What began many years ago as a low murmur of discussion has grown into a full-throated debate. It’s a question that is engaging activists, economists, legislators and even the company around which the controversy swirls: Is Wal-Mart good for America?
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Wal-Mart was accused in a lawsuit of knowingly hiring companies that employed illegal immigrants to clean Wal-Mart stores and telling one vendor to hide the arrangement.
Lawyers for a group of immigrant janitors suing Wal-Mart made the claims in an amended complaint filed in federal court in New Jersey yesterday.
“Wal-Mart senior managers instructed and encouraged contractors to create a Web of alter ego companies that permitted Wal-Mart to continue to do business with the principals and allowed the migrant hiring scheme to flourish despite repeated law enforcement actions,” the complaint says.
The claims are based in part on records, unsealed this month by a federal judge in Arkansas, from a U.S. investigation of cleaning contractors hired by Wal-Mart.
Monday’s announcement that General Motors will close its Oklahoma City assembly plant next year ends a 27-year business relationship that has been lucrative for workers, management and central Oklahoma.
There is no good time for such an announcement, but the timing before the holidays is doubly hard. Some have suggested the timing is a blessing so that workers and their families don’t ring up excessive holiday expenses that will be harder to repay next year. In a large operation like General Motors, sensitivity often takes a back seat to the bottom line.
For the most part, leaders of both parties have yet to point fingers or lay blame for the plant closing. We saw a hint of it in one press release from a defeated Corporation Commission candidate Monday, but most others have been empathetic with the workers’ plight.
GM said the closing is a result of market forces and not a reflection of the work force’s quality. The plant has long been cited as a model of efficiency. Oklahoma GM workers, like those in other fields, routinely won industry praise for their work ethic.
Oil companies tricked Congress into passing dangerous amendments to the Clean Air Act 15 years ago, according to attorney Christine Moody of the Korein Tillery firm.
Moody claims in a proposed class action suit that Shell Oil, Exxon and Mobil persuaded Congress to adopt a new recipe for gasoline although the oil companies knew an ingredient would contaminate groundwater.
The oil companies “demonstrated their willingness to use any means to place their economic interest above the health, property and well-being of the people of the United States,” Moody wrote in a Sept. 28 complaint.
Shell Oil and Exxon Mobil responded that the plaintiffs sought to replace national water quality standards with standards of their own devising.
For the moment the case rests at U.S. District Court in East St. Louis, but neither side wants it to remain there.
General Motors Corp.’s plan to cut 30,000 manufacturing jobs is the latest in a string of actions that have chipped away at auto unions’ power this year. Unions are digging in their heels, trying to figure out how to counter increasing competition from foreign competitors and investors demanding even more drastic cuts.
“This is a real shock, and my problem is, this is not the end,” Canadian Auto Workers President Buzz Hargrove said Tuesday. “This is a cancer that will kill if it’s not stopped.”
GM said Monday it plans to cut the jobs - which represent a quarter of its North American hourly workforce - and close 12 facilities by 2008 as part of a restructuring plan. It plans to offer early-retirement buyouts to some workers and have others leave through attrition.
Oil was meant to bring hope and money to this sleepy fishing town in Cameroon, but Kribi’s residents say they can barely make ends meet.
The terminus for a 665-mile pipeline bringing oil from landlocked Chad to Cameroon, Kribi was full of expectations that wealth would trickle down from the $4 billion venture — one of Africa’s biggest infrastructure projects.
Instead, Kribi’s fishermen say a reef was destroyed during the construction of an offshore facility three years ago and this has endangered their livelihoods. Their complaints echo those heard from others living along the Doba pipeline route.
“These people only cared about their pipeline and the money they will make from it, they cared little about us,” said Agathe Mbedi, who sells fish at Kribi’s market.
“They destroyed the rock that shielded the water in which fish used to breed. They promised to replace it, but have done nothing. Our men are earning less money, our children are out of school and we risk starving.”
Former Coca-Cola Co. employees in Venezuela are threatening to occupy a local facility to demand severance pay, the state-run Bolivarian News Agency (ABN) reported.
José Chirinos, a legislator from central Carabobo state who spoke to the ABN media outlet on behalf of the former workers late Saturday, said that an assembly of roughly 4,000 former employees would consider the proposal at an Oct. 29 meeting. He did not say when or why the workers were laid off.
“Through a trick … (the company) hasn’t paid thousands of workers what they are owed,” Chirinos said.
Company representatives could not be reached for comment. The U.S.-based company owns four bottling units and 34 distribution centers in Venezuela.
While a potential vaccine against the Avian Flu is being worked on in laboratories worldwide, some corporations are hoarding the-next-best-vaccine possible. It is Tamiflu. It a “crucial influenza drug,” according to Jeff Nesmith of Cox News.
Governments and health offices are grasping for the drug. They are having all sorts of difficulties.
Yet corporate heads say they are stockpiling the drug to provide their employees so that their businesses will continue per usual, or at least as close to usual as possible if the illness spreads globally.
Coca-Cola Company, Motorola Incorporated, and Exxon Mobil Corporation are seriously talking about stockpiling Tamiflu. They say they want overseas businesses to continue to operate during a virus spread.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is suing a former employee for misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract.
Fayetteville attorney Woody Basset filed the suit Tuesday in Benton County Circuit Court on behalf of the retailer against David F. Smith, who was employed by Wal-Mart as a business analyst in the information systems division transportation group. Smith gave written notice Oct. 3 of his resignation from Wal-Mart, according to the complaint.
FBSR was recently included in an article on boycotting Bush in Ethical Consumer magazine Issue 96. Some of you may know Ethical Consumer as the brains behind Boycott Bush.
Ethical Consumer is an independent lifestyle magazine, with a readership of 20,000 that informs consumers about everything from the social and environmental impacts of a product to the ethical records of the companies that make it. Complex issues are simplifeid with easy-to-use tables that show important facts at-a-glance.
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