As one of my actual areas of expertise, I've shied away from posting on the big, bad behemoth in this forum in the past, but I think the time is now right. Wal-Mart and its subsidiaires are some of the most horrible abusers of labor this country has ever seen--there is no question. Yet, I wonder to what extent the almost universal left of center Wal-Mart outcry has become about the corporation itself rahter than its practices. What I mean is, it's fine and good to have a rallying cry, but when we start singling out Wal-Mart to the extent that we have, do we necessarily ignore the fact that Wal-Mart is not the exception, but the rule; that as a comany and anti-labor employer its only true distinction is scale rather than character. The fact is, the essence of business in a service (i.e. not productive of physical commodities) oriented economy has been as anti-labor as it comes, and my intuition is that service employers, because they can't make profits through production, but only through distribution and labor are necessarily more exploitative of their workers than even the most dire of 1930s southern textile mills or 1890s steel mills. My worry here is not that we attack Wal-Mart too much, but rather we view Wal-Mart as isolated and not understand that K-Mart, Sodexho, Targt, Brinks, Kroger, McDonalds, Janiking . . . . . . . . are much closer to Wal-Mart's practices than they are not; that given the opportunity and distribution scale, they would effectively be the same, or even worse. As the last year of outcry over Wal-Mart has demonstrated, labor exploitation in the "new" economy has political and popular attraction-it's time now to move beyond Wal-mart and bring our critique not to the symbol but to the condition.
