Supply Chain Workers Tell Walmart’s Dirty Secrets

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2013/04/supply-chain-workers-tell-walmart%E2%80%99s-dirty-secrets

April 23, 2013 / Jenny Brown



Workers all along Walmart's supply chain, from factory to store, marched to Walmart board member Michele Burns' residence in downtown Manhattan April 18 with a letter asking for compensation for the Tazreen fire victims and demanding that Walmart sign a fire-safety agreement with Bangladeshi unions. Photo: Jenny Brown.


Walmart has cut store staffing so severely that in some cases workers have no time to stock shelves, and the few remaining checkers face customers who’ve been waiting in line for 30 minutes.

That’s just the newest symptom of Walmart’s profit-at-any-cost policies, which create miserable conditions along the company’s whole supply chain, said Walmart workers who compared notes Thursday in New York.

They gathered to remember 112 garment workers who died in the Tazreen Fashion factory fire near Dhaka, Bangladesh, last November. About 100 marched to the house of Walmart board member Michele Burns with a letter asking for compensation for the victims and demanding that Walmart sign a fire-safety agreement with Bangladeshi unions.

Police and building security prevented delivery of the letter, so workers, including Sumi Abedin, a young survivor of the fire, stood outside in the dusk, reading the names of the dead and holding a series of long, black, coffin-shaped signs that spelled W-A-L-M-A-R-T.

FULL story at link.