In Wal-Mart's Image | The American Prospect
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In Wal-Mart's Image The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing.

"The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing."

"Wal-Mart's more serious failure of market penetration remains its inability to break into America's major coastal cities or Chicago. There, the specter of its superstores -- stores that include supermarkets, whose success has already given Wal-Mart 30 percent of the U.S. retail food market -- poses a direct threat to unionized supermarket workers. In 2003, Southern California supermarkets, after decades of mutually profitable labor relations, told the United Food and Commercial Workers that they would have to reduce wages and benefits to compete with Wal-Mart, and, after breaking the union's strike, imposed a contract in which new hires were offered not the traditional health insurance package but one modeled on Wal-Mart's. At the time, the proportion of Southern California grocery workers with health insurance stood at 94 percent; by 2007, it had declined to 54 percent."

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Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle ... There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. ... "We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis report on how Argentina's worker-run factories have nurtured a powerful social movement, while seamstress Matilda Adorno explains how a dispute over pay became a political struggle

In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start Taking".

Occupy, resist, produce

"Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun.""