Miller Statement on "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"

Miller Statement on "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC -- Representative George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, issued the following statement today in advance of this evening's Washington, D.C. premiere of the new Robert Greenwald film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price."

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In May 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney gave a campaign speech in Bentonville, Arkansas, where he said that "Wal-Mart exemplifies some of the very best qualities in our country - hard work, the spirit of enterprise, fair dealing, and integrity."

I think it is clear to most Americans that Wal-Mart represents a lot of things, but fair dealing and integrity are not Wal-Mart management's strengths.

Robert Greenwald's new film about Wal-Mart helps to document the many ways the company has systematically undermined its workers. Maybe the ‘hard work' the Vice President referred to was the kind of hard work that Wal-Mart employees have been forced to do off the clock.

It is extremely troubling when the Vice President of the United States praises a company that pays low wages and benefits, discriminates on the basis of gender, locks its own workers into stores at night, busts unions, and violates child labor laws.

It is extremely troubling, but it also speaks volumes about the economy that Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott and Vice President Cheney and President Bush envision.

The America that the Bush Administration and Wal-Mart promote protects business' bottom line at the expense of workers, local communities and taxpayers. In their economy, Wal-Mart workers have to put their families on Medicaid while Sam Walton's heirs amass $90 billion in wealth. They favor an economy that works for the few, and not for everyone.

I want to talk for a minute about one example of the difference between the Wal-Mart/Bush economy and an economy that puts people first.

An economy that puts people first respects the fundamental right of American workers to form and join a labor union. America's best employers treat unions as partners, not as threats. If Wal-Mart did the same, we believe a better, stronger company would emerge, and all Americans would be the beneficiaries.

Lee Scott and President Bush could not see things more differently, as Robert Greenwald's film shows. The company maintains an anti-union SWAT team that flies around the country on a private plane to stamp out organizing activity.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has increased spending at the Department of Labor for new personnel to investigate unions - even though unionization rates have been declining for decades and are the lowest they've been in generations.

The Bush Administration has come up with the money for these new investigators while underfunding and understaffing the Labor Department's wage and hour investigators - the people who investigate child labor and overtime violations, among other things.

As we learned recently from a report prepared by the Labor Department's Inspector General, the Department of Labor didn't have enough resources to conduct a comprehensive investigation after Wal-Mart was found to have violated child labor laws in three states - violations that led to at least one child being injured while working at a Wal-Mart.

As a result, we don't know the true extent of child labor violations at Wal-Mart stores nationwide. Indeed, the Bush Department of Labor has made it impossible to know - promising Wal-Mart a sweetheart deal that allowed the company 15 days advance notice before the Department conducted any wage and hour investigations.

America can do better than this. Employees have a right to the consistent and vigorous enforcement of the nation's wage and hour, health and safety, and collective bargaining laws. And Americans should be free to decide, on their own, whether they want to join or form a union.

That is why Senator Kennedy and I have introduced the Employee Free Choice Act, which removes many of the barriers that prevent workers from making their own decision about whether or not to form and join a union.

One of the most important things we can do for Wal-Mart workers is to help them gain for themselves the ability to negotiate for higher wages and benefits and better working conditions. Across the board, when workers' fundamental right to organize is respected and when workers form unions, they earn better pay, better pensions, and better health care than their non-union counterparts. And companies prosper from that.

We have a choice: allow powerful corporations to undermine the living standards of American workers and their families, or create an America economy that works for all Americans.

We all know Wal-Mart is a powerful international corporation, but it still has to play by the rules. Wal-Mart must start obeying the laws, and treat its employees with dignity, respect, and fairness. That not only makes good sense for the nation, it makes good business sense too.

For more information, go to: http://edworkforce.house.gov/democrats/walmartupdate.html.

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/ed31_democrats/rel111505.html