbes, speaks to the corporate class. Lies are 
for outsiders; businessmen need to know the real deal: "The 
industry's goal is to bring its health-care costs more in line with 
those of nonunion Wal-Mart Stores," said the February 12 Business 
Week. "The retail giant's medical plan covers fewer than half its 
workers, and
its sales clerks earn less, on average, than the federal 
poverty level." 

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically special about the cost of 
health care - for the company, it's just another labor expense, 
albeit a fat and growing one. If Wal-Mart is the model - the leader 
of the pack - then "the industry's goal" is to bring all labor 
costs "more in line" with the viciously anti-union trendsetter. The 
larger objective is to break the union, as an organization or in 
spirit. From the current corporate perspective, level playing fields 
can only exist when the employees are flat on their backs. Executives 

>from purportedly competing companies conspire and collude toward that 

end, all the while pleading that "The Devil (Wal-Mart) made me do 
it." 

The Devil and his disciples at Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons have 
access to the same numbers, and move inexorably in the same 
direction. It is their nature. The supermarkets offer to the striking 
and locked out UFCW workers amounts to a 65 percent cut in the 
employers' health care contribution: from the current $3.85 per hour 
worked to $1.35. The owners dispute this figure, but in eagerly 
following Wal-Mart's model they have telegraphed the fact that there 
is no limit to how far they are willing to reduce labor costs. If 
there is a bottom, Wal-Mart will find it first, and the pack will 
eagerly follow. 

Wal-Mart can also teach its acolytes how to profit from poverty. 
Although the Walton family spends millions on rightwing causes to 
undermine what's left of the social safety net, their corporation 
urges employees to apply for every available government assistance. 

According to a report prepared by the House Committee on Education 
and the Workforce, federal taxpayers subsidize the typical, 200-
employee Wal-Mart store at the rate of $420,750 a year. Rep. George 
Miller charges Wal-Mart is the source of "downward spirals in 
communities." 
Wal-Mart excuses its bare bones health care plan - which covers no 
one working less than 34 hours a week - on the grounds that about 40 
percent of their "associates" get health coverage through their 
otherwise employed spouse's plans. The rationale appears to be: 
Employees whose spouses work at better places have no need for health 
insurance. 

The striking southern California grocery workers who depended on the 
company plan no longer have health benefits, and must get by on $100 
dollars a week doled out from the union strike fund. They don't want 
to be the first line of defense against a highly mobile corporate 
assault on living standards in America - but they have no choice. 

They are in the way of a yelping wolf pack, led and inspired by Wal-
Mart.

*****

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"The World is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are 
evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert 
Einstein 
******************************************************************** 
"Never cease in the fight for peace, justice, and equality for all people. Be 
persistent in all that you do and don't allow anyone to sway you from your 
conscience."- Leonard Peltier 
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