I have an op-ed on TomPaine.com today about Wal-Mart's recent green initiatives. Give it a read. I'm sure the accusations of corporate whoredom will come rolling in at any moment.
I worry that, even given the copious pixels expended, my overall point was not entirely clear. So below the fold, I shall try to express it in more compact form.
The basic dilemma Wal-Mart's greening poses is this: they're doing good environmental things -- real things, substantive things, despite knee-jerk dismissals from some quarters -- but they still suck on labor relations (wages, healthcare benefits, etc.). Since many progressives consider themselves both environmentalists and labor advocates, they're bound to be torn.
For better or worse, though, the situations (labor and environment) are not entirely parallel.
The fact is, there are many ways to green business operations that make perfect hard-headed pragmatic sense, from a purely bottom-line perspective. After all, reducing waste and improving efficiency are hallmarks of good management. The ways greens favor -- alternative energies and fuels, reduced packaging, shorter supply lines, closed-loop manufacturing -- have not been adopted on a wide scale for two reasons. First, they're just new, and business leaders, like most people, are creatures of habit and custom -- small-c conservative -- as well as frequently short-sighted. Second, such green methods have ideological connotations. They're associated with environmentalists, leftists, commies, whatnot, and business leaders are also often capital-c Conservative. They don't want to be associated with lefties.
Wal-Mart is showing other businesses, in rather spectacular fashion, that those ideological connotations no longer hold, and that green innovation is smart even for large, middle-American companies. Which is an unqualified good, and to be celebrated.
The labor question is different. Paying workers more, offering better benefits, really does cost businesses more. It really would eat into Wal-Mart's narrow profit margins. And, perhaps most importantly, it would disadvantage Wal-Mart relative to its retail competitors. There are benefits, of course, to having happy, healthy workers, but there's no real sign that Wal-Mart workers are any more unsatisfied or unhealthy than the average service worker. If we progressives want to improve labor standards -- and I do -- it seems to me we should be focusing on the public sphere. We should be advocating for universal, publicly funded health care, a repairing of the social safety net, a reversal of the post-Reagan decline in union law, a substantial bump in the minimum wage (which Wal-Mart's CEO supports, BTW), etc.
So, for progressives to say, "sorry, you get no thanks from me until you green and improve labor standards" is to reject the good in favor of the perfect. Businesses exist to make money. We want to convince them that being green can help them make money. Defending the rights of workers has traditionally been the role of government; that's what progressives exist to fight for. I'm all for pressuring Wal-Mart to become more of an advocate for worker-friendly public policy -- their help in the fight for universal health care would be immeasurable -- but it just seems short-sighted to me to reject the positive steps they're making.
(Incidentally, I had a whole section in the piece about the energy economy, which might do more to damage Wal-Mart's business model than anything advocates could do, but it was getting too long and complicated.)
(So much for using fewer words.)
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Comments
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JMG Posted 9:12 am
08 Aug 2006
There's nothing wrong with noting progress wherever it occurs; the point that environmentalists need to remember, however, is this: just as you should resist the tendency not to overlook progress where it occurs, neither should you allow the halo effect to cause you not to note ongoing misbehavior where it occurs.
So, commending Wal-Mart's green initiatives doesn't mean that you stop pointing out that the company is the essence of the unsustainable business--
Wal-Mart is the business analogue of a broad-spectrum pesticide, destroying the infrastructure of whole communities at a stroke, radically simplifying the economic relationships in the community and acting as a hyper-efficient parasite that tends to weaken, rather than strengthen the communities it "serves."
It depends 100% on radically underpriced and overconsumed energy and encourages wasteful consumption of nonrenewable resources. It is the essence of sprawl development, paving square miles of America and then abandoning those same sites the instant that its profit targets aren't met (or its workers think about a union), leaving hulking shells and destroyed city budgets.
It demands extraordinary tax abatements and subsidies through its labor policies, both of which have a direct deleterious effect on the environment, as local and state governments wind up devoting more and more resources to provide the health care and services that better paid workers used to get through their jobs.
Where enviros get into trouble is that they fall prey to the natural human tendency not to want to say nasty things about people/companies that you have just praised for doing something right. That's why co-opting strategies work so well, and that's why there is a cadre of PR consultants who make a living telling businesses like Wal-Mart how to identify just the right people to please in order to isolate and silence their critics (at the lowest possible cost, and with the least change in the objectionable behaviors).
So here's a cheer for what Wal-Mart does right--and here's to redoubled efforts to reveal the deep brown business model that undergirds the green behavior.
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David Roberts Posted 9:34 am
08 Aug 2006
The first is cheap energy; Wal-Mart is in many ways the quintessential product of a global economy awash in oil. Why does it make sense to make products in low-wage Chinese factories? Because it's cheap to fly them over here. Why does it make sense to build gargantuan stores in the middle of nowhere? Because it's cheap to manufacture and transport the materials, and cheap for customers to drive to them.
If, as many predict, energy prices become substantially higher -- or just substantially more volatile -- in coming years, Wal-Mart may be forced to shorten its enormous supply lines. As a general rule, when energy becomes more costly, economies localize and human labor rises in relative value.
I hesitate to be fatalist about it, but it seems to me that Wal-Mart is an inevitable excretion of a cheap-energy economy. If it didn't exist, late-stage U.S. corporate capitalism would have to create it. All the noble urges in the world on the part of progressives won't knock it down -- what will knock it down is the end of cheap energy.
(Obviously I don't hesitate too much to be fatalist about it.)
www.grist.org
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bottleman Posted 3:08 am
09 Aug 2006
Yes, Wal-mart is a preposterously unsustainable operation. But the fact that they of all companies is greening up its image means that green has arrived as an issue -- in the dark brown sludge of the main stream. It stinks here, but it's progress.
http://bottleworld.net
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kmp Posted 4:15 am
09 Aug 2006
SHANGHAI, Aug. 9 -- After years of fighting unionization efforts at its stores, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said today that it would work closely with Chinese officials to establish labor unions at all of its outlets here.
Wal-Mart said it would form an alliance with the government-backed All China Federation of Trade Unions because it wanted to create "an effective and harmonious way of facilitating the establishment of grassroots unions" at its stores.
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Chris Schults Posted 4:22 am
09 Aug 2006
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said its raising wages at nearly a third of it's 4,000 U.S. stores and introducing wage caps at all stores in an effort to remain competitive with other retailers and meet a need for workers and managers as it continues to expand.
Workers at more than 1,200 stores will see their paychecks grow by an average 6 percent, and the world's largest retailer said it will begin introducing wage caps for the first time on each type of job in all stores.
Look out! It's a media shower!
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ffletcher Posted 4:52 am
09 Aug 2006
I doubt if labor unions work the same in China as they do in the USA.
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tbelford Posted 8:00 am
09 Aug 2006
As for Wal-Mart ... As it happens, a close friend, Leslie Dach, has just been appointed SVP there for Corporate Affairs. He has deep roots in the enviro community. Fact is, in his new role he'll have more actual power to achieve concrete results for environmental betterment, on a worldwide basis, than most of us mere bloggers (and some governments) will. People with values we share can make a huge difference in the corporate world (I for one am prepared to accept that corporations are here to stay, like Republicans!) Knowing Leslie, I expect Wal-Mart will be doing more and more of the right thing ... not always, not in every instance ... but steadily.
Tom Belford
TheAgitator.net
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