Walmart's Global Chain Of Repression

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

From Bangladesh to Illinois to Maryland, Walmart’s business model is based on a system that keeps workers in a cycle of low wages, no voice on the job, and dangerous working conditions, according to four Walmart workers who spoke at a “Truth Tour” forum at George Washington University’s Gelman Library IBT Labor History Research Center on April 4, part of the “We Are One” activities in Washington. Although Cynthia Murray has worked at Walmart’s Laurel, MD store for 11 years, she earns just $19,000 a year as a full-time associate and cannot afford the company’s health benefits. “I pray every day that I don’t get sick,” she said. Robert J. Hines, Jr. worked at a Joliet, IL warehouse that supplies Walmart stores, but found he was being cheated out of his promised pay. “I was told I would be paid $10 an hour plus piecework, but then I was only paid for piecework,” he said. “I’ve got six kids. I couldn’t feed them on that.” Halfway around the world, Aleya Akter had it even worse. She started work in a Bangladesh sweatshop that produces jackets and trousers for Walmart when she was just nine years old. Her starting salary was $7 a month and she was forced to work 14 hours in a row, seven days a week, without overtime pay and was even denied bathroom breaks. Now, 17 years later, she earns just $80 a month. In August, former sweatshop worker Kalpona Akter and her colleagues were seized in a crackdown against worker rights advocates and jailed, beaten and tortured for their activism on behalf of sweatshop workers and now face charges that could result in life imprisonment and even the death penalty. The four workers urged concerned citizens to take action to get Walmart to change. “If Walmart paid a fair price for the clothes we make, we could have a better workplace,” Akter said through a translator. Forum attendees connected Walmart’s system of keeping workers trapped in a cycle of poverty jobs and its efforts to open four stores in Washington, DC. “We need jobs, but what is a poverty job going to do for us?” Murray asked. - this report is excerpted from a longer report on UFCW 400’s website; photo by A. Lutty