It's Wal-Mart Week in Bentonville, Arkansas and the retail giant is throwing its annual celebration for 20,000 of its workers and shareholders, complete with concerts by stars like Keith Urban, Carrie Underwood, and Journey. All this serves to distract shareholders from Wal-Mart's failure to address the chronic problems that negatively affect their image and result in obstacles to growth into new geographic and demographic markets A Handshake with Sam [PDF], an agreement of common principles with Wal-Mart first released in 2006, offers a roadmap out of this crisis.
Polling that we conducted last fall shows that 28 percent of all consumers developed a more negative opinion of the company over the previous twelve months. And there are plenty of real examples to demonstrate this. Just in the past 12 months, Wal-Mart has had to back out of 69 communities, including Chicago, where their poor business and labor practices were front and center.
It's a problem that gets lost in all the noise and pretty lights. The one part of the shareholders meeting designed to address the situation -- eight shareholder resolutions [PDF] -gets ignored. At last year's shareholders meeting the company rejected every single proposal. And this year, each one will receive about two minutes of consideration -- compared to the four days of concerts and parties going on this week.
The resolutions Wal-Mart will quickly reject tomorrow have clearly failed to get their attention, including the following examples:
Human Rights Committee: Proposes the establishment of a human rights committee at Wal-Mart to "review the implications of company policies...for human rights of individuals in the U.S. and worldwide."
Amend Equal Employment Opportunity Policy: Proposes amending Wal-Mart's equal opportunity employment policy to include protection for gender-identity-based discrimination.
Social and Reputation Impact Report: Proposes to require Wal-Mart to issue a report to shareholders on the negative social and reputational impacts of the company's non-compliance with the International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions and standards on workers' rights.
Political Contributions Report: Proposes to increase transparency about "direct and indirect political contributions to candidates, political parties or political organizations; independent expenditures; or electioneering communications on behalf of a federal, state or local candidate."
These seem like reasonable proposals that would go a long way toward making Wal-Mart a more responsible, more humane company. But by tomorrow they'll end up in the dustbin, and Wal-Mart will plow ahead with its greedy and unsustainable practices.
That is why Wal-Mart Watch has re-introduced "A Handshake with Sam," a set of seven principles that challenge Wal-Mart to be the fair, honest business Sam Walton intended it to be. We're asking our supporters to sign the "Handshake with Sam" and urge Wal-Mart to commit to these important principles.
We rooted these principles in Sam Walton's own beliefs in the hopes that they might be more palatable to Wal-Mart than if they were just written by their critics. It is Wal-Mart's abandonment of these beliefs that have led them to become such a distasteful presence to an increasing number of communities and shoppers.
After all, the one thing Wal-Mart's leaders care about is the company's bottom line. When the public outrage over its treatment of brain-damaged former employee Deborah Shank became overwhelming, Wal-Mart gave in and returned her medical funds. We will continue to apply that kind of pressure until Wal-Mart recognizes that it can no longer afford to be stubborn -- the same way it realized it could no longer afford to avoid doing the right thing for Ms. Shank.
Tomorrow's shareholders' meeting may not make Wal-Mart reform its practices, but Wal-Mart Watch will continue making sure the public knows the truth about Wal-Mart, whether it takes another year, five years or ten.