The World’s Most Progressive Company? Wal-Mart, by a Mile
- Posted by: Cliff Kuang
- on July 2, 2009 at 9:00 am
The Beast from Bentonville (and the world’s largest private employer) announced that it’s backing employer mandates for health care. That’s not all it’s been up to.
Hell froze over yesterday, a pig took its tentative first flight—and, in related news, Wal-Mart may have just secured the title of The World’s Mightiest Advocate for Progressive Causes.
That title claim became undeniable with Wal-Mart’s announcement that it’s endorsing the idea of compelling large companies to provide health coverage. Its bedfellows on that deal? The Service Employees International Union and John Podesta, who oversaw Obama’s transition team and heads the Center for American Progress. You got it: Wal-Mart’s allies are a think tank that has taken it to task on living wages, and a labor organization of the sort that Wal-Mart has always sought to quash; the cause is health benefits, which it has so infamously denied workers in the past.
Wal-Mart’s dramatic shift seems to have been brought about by a canny sense of the prevailing winds in America’s political life. As The New York Times pointed out, big companies that have previously balked at providing insurance to all employees sense that some sort of change is coming. To wrangle better concessions, they figure they should link arms with the Obama administration, and come to the negotiating table as soon as possible. Wal-Mart in particular is advocating a containment in rising health care costs—which, incidentally, is a cause that President Obama has been propounding.
The company has never been shy to admit that, when it adopts social causes, the reasoning is less about altruism and more about cash flow. Lee Scott, the company’s outgoing CEO, admitted as much when he first began Wal-Mart’s massive environmental push in 2005. At the time he said, “As I got exposed to the opportunities we had to reduce our impact, it became even more exciting than I had originally thought: It is clearly good for our business …” Scott’s successor, Mike Duke, underscored that commitment last week, at Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting. “This is not optional,” he said. “It’s not something of the past. This is all about the future.”
Four years on the green bandwagon is, of course a very short time. So what’s been most surprising is the depth and stability of Wal-Mart’s environmental commitment. Already, it has been astonishingly aggressive in using solar and wind power, carbon-neutral building, and carbon-efficiency in shipping. Its stated goal is to operate with 100 percent renewable fuels.
Wal-Mart’s power lies in the fact that it can influence everyone it does business with. Worldwide, the company employs 2.2 million people. It owns a mind boggling 11 percent of America’s $3 trillion retail market. It accounted for nearly 10 percent of America’s imports from China between 2001 and 2006. The line on the company’s business practices has always been that it’s ruthless: Suppliers that don’t meet its purchasing guidelines get fined, and then get dropped with alarming speed. Wal-Mart does this because, thanks to the stores’ low prices, profit margins are tiny, and the only way it can make money is with uncompromising efficiency. For example, Wal-Mart now rates its suppliers based on the energy efficiency of their operations, among other things. If you don’t like it, you don’t do business with the world’s largest retailer. That’s it.
And that’s precisely what makes Wal-Mart the most compelling model today for corporate responsibility. It is the world’s biggest advertisement for the idea of a profitable, aggressively green company. But more than that, the company is proving—in the center of the country, in places far removed from the Democratic power bases on the coasts—that carbon emissions, and now health care, are not purely political causes. No politician could ever hope for that sort of power as an advocate. In the United States alone, Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million—that is, 1.4 million people working under the company’s ruling assumptions. One can only guess at the broader reach of all that green P.R.
Is Wal-Mart a champion of sustainability in every respect? No. Despite its other good works, no company is as responsible for American sprawl as Wal-Mart is—it has predicated its growth on building stores far from city centers.
But those are contradictions we have to live with. When dealing with problems as dauntingly complex as carbon emissions or health care, there are going to be messy counterexamples to every good deed. Pure-hearted, indie start-ups simply don’t have the power to effect widespread change. The best we can hope for is that the influential corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart are tending towards the light. It’s thrilling when they do.
CORRECTION: The subtitle of this article originally stated that Wal-Mart backs universal health care. In fact, Wal-Mart backs employer healthcare mandates. The text has been edited to reflect the correction.
DISCUSSION: 12 Comments
Hold your horse there Tex. Employer mandated health care — particularly in an age of double-digit unemployment — is NOT at al the same thing as *universal* health care.
do you work for walmart? just backing a “universal healthcare” doesnt make walmart progressive. Its a legal way for them to avoid the responsibilty of providing healthcare to their employees. Are they working on a deal to bring their shitty $4 prescriptions universally too? ”Pure-hearted, indie start-ups simply don’t have the power to effect
widespread change. The best we can hope for is that the influential
corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart are tending towards the light. It’s
thrilling when they do.”you must be joking or high. Our best bet is to HOPE that buisnesses decide to be good? and Walmart is the your choosen leader?
@Keith–You’re absolutely write. That was an error just in the subhed, which you’ll see isn’t carried through in the article itself. But we’re going to correct that ASAP.@Stephen–Um, accepting a mandate on employer-provided healthcare doesn’t amount to a legal dodge of providing insurance. It’s exactly the opposite. They’re embracing the plan. Also, Wal-Mart’s bonafides don’t stop at heath care–which was the point of the article. They’ve decided that green makes good fiscal sense, and I’d argue they’re a good model for any other company. But I figured that this piece would inspire a lot of reflexive Wal-Mart bashing.
well of course my arguement seems stupid AFTER you changed the text of your article. I cant go bck an edit my post, but i will retract my dodge statement. however, i stand by my statement that Walmarts gestures do not qualify it as progressive. It qualifies it as a company that sees greenwashing as a way to drum up positive sentiments for a company that is not well liked. Ill reserve my praise for them once i see an article that doesnt site walmarts homepage as it source.
of course my comment looks stupid after you changed your articles text. but i cant edit my post. So i will retract the dodge statement. But linking to walmarts homepage does not convince me they are progressive. Every company has grand proclamations like this on their sites.
“They’ve decided that green makes good fiscal sense, and I’d argue they’re a good model for any other company.”A megacorporation that exists to maximize their sales of cheap, unnecessary consumer goods made from unfair labor practices in countries thousands of miles away will NEVER be sustainable, especially when it kills local businesses as effectively as Walmart does. Can you say greenwashing?
You might want to read this article.http://walmartwatch.com/pages/healthcare
I will NEVER shop at MallWart. They’re ruined the fabric of the U.S.A. Captialism is one thing, but this needs a Ma Bell job.
Just because Wal-mart is partnering with a union doesn’t mean they’re progressive. Not only does it say nothing about Wal-mart’s continued labor abuses, the union they’ve partnered with can hardly be called progressive, either. While most unions are forces for left-leaning good in this country, not all are, and SEIU is at the top of the list of unions selling out working people for the power of its leadership, and particularly its president Andy Stern.At a time when a historically low number of working people are represented by unions, SEIU is working to raid members of other unions instead of organizing the unorganized. They are actively trying to split up UNITE-HERE (a reliably progressive union, especially in the case of immigrant rights) and invading their core juridiction of the hospitality industry by letting management know that SEIU contracts will be cheaper than UNITE-HERE contracts, because–among other details–SEIU contracts will require that members pay for their own health care. And by partnering with Wal-Mart, SEIU is undercutting the efforts of the Union of Food and Commercial Workers to organize workers by giving the bosses good PR such as this article instead of continued exposure of their maltreatment of workers.For more on SEIU’s expansion at the sake of other unions, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6mKXyFeALw
I love Walmart
Universal healthcare will save them money. They have no intention of saving the environment, it just so happens that doing one thing an actually ethical company would do happens to make sense according to their totally unethical schemas. Greenwash, hogwash.
Wal-Mart is not “unethical” nor are any companies “ethical”. They are *all* profit-oriented (after all, the “ethical” companies all are doing their environmental activism in a way to call attention to themselves–why? so they can make $$$, of course, from environmentalists!).
If you don’t try to maximize profits, my company will outcompete yours. Then your company will be out of business and I will take over your market. The only solution is for consumers to make it profitable to do “the right thing”. Anything else is asking too much of companies.