[Paleopsych] NYRB: Inside the Leviathan
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Inside the Leviathan
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17647
Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
By [13]Simon Head
BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?
edited by Nelson Lichtenstein
Papers presented at a conference on Wal-Mart held at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, April 12, 2004.
New Press, forthcoming in 2005
US Productivity Growth, 1995-2000, Section VI: Retail Trade
a report by the McKinsey Global Institute
October 2001, at www.mckinsey.com/knowledge/mgi/productivity
[14]Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart
by Liza Featherstone
Basic Books, 282 pp., $25.00
[15]Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Owl, 221 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Betty Dukes, Patricia Surgeson, Cleo Page et al., Plaintiff, vs. Wal-Mart
Stores Inc., Defendant: Declarations in Support of Plaintiffs
United States District Court, Northern District of California, at
www.walmartclass.com
Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart
a report by the Democratic Staff of the House Committee on Education and the
Workforce
February 16, 2004, at
edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/walmartreport.pdf
1.
Throughout the recent history of American capitalism there has always
been one giant corporation whose size dwarfs that of all others, and
whose power conveys to the world the strength and confidence of
American capitalism itself. At mid-century General Motors was the
undisputed occupant of this corporate throne. But from the late 1970s
onward GM shrank in the face of superior Japanese competition and from
having outsourced the manufacture of many car components to
independent suppliers. By the millennium GM was struggling to maintain
its lead over Ford, its longstanding rival.
With the technology boom of the 1990s, the business press began
writing about Microsoft as if it were GM's rightful heir as the
dominant American corporation. But despite its worldwide monopoly as
the provider of software for personal computers, Microsoft has lacked
the essential qualification of size. In Fortune's 2004 listings of the
largest US corporations, Microsoft ranks a mere forty-sixth, behind
such falling stars as AT&T and J.C. Penney. However, Fortune's 2004
rankings also reveal the clear successor to GM, Wal-Mart. In 2003
Wal-Mart was also Fortune's "most admired company."^[16][1]
Wal-Mart is an improbable candidate for corporate gorilla because it
belongs to a sector, retail, that has never before produced America's
most powerful companies. But Wal-Mart has grown into a business whose
dominance of the corporate world rivals GM's in its heyday. With 1.4
million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart's workforce is now larger than
that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003,
Wal-Mart's annual revenues are 2 percent of US GDP, and eight times
the size of Microsoft's. In fact, when ranked by its revenues,
Wal-Mart is the world's largest corporation.
One sign of its rising status is an academic conference devoted
entirely to the subject of Wal-Mart that was held last April at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. The range of subjects covered
in the conference papers to be published early next year testifies to
Wal-Mart's impact both on the transfer of goods from third-world
sweatshops to suburban shopping malls in the US and on local
communities where its stores are located. At the conference the
many class-action lawsuits against Wal-Mart's employment practices
were discussed, particularly its unfair treatment of women, whether by
paying them extremely low wages or denying them promotions. The
conference organizer, the labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, asked
Wal-Mart to send a representative, but Wal-Mart declined.
_________________________________________________________________
Within the corporate world Wal-Mart's preeminence is not simply a
matter of size. In its analysis of the growth of US productivity, or
output per worker, between 1995 and 2000-- the years of the "new
economy" and the high-tech bubble on Wall Street--the McKinsey Global
Institute has found that just over half that growth took place in two
sectors, retail and wholesale, where, directly or indirectly, Wal-Mart
"caused the bulk of the productivity acceleration through ongoing
managerial innovation that increased competition intensity and drove
the diffusion of best practice."^ This is management-speak for
Wal-Mart's aggressive use of information technology and its skill in
meeting the needs of its customers.
In its own category of "general merchandise," Wal-Mart has taken a
huge lead in productivity over its competitors, a lead of 44 percent
in 1987, 48 percent in 1995, and still 41 percent in 1999, even as
competitors began to copy Wal-Mart's strategy. Thanks to the company's
superior productivity, Wal-Mart's share of total sales among all the
sellers of "general merchandise" rose from 9 percent in 1987 to 27
percent in 1995, and 30 percent in 1999, an astonishing rate of growth
which recalls the rise of the Ford Motor Company nearly a century ago.
McKinsey lists some of the leading causes of Wal-Mart's success. For
example, its huge, ugly box-shaped buildings enable Wal-Mart "to carry
a wider range of goods than competitors" and to "enjoy labor economies
of scale."
McKinsey mentions Wal-Mart's "efficiency in logistics," which make it
possible for the company to buy in bulk directly from producers of
everything from toilet paper to refrigerators, allowing it to dispense
with wholesalers. McKinsey also makes much of the company's innovative
use of information technology, for example its early use of computers
and scanners to track inventory, and its use of satellite
communications to link corporate headquarters in Arkansas with the
nationwide network of Wal-Mart stores. Setting up and fine-tuning
these tracking and distribution systems has been the special
achievement of founder Sam Walton's (the "Wal" of Wal-Mart) two
successors as CEO, David Glass and the incumbent Lee Scott.
Throughout its forty-year existence Wal-Mart has also shown
considerable skill in defining its core customers and catering to
their needs. One of Sam Walton's wisest decisions was to locate many
of his earliest stores in towns with populations of fewer than five
thousand people, communities largely ignored by his competitors. This
strategy gave Wal-Mart a near monopoly in its local markets and
enabled the company to ride out the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s
more successfully than its then larger competitors such as K-Mart and
Sears.^[17][2] Wal-Mart has also been skillful in providing products
that appeal to women with low incomes.
_________________________________________________________________
Although her book Selling Women Short is a powerful indictment of how
Wal-Mart has treated its female employees, Liza Featherstone
nonetheless acknowledges the lure of the Wal-Mart store for female
shoppers, who delight "in spending as little as possible, all in one
place." At a Wal-Mart "supercenter"
you can change a tire, buy groceries for dinner, and get a new pair
of shoes and some yard furniture--a set of errands that once would
have required a long afternoon of visits to far-flung merchants.
All these innovations contribute to Wal-Mart's remarkable productivity
record, and this in turn has opened up another major source of
competitive advantage for the company, its policy of "Every Day Low
Prices" ("EDLP"), which makes it possible for it to undersell its
competitors by an average of as much as 14 percent.^[18][3] Here the
picture darkens because Wal-Mart's ability to keep prices low depends
not just on its productivity but also on its ability to contain, or
even reduce, costs, above all labor costs. As Sam Walton wrote in his
memoirs:
You see: no matter how you slice it in the retail business, payroll
is one of the most important parts of overhead, and overhead is one
of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your
profit margin.
One of the ways to win this particular fight is to make sure that the
growth of labor's productivity well exceeds the growth of its wages
and benefits, which has in fact been the dominant pattern for US
corporations during the past decade.
From a corporate perspective, this is a rosy outcome. When the
productivity of labor rises and its compensation stagnates, then,
other things being equal, the cost of labor per unit of output will
fall and profit margins will rise. Wal-Mart has carried this strategy
to extremes. While its workforce has one of the best productivity
records of any US corporation, it has kept the compensation of its
rank-and-file workers at or barely above the poverty line. As of last
spring, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart was $8.50 an
hour, or about $14,000 a year, $1,000 below the government's
definition of the poverty level for a family of three.^[19][4] Despite
the implied claims of Wal-Mart's current TV advertising campaign,
fewer than half-- between 41 and 46 percent--of Wal-Mart employees can
afford even the least-expensive health care benefits offered by the
company. To keep the growth of productivity and real wages far apart,
Wal-Mart has reached back beyond the New Deal to the harsh, abrasive
capitalism of the 1920s.
_________________________________________________________________
At a retail business such as Wal-Mart the methods used to increase
employee productivity differ from those used "on the line" at a
manufacturing plant producing automobiles or computers, where work can
be rigorously defined, and higher productivity can be achieved by
simplifying tasks so that they are performed more quickly. At Wal-Mart
most employees are not engaged in single, repetitive tasks. The
location and timing of work at a Wal-Mart store is determined by the
flow of goods entering the store through the back entrance, and the
flow of customers entering the store through the front.
Neither of these flows is constant or entirely predictable, and
workers may have to be moved from one task to another as the flows
change. An employee may begin the day by unloading and unpacking goods
at the receiving dock; she may then transfer to shifting goods from
the dock into the store; then to stacking goods on shelves or in
special displays; and then finally to registering the sale of goods at
one of the many checkout counters and making change. (At a Wal-Mart
"supercenter" I recently visited in suburban Columbus, Ohio, there
were two rows of checkout counters, each row with eighteen cash
registers.)
Since there is no assembly line at Wal-Mart its senior management uses
blunter methods to achieve higher levels of productivity from the
workforce. These methods are governed by a simple principle: when
deciding how many workers to employ, Wal-Mart management relies on a
formula guaranteeing that the growth of the labor budget will lag
behind the growth in store sales, so that every year there will be
more work for each employee to do. In her paper "The Quality of Work
at Wal-Mart," presented at the conference in Santa Barbara, Ellen
Rosen of the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis described in
detail how this squeeze on labor works. Each year Wal-Mart provides
its store managers with a "preferred budget" for employment, which
would allow managers to staff their stores at adequate levels. But the
actual budget imposed on the store managers always falls short of the
preferred budget, so that most Wal-Mart stores are permanently
understaffed. The gap between the preferred and actual budgets gives
store managers an idea of how much extra work they must try to extract
from their workforce.
Jed Stone, a store manager at Wal-Mart between 1983 and 1991,
explained to Rosen the practical consequences of this understaffing:
With the meager staff he was allowed, it had always been a struggle
to keep the shelves stacked and the floors shiny, or to get hourly
workers to help customers.
To get the work done Stone had to break the company rules by having
employees work more than fifty hours a week--an "offense" for which a
manager can be fired at Wal-Mart. Rosen also interviewed Katie
Mitchell, a shop floor employee who worked night shifts at the
unloading dock. Her task was to move goods from the dock to the store
aisles where they could be stacked. She also had to count the goods
with her handheld computer: "There was always too much work to be done
and no one to help her," and at the end of the shift the supervisor
was always at hand to issue a reprimand if the work had not been done.
Sandra Stevenson was an overnight supervisor at a Wal-Mart store in
Gurnee, Illinois, whose job was to get the store ready for the next
day's business. Stevenson was supposed to be assigned between fourteen
and sixteen employees to do the job properly; but she was usually
understaffed and her requests for additional workers were always
turned down. Nevertheless, Stevenson was severely reprimanded for "the
condition of the store in the mornings."^[20][5] After a string of
such incidents, Stevenson found that her "spirit was broken" and she
left the company. Many others have had similar experiences.
The pervasive understaffing at Wal-Mart gives rise to one of the most
common employee infractions at the company, "time theft." With each
em-ployee having more work to do, managers assume that whenever they
see an employee not working, she must be shirking her duties, or
"stealing time" from the corporation, a punishable offense. When
Barbara Ehrenreich worked at a Minneapolis Wal-Mart as part of her
research for her book on low-wage work, Nickel and Dimed, she was told
by her boss that "time theft" in the form of "associates standing
around talking to one another" was his "pet peeve." Later a fellow
worker warned Ehrenreich that they could only talk about their work,
and that anything else counted as "time theft" and was forbidden.
Ehrenreich soon found that her boss and his fellow management spies
were a constant presence on the shop floor, looking out for time
thieves.
2.
The harshness of the working conditions at Wal-Mart helps to account
for the exceptionally high employee turnover at the company. Some 50
percent of Wal-Mart workers employed at the beginning of 2003 had left
the company by the end of the year. At the retailer Costco, where
employees are better treated, turnover in 2003 was just 24
percent.^[21][6] But Wal-Mart's harshness is not simply a consequence
of management's efforts to extract maximum productivity from its
workforce at minimum cost. There are also employees and groups of
employees that management particularly mistrusts, and these have often
been subjected to relentless harassment. Hundreds of employees have
testified against Wal-Mart in the many class-action lawsuits brought
against the corporation, and their sworn depositions provide a
detailed account of what it is like to work at Wal-Mart day by day,
even hour by hour.
Perhaps the best evidence we have of this selective harassment is to
be found in the depositions of 115 women who have testified against
Wal-Mart in the Dukes case, a class-action lawsuit brought in 2001 by
six female employees and named for one of the six, Betty Dukes, a
Wal-Mart employee in Pittsburg, California. Most of the witnesses in
the case have since either left Wal-Mart or been fired, but Betty
Dukes herself continues to work as a greeter at the Pittsburg
Wal-Mart. The suit, which alleges systematic discrimination by
Wal-Mart both in the pay and promotion of women, is brought on behalf
of 1.6 million female employees of Wal-Mart past and present, the
largest civil rights case of its kind in US history. On June 22, 2004,
US District Judge Martin Jenkins of San Francisco held that the Dukes
lawsuit could proceed to trial, although a date has not been set.
Sex discrimination at Wal-Mart has a long history. Bethany Moreton, a
doctoral candidate in history at Yale, has stressed the importance of
Wal-Mart's origins in the rural, small-town culture of the Ozarks,
where Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters at Bentonville, Arkansas, is
still located.^[22][7] In the early years many of the women who worked
at Wal-Mart were the wives of local Ozark farmers, and the women's
earnings were a meager supplement to their husbands'. The women in the
Dukes case say that some of their store managers still often think of
them as resembling those farmers' wives. Ramona Scott, a Dukes case
petitioner who worked for Wal-Mart in the 1990s, was told by her store
manager that "men are here to make a career and women aren't. Retail
is for housewives who just need to earn extra money."
In her book on the Dukes case, Selling Women Short, Liza Featherstone
describes the women who have testified against Wal-Mart and shows why
they have been willing to take on the corporation, often at the cost
of their jobs. What the Dukes case women share in common is competence
(as revealed in their work records), an ambition to move on to more
responsible and better-paying jobs, and a sense of indignation when
they discover that their male counterparts are paid significantly more
than they are and are promoted ahead of them. The group includes
college graduates who have worked at Wal-Mart's Bentonville
headquarters, as well as high school graduates and dropouts assigned
to Wal-Mart's checkout counters. For example, Stephanie Odle, an
assistant store manager at a Riverside, California, Wal-Mart, decided
that she would testify in the Dukes case when she found that a male
assistant manager was earning $10,000 a year more than she was.
_________________________________________________________________
The business economist and historian James Hoopes has described
Wal-Mart as "one of the most highly disciplined firms in the history
of busi-ness."^[23][8] The independence of spirit shown by the women
in the Dukes case has therefore challenged the strict obedience that
Wal-Mart requires of its rank-and-file employees. Indeed, the
corporation insists on an elaborate aptitude test for new employees
that is intended to weed out troublemakers. When Barbara Ehrenreich
took the test at the Minneapolis Wal-Mart, she was told that she had
given a wrong answer when she agreed "strongly" with the proposition
that "rules have to be followed to the letter at all times." The only
acceptable answer for Wal-Mart was "very strongly." Similarly, the
only correct answer to the proposition "there is room in every
corporation for a non-conformist" was: "totally disagree."
For Wal-Mart the Dukes case women were therefore troublemakers who had
somehow managed to get past Wal-Mart's digital gatekeeper and had
ended up where they didn't belong. Wal-Mart management has been
prepared to go to considerable lengths to discourage the women from
making complaints, and to stop them from pursuing the Dukes case. The
purpose of this management offensive was not simply to maintain
discipline at Wal-Mart, but also to protect the corporation's pattern
of sex discrimination. Since lower wages and salaries paid to female
employees have added significantly to profits, the company's profit
margin was threatened by the Dukes women's demands for fair promotion
and for equal pay.
The Dukes case depositions show how ruthless and inventive Wal-Mart
managers can be in keeping troublesome women in their place. To
discipline the workforce, Wal-Mart managers can use a variety of
formidable penalties and punishments. There are written reprimands in
the form of "pink slips"; spoken reprimands in the form of
"coachings"; "decision making days" when an employee must explain why
he or she should not be fired; and, finally, summary dismissal. Women
who inquire about promotion are often told they must conform to rules
or qualifications that are invented on the spur of the moment and have
never been required of male employees. Claudia Renati, a marketing
specialist at a Roseville, California, Wal-Mart, was told by her boss
that she could not join a management training course unless she could
first prove to him that she could lift fifty-pound bags of dog food.
"When I told him I could not repeatedly lift 50 pounds, he told me
that there was nothing he could do for me." Renati was also told that
she was not eligible for management training unless she was prepared
to sell her house in Roseville and move immediately to Alaska.
The women in the Dukes case were frequently punished or fired for
trivial or trumped-up offences. Melissa Howard, a manager at several
Indiana Wal-Marts, resigned from the company when a senior manager
well known for his belittling of women humiliated Howard in front of
her subordinates. He berated her for designating a certain type of
plastic spoon as a nonreplenishable item, even though a junior manager
had told him that Howard had done the right thing. Trudy Crom, an
assistant manager at a Loveland, Colorado, Wal-Mart, was told by her
immediate boss, the store manager, to reprimand all the shop floor
employees who were working forty hours a week or more and were
therefore likely to earn higher overtime pay. This was a way of making
it easier for Wal-Mart to fire such potentially expensive employees if
the corporation needed to reduce its wage bill. Crom twice queried the
order with her store manager, and was told both times that it was
company policy and she should go ahead. But when some of the employees
complained to senior management about this treatment, the store
manager denied ever have given the order to Crom, and it was Crom who
was reprimanded.
_________________________________________________________________
The productivity figures at Wal-Mart wouldn't be as good as they are
unless most employees were doing their jobs efficiently most of the
time. But it is hard for Wal-Mart employees to take pride in their
work or to have confidence in themselves. Perhaps the most powerful
insight that Barbara Ehrenreich took away from her time at Wal-Mart
was that the daily routines of the low-wage world damage the
self-esteem of employees:
If you are treated as an untrustworthy person--a potential slacker,
drug addict or thief--you may begin to feel less trustworthy
yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in
the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a
plethora of impersonal rules--you begin to accept that unfortunate
status.
With its deliberate understaffing, its obsession about time theft, its
management spies, and its arbitrary punishments, Wal-Mart is a
workplace where management's suspicion can affect the morale of even
the best employees, creating a discrepancy between their objective
record of high productivity and how they come to regard their
performance on the job as a result of their day-to-day dealings with
management. This discrepancy helps keep wages and benefits low at
Wal-Mart.
One of the most telling of all the criticisms of Wal-Mart is to be
found in a February 2004 report by the Democratic Staff of the House
Education and Workforce Committee. In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in
holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the
costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they
qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous
rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee
Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for
children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions
for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The
report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs
federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart
employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5
billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.
Wal-Mart is also a burden on state governments. According to a study
by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 2003 California taxpayers subsidized $20.5
million worth of medical care for Wal-Mart employees. In Georgia ten
thousand children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state's
program for needy children in 2003, with one in four Wal-Mart
employees having a child in the program.^[24][9]
3.
In the introduction to her book Liza Featherstone argues convincingly
that Wal-Mart is a "scandal, not a praiseworthy business model." Yet
Wal-Mart is Fortune's most admired corporation, the star of McKinsey's
productivity study, and the subject, as recently as last April, of a
hagiographic cover story in The Economist, "Wal-Mart: Learning to Love
It."^[25][10]
Wal-Mart has also set off a particularly destructive form of
competition among corporations, which seek competitive advantage by
pushing down the wages and benefits of employees. A clear example of
this has been the conflict provoked by Wal-Mart's decision in 2002 to
enter the southern California grocery market with forty of its
"supercenters"--where the shopper can buy everything from tomatoes to
deck furniture and spare tires. Although Wal-Mart has not yet opened
any of these new stores, the response of California supermarkets, led
by Safeway, has been to demand cuts in their employees' wages and
benefits, with the cuts falling heavily on newly hired workers. This
posed a serious threat to the supermarket employees, 70,000 of whom
are members of the Union of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and
have benefited from its bargaining with employers. While a sales clerk
at Wal-Mart earns only $8.50 an hour, a worker holding a similar job
at Safeway or Albertson could earn $13 an hour along with full health
care benefits.^[26][11] For employees that could make the difference
between minimal financial security and a life spent scraping by on the
poverty line.
After the UFCW called a large-scale strike against the Safeway stores
last winter, two other retailers, Kroger and Albertsons, locked out
their workforce --and replaced it with temporary employees--as a
demonstration of support for Safeway even though their workers were
not on strike themselves. Taking full advantage of their right to hire
replacements for striking and nonstriking workers, the supermarket
owners beat the Safeway strike and forced the UFCW to accept cuts in
wages and benefits.
The failure of the California grocery strike, not to mention the
history of labor relations at Wal-Mart, points to the urgent need for
reform of labor law in the United States. Wal-Mart is a ferociously
anti-union company, and the UFCW has yet to organize a Wal-Mart store.
Every store manager at Wal-Mart is issued a "Manager's Toolbox to
Remaining Union Free," which warns managers to be on the lookout for
signs of union activity, such as "frequent meetings at associates'
homes" or "associates who are never seen together...talking or
associating with each other."
The "Toolbox" provides managers with a special hotline so that they
can get in touch with Wal-Mart's Bentonville headquarters the moment
they think employees may be planning to organize a union. A
high-powered union-busting team will then be dispatched by corporate
jet to the offending store, to be followed by days of compulsory
anti-union meetings for all employees. In the only known case of union
success at Wal-Mart, in 2000 workers at the meat-cutting department of
a Texas Wal-Mart somehow managed to circumvent this corporate FBI, and
voted to join the UFCW in an election certified by the National Labor
Relations Board. A week later Wal-Mart closed down the meat-cutting
department and fired the offending employees, both illegal acts under
the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB ordered Wal-Mart to reopen
the department, reemploy the fired workers, and bargain with the
union, but Wal-Mart has appealed the NLRB decision and the litigation
continues.
_________________________________________________________________
Unions are needed at Wal-Mart for much the same reasons that they were
needed at Ford and GM in the 1930s--to prevent the mistreatment of
employees, and to obtain for them fair, living wages. Unions are also
needed to curb the unedifying "race to the bottom" among corporations.
If Wal-Mart had been a union company and its employees had the same
wages and benefits as other California store employees, Safeway and
Albertsons could not have used Wal-Mart's planned entry into the
California market as an excuse to beat down employee wages and
benefits.
As things stand now, the National Labor Relations Act, the toothless
federal law governing the right to organize, allows union-busting
corporations like Wal-Mart to break the law with virtual impunity.
Since 1995 the US government has issued sixty complaints against
Wal-Mart at the National Labor Relations Board, citing the illegal
firing of pro-union employees, as well as the unlawful surveillance
and intimidation of employees. But under the present law persistent
violators of government rules such as Wal-Mart are responsible only
for restoring the lost pay of fired workers --in most cases, not more
than a few thousand dollars--and these penalties do not increase with
successive violations. So long as US law makes it possible for
Wal-Mart to crush efforts to organize unions it will continue to treat
its more than a million workers shabbily, while the company no doubt
continues to be celebrated in the business press as a a model of
efficient modern management.
The exploitation of the working poor is now central to the business
strategy favored by America's most powerful and, by some criteria,
most successful corporation. With the re-election of a president as
enamored of corporate power as George W. Bush, there is every prospect
that this strategy and its harsh practices will continue to spread
throughout the economy.
Notes
^[27][1] "The Fortune 500 Largest US Corporations," Fortune, April 5,
2004, p. B-1; see also Jerry Useem, "America's Most Admired Companies:
One Nation Under Wal-Mart," Fortune, March 3, 2003.
^[28][2] Sam Walton with John Huey, Made in America: My Story (Bantam,
1993), pp. 139-141.
^[29][3] Steven Greenhouse, "Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and
Supermarkets Crazy," The New York Times, October 19, 2003.
^[30][4] See Greenhouse, "Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets
Crazy."
^[31][5] United States District Court, Northern District of
California: Betty Dukes, Patricia Surgeson, Cleo Page, et al
Plaintiff, v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Defendant. Declaration of Sandra
Stevenson in support of plaintiffs, pp. 2-3. Hereafter referred to as
"Dukes Case Declarations."
^[32][6] Ann Zimmerman, "Costco's Dilemma: Be Kind to Its Workers, or
Wall Street?" The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2004.
^[33][7] Bethany Moreton, "It Came From Bentonville: The New South
Origins of Wal-Mart's Managerial Culture," UCSB conference paper,
forthcoming in Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?, edited
by Nelson Lichtenstein.
^[34][8] James Hoopes, "Growth Through Knowledge: Wal-Mart, High
Technology, and the Ever Less Visible Hand of the Manager,"
forthcoming in Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism? and
available at www.americaincorporatedweblog.com/index.php, p. 2.
^[35][9] See the House Committee on Education and the Workforce,
Everyday Low Wages, p. 9. See also Featherstone, Selling Women Short,
p. 148.
^[36][10] April 17-23, 2004.
^[37][11] See Greenhouse, "Wal-Mart, Driving Workers and Supermarkets
Crazy."
References
13. http://www.nybooks.com/authors/847
14. http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=119949&ISBN=0465023150
15. http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=119949&ISBN=0805063897
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