The bigger concerns on the Wal-Mart offer to buyout Massmart
On Monday morning the world was greeted by the news of an offer by Wal-mart the worlds biggest retailer to buyout Massmart, at a a price that might look very tempting to shareholders and will definitely be so for top managers. The offer saw the value of Massmart shares jump with more than 10%. Surely this will appear very attractive to many shareholders. However, this offer and the likelihood of a deal has much more to do with simply what shareholders will get on accepting the offer.
For some time now SACCAWU has not only anticipated this intention of Wal-Mart but we have also actively participated in international campaigns against Wal-Mart as one of the worst and stubbornly anti-union companies in the world. Thus, a takeover of Massmart by Wal-Mart is a matter of serious concern to the SACCAWU.
Some facts about Wal-Mart anti union activities:
- Wal-Mart is a known anti-union company with training and toolkits for managers to keep the workplace union-free.
- It took almost fifty years for workers to successfully get Wal-Mart recognise a union at one of their US outlets.
- It has closed down departments and stores in North America where workers have successfully unionise themselves.
- By July 2008 the company faced more than 80 lawsuits in connection with wages, overtime and hours violations, most of it class actions, with more than 10 000 workers affected in many of the cases.
- It currently faces the largest class action on discrimination of women with more than 1.5 million women workers being part of the action.
- It pays women less then men and women are less likely to be promoted than male workers.
- It has been in court for racial discrimination against African-Americans truck drivers and Muslim employees of West African origin.
- In the 2008 US Presidential elections it was exposed to have actively co-erced their employees not to vote for Obama - the reason, Obama will make it easy to for unions to get into the workplace.
- It has been listed in Human Rights Watch reports for its aggressiveness of its anti-union activities.
- In the US wage levels at Wal-Mart has been found to be between 26% -37% lower than the national average.
- In 2008 it was fined 2 billion US dollars for more than two million wage related violations.
- Recently it was compelled to pay 34 million US dollars in unpaid back wages.
- Today in the US, it still represents the main opposition to a bi-partisan Free Choice Act that will allow workers to form and join unions easier.
- It conducts illegal surveillance on its employees to root out any attempts to unionisation.
However, it is not only the anti-union attitude that concerns us, also the impact that the general operations of Wal-Mart have on local economies, distributors, suppliers and manufacturers. While Wal-Mart has been touted as the cheapest retail outlets, new studies increasingly show that basket comparisons between Wal-Mart and competitors show the opposite, and this has seen a shrinking of its market share in the US, their biggest market. This might be one of the considerations for this move into AFRICA.
Wal-Mart has become so powerful that it dictates to their suppliers at what price they prepared to buy goods and failure have seen many suppliers, distributors and manufacturers going down. But more important, this 'reverse auction' relationship it has with suppliers has seen, not only the collapse of local manufacturing in many instances, but has also fueled the use of child labour and extreme low wage labour in other parts of the world where they source their goods from, like Guatemala and Bangladesh. Therefore, if this deal goes through, it will be a severe blow to all our intentions and attempts to build and develop local manufacturing, it will be a set-back for our buy local campaign and can lead to further increased unemployment not only in wholesale and retail but also in other sectors of the economy. Further, this development by its nature also poses serious threats to other wholesale and retail competitors in the country.