Nathan -- I'd like to know the name of the "many activists who are concerned" but "don't have a Wal-Mart nearby"! The thing is almost incomprehensibly huge. They basically pursued a Maoist strategy of starting in the countryside and surrounding the cities, and now they can attack the inner suburbs and the cities themselves with consummate ease. They are now everywhere.

Your argument that we should understand Wal-Mart as something much more than a retailer is a very good one. They are developing a new and almost unprecedented system of vertical integration that includes an increasingly monopolistic lock on the retail distribution end. They want to turn the entire world into their company town.

John, as you yourself say, Wal-Mart doesn't have much presense in the cities. If you live in the city and don't have a car, Wal-Mart may as well be on the other side of the country.

Nathan, this SEIU project sounds like a great plan. I'm rather busy, and not enough of an expert, to feel that it would be productive for me to participate in the brainstorming part, but I hope to do my bit once a plan of action is presented. I trust you'll keep us posted on that.

Thankfully, those of us in New York City have been spared Wal-Marts so far, but no doubt they are looking.

But there is lots of resistance and if we organize, it won't be as easy for Wal-Mart to take on the urban areas. But it will take organizing.

Great post. It's a bit tricky to describe what is wrong with Wal-Mart without slipping into an anti-corporate screed that most people just tune out.

Great post. It's a bit tricky to describe what is wrong with Wal-Mart without slipping into an anti-corporate screed that most people just tune out. Adding a historical perspective really helps.

Awww, but what's wrong with buyer-driven commodity chains? You got something against segmenting the production process into more- and less-labor-intensive tasks and spatially deconcentrating them to more- and less-labor-exploiting sites?

When you hear economists talk about WM you always hear only one side of the argument. That is, "WM helps keep prices low for consumers". This argument NEVER discusses the effects on WORKERS. I think one way to start the fight is to try to educate people on the effects WM has on workers.

Unfortunately, I think the damage has already been done. WM's effect on wages has been so great, I don't see how we can reverse the trend, without damaging the very consumers WM's low prices "helps".

"I don't see how we can reverse the trend, without damaging the very consumers WM's low prices "helps"."

Raise the minimum wage.

That was *easy*.

I'm sure that folks were arguing that Henry Ford was doing people a disservice by paying his workers adequately, rather than making his Model T even cheaper. I'm not buying.

"Raise the minimum wage.

That was *easy*."

Except that there is no political will to do this. Also, WM does most of their damage in countries like China, I doubt the gov't there will ever even allow a country-wide minimum wage.

"You have nothing to lose but the chains of low wage exploitation ..."

Sounds familiar. Actually it's paraphrased from the Communist Manifesto. But then the new problems are really not much different from the old problems.

As a perhaps off-topic side note, Germany doesn't have minimum-wage laws; the holy cow of the "tariff autonomy" of working conditions being collectively bargained is still holding up, even if barely. But Germany has a relatively generous welfare state and social security mechanisms that put a floor under wages. (Foreigners often have exaggerated ideas of the actual amount of welfare that Germans receive, but let's say it provides for basic subsistence plus basic housing and health care, so poor people cannot really live comfortably, but for the most part don't have to starve.) Not surprisingly, it is this very basic assistance that is heavily attacked by corporate interests, as nobody understandably wants to work for less than welfare or unemployment benefits, whichever is applicable, and it contributes big to defining the wage pyramid.

I'm concerned and don't have a WalMart nearby, but I ought to be more active. Getting a bit of a gut from all my mournful bitching.

"Wal-Mart then drives down wages not only for its own workers but in the companies which compete with Wal-Mart"

And the companies that supply WalMart, recalling a fastcompany article from a few months ago:

"Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole."

Well, If I am going to risk being called a nutcase, now is the time...

I recently read Progress and Poverty by Henry George. Before reading it, I had assumed his ideas were more applicable to agrarian societies. Not so. George was, in fact, more concerned with poverty in cities were it was greatest. George's analysis of Ricardian rents in cities connected them not to the inherient productive power of land, but to their virtual ecconomic productive power. Cities are centers of ecconomic activity, and those who own the title to the location of that activity have the ability to extract all of the extra wealth generated, and drive down wages to subsistence level. Since no one created the locations, and that power to extract the extra wealth is granted by the government grant of a title deed, George's solution was to tax the entirety of the Ricardian rent.

When I read this analysis, I thought of WalMart. WalMart has become a nexus of ecconomic activity, and is using its effeciency of scale power to push down wages for itself and its competitors and extract all of the extra generated wealth for itself. The only difference is that its claim to the extra generated wealth is not a government-granted land title deed, but a government-granted corporate charter that gives it advantages no individual has.

Question: Does my neo-Georgist analysis makes sense?

If so, it seems their are two possible solutions.
1) Revoke their corporate charter, and the charter of any corporation that gets "too big".
2) Tax the full value of the "Ricardian rent" generated by their corporate charter. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, this solution is not quite as elegant as taxing Ricardian rents on site values.

So, am I nuts?

Thanks for the link, buermann -- an excellent article.

How much of Wal-Mart's behavior is subject to challenge as monopolistic? The descriptions of their dealings with suppliers certainly sounded like the cations of a monopoly.

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