Act Up
My War Against Wal-Mart

Piling onto Old Fogey's post below about the Wal-Mart sponsored academic conference, here's a round-up by Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel of a variety of campaigns that have been instigated by the groups Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart. Here's a sampling:

-- Make Wal-Mart Care About Health Care Campaign: Wake Up Wal-Mart helped coordinate more than120 house parties in 38 states, which led to over 150 actions encouraging legislators to crack down on Wal-Mart's health care policy. Thanks largely to pressure from Wake-Up Wal-Mart supporters, Rep. Anthony Weiner, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and Sen. Jon Corzine introduced the Health Care Accountability Act in Congress--which would require states to disclose the names of large employers whose workers are on Medicaid as a result of the companies refusal to provide insurance benefits.

-- Fair Share Health Care Act: Representatives of Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch lobbied Maryland's legislature and helped pass the first legislation in the nation that would require large companies (specifically Wal-Mart) to pay for health benefits for employees. Although Republican Gov. Robert Erlich vetoed the bill, the movement to get such legislation passed in other states has just begun. Over 2,000 Wake Up Wal-Mart supporters have pledged to lead the fight in their states to introduce Fair Share Health Care legislation (click here to help introduce such a bill in your state). In September, the Working Families Party and the Long Island Federation of Labor helped get a bill passed in Suffolk County, New York.

-- The Leaked Memo: On October 26th, Wal-Mart Watch delivered a knock-out blow to Wal-Mart. The corporation had just made giant strides to rebuild its image--publicly declaring its intentions to offer health care plans for its employees and voicing support for a Federal minimum-wage increase. The very next day, the New York Times published a cover-story on a leaked internal memo, acquired by Wal-Mart Watch, which detailed Wal-Mart's plans to systematically weed out unhealthy employees and applicants in order to avoid health care costs. The exposure of the memo instantly deflated Wal-Mart's hollow attempt at an image makeover.

And here's a quote to put all this action into perspective:

"We don't want to destroy Wal-Mart. We want to change it, to make it a decent, humane company, which it could easily do," says Chris Kofinis, communications director of Wake Up Wal-Mart, who stresses that Wal-Mart will be a key issue in the 2006 and 2008 elections. "We're not going to rest or sleep one bit until that happens."