Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Wal-Mart seems to be on the brain today ...

After much thought, we've decided to host a private screening of Robert Greenwald's new film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," next week at World Fare. Our hesitation stemmed from the nature of Greenwald's other work--"Uncovered: The War on Iraq" and "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism"-- and our ongoing discussion about whether or not this film would be winsome for our community.

We settled on the private screening option. We'll have a select group of folks view the film during its screening week and then we'll decide together if we should hold a public screening later. If it's too left-wing and reactionary, we'll probably nix a larger showing.

Salon.com has an excellent review of the film that seems to indicate that it might not be as left-wing as I anticipate it being. And it seems as though it might bring up a lot of issues that our small, working class town needs to think about as we anticipate a Wal-Mart moving into our community:

We also meet the owners of longtime local businesses destroyed by Wal-Mart -- places like Esry's Grocery, of Hamilton, Mo., and H&H Hardware, of Middlefield, Ohio -- African-American and female employees who worked eagerly and hard for years at poverty wages and were told there was no place for them in management; customers victimized by crimes in the stores' vast, unpoliced parking lots; and a former global-services manager who says he was fired for reporting the truth about the chain's factories in Latin America. What makes the movie so powerful is the totality of the portrait, both in its details and its sweep. Most of these people are entirely unexceptional Americans from the working class or lower-middle class, believers in flag and country and God and capitalism, not left-wing activists or academics with some theoretical critique. Most of them believed in Wal-Mart, too, and were genuinely horrified to learn that its low prices depended on enforced poverty, whether theirs or somebody else's.

The review also hits on the primary reason for our work with Fair Trade and World Fare:

For me, the crippling moment arrives when Greenwald takes his cameras to a factory in China, where workers toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week, to make toys for Wal-Mart. They're paid roughly 30 to 40 cents an hour (with rent for the factory's dormitory, with its triple-decker bunk beds, deducted) and perhaps an economist could convince me that's a decent wage in that context. But for me these workers and their painful, hopeful stories recalled the righteous anger of Chapter 4 of Marx's "Capital," with its descriptions of the Industrial Revolution's workday that began long before dawn and went deep into the night, of women locked in sweatshops and 8-year-old children fed their lunches inside the machinery. I started anxiously reading the labels on my shirts and asking myself questions: Where did I buy this -- I'm hoping the answer is the Salvation Army -- and where did it come from before that? And am I really willing to buy a shirt at a price that would pay the person who made it a decent wage?

These are some of the questions I feel Christians need to start asking if they are serious about the command of Micah 6:8 and Jesus' summation of the law. All of which, of course, is intricately tied into the Wal-Mart issue.