Every day, millions of consumers endure Walmart’s crowded parking lots and cramped aisles for the chance to buy retail goods and groceries at low prices. Perhaps some visitors find value in the prospect of starring in the next caught-on-camera video like last week’s hit filmed at a store in Beech Grove, Indiana. But the lower prices Walmart offers come at a high cost elsewhere.
According to a new report by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, Walmart’s low cost strategy induces poor labor and environmental practices throughout its food supply chain, and these hidden costs are passed back to workers, suppliers, the environment, and communities. “Walmart’s business model . . . . creates the conditions to force suppliers to cut costs, which often means cutting wages for workers, lowering prices to farmers, and externalizing costs on to the environment and the communities surrounding the suppliers’ business,” the report states.
Moreover, the authors found that despite Walmart’s so-called “responsible sourcing” code of ethics that its suppliers are supposed to abide by, the company continues to do business with suppliers that fall below the code’s standards. For all 11 of the food-related industries examined in the report, researchers found that companies supplying food to Walmart exploited workers. Violations and bad practices cited in the report ranged from racial and gender discrimination to unsafe working conditions to forced labor.
The report also discusses how Walmart perpetuates the growing trend toward using contingent workers by contracting out its warehouse and food distribution operations to third parties that rely heavily on temp workers hired by staffing agencies, which are notorious for ignoring health and safety standards, paying low wages, and declining to offer health care. As CPR scholars and staff explain in, At the Company’s Mercy: Protecting Workers from Unsafe Working Conditions, the increasing use of contingent workers is reshaping the entire labor market and it is critical that our laws and standards are modernized to ensure this growing workforce has the protections they deserve.
The Food Chain Workers Alliance offers a laundry list of recommendations that Walmart could adopt to increase transparency in its supply chain, demand fair wages and safe workplaces for workers in its food supply chain, empower workers to report violations, and support workers’ rights in its own operations. Additionally, the report recommends the President and Congress establish a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate and develop policies that would stop supermarket chains from abusing their buyer power in the way that Walmart has.
In addition to lawmakers and corporate executives, workers and consumers can stand up to Walmart and demand it stop its exploitative practices. Toward that end, the Food Chain Workers Alliance has created a petition to Walmart CEO Doug McMillion urging the company to protect workers’ rights in its own operations and throughout its supply chain.
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Katie Tracy | June 23, 2015
Every day, millions of consumers endure Walmart’s crowded parking lots and cramped aisles for the chance to buy retail goods and groceries at low prices. Perhaps some visitors find value in the prospect of starring in the next caught-on-camera video like last week’s hit filmed at a store in Beech Grove, Indiana. But the lower […]
James Goodwin | June 23, 2015
When your public approval rating has hovered at or below 20 percent for the last several years, maybe the last thing you should be doing is maligning other government institutions. That didn’t stop a group of Senators from spending several hours doing just that today during a joint hearing involving the Senate Budget and Homeland […]
James Goodwin | June 22, 2015
For decades, so-called regulatory “reformers” have backed up their sales pitches with the same basic promise: Their goal is not to stop regulation per se but to promote smarter ones. This promise, of course, was always a hollow one. But it gave their myriad reform proposals—always involving some set of convoluted procedural or analytical requirements […]
Matt Shudtz | June 22, 2015
Last week, OSHA issued noteworthy citations against a poultry slaughtering facility in Delaware. The agency is using its General Duty Clause to hold Allen Harim Foods in Harbeson, Delaware responsible for ergonomic hazards that plague the entire industry—hazards involving the repetitive cutting and twisting motions that lead to musculoskeletal disorders like tendonitis and carpal tunnel […]
Evan Isaacson | June 22, 2015
Editors’ Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on measuring progress toward the 2017 interim goal of the Bay TMDL. The first three posts cover the region as a whole, and then Pennsylvania and Virginia. Future posts will explore the progress of the remaining four jurisdictions. […]
Erin Kesler | June 19, 2015
Regular readers of this blog are already well acquainted with her, but for everyone else, CPR is pleased to introduce our new workers’ rights policy analyst, Katie Weatherford. Weatherford joins CPR after several years with the Center for Effective Government, where she was a regulatory policy analyst and advocated for strong regulations to protect public […]
Robert Verchick | June 18, 2015
ROME—On my first visit to Vatican City, before my meeting with Michelangelo, I greeted the Pope via the city’s ubiquitous souvenir stands. I love this stuff. You can try on the “Papa Francisco” kitchen apron and imagine the pontiff’s smile beaming over your Spaghetti Bolognese. Or gently joggle the pate of a Pope Francis bobble-head. […]
Evan Isaacson | June 17, 2015
We recently explored how Virginia’s progress toward meeting the 2017 interim goal for the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (Bay TMDL) is mostly the product of decades’ old financial commitments. So, we might hope to see much of the same from Pennsylvania, a fellow member of the Chesapeake Bay Commission since 1985. Unfortunately, despite […]
Evan Isaacson | June 17, 2015
This is the second in a series of posts to explore progress in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, as reflected in recent data from the Chesapeake Bay Program’s elaborate computer model of the Bay, which accounts for what the states are actually doing to reduce pollution. Read the first post, taking a look at the […]