I’ve been thinking for a while now that though Wal-Mart has been a lightning rod for criticism, it is, in fact, merely a poster child for a kind of corporate abuse which has become common in corporate America. Increasingly, corporations are taking advantage of the weakening of the labor movement and conservative hegemony in American politics to abuse their employees, put pressure on unionized operations, evade social and environmental costs, and pass these costs on to local government. An article in Spiegel concludes:
“Wal-Mart has largely played by the rules that society has set out for it,” business columnist Joseph Nocera wrote in the New York Times. In other words: low prices and high shareholder value come first, and everything else is a low priority. “Do we really want to change Wal-Mart?” asks Nocera, offering his own answer: “If the answer truly is yes, then we need to change ourselves first.”