Wage slavery, Wal-Mart style

The depravity of capitalist exploitation knows no bounds. Yet another example of this was given in Newsweek on July 31, when they exposed the use of more than 4,000 14- to 16-year-olds to bag groceries in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores in Mexico. While the full-time employment of 14-year-olds is specifically prohibited by the International Labor Organization, that’s only the tip of the iceberg: Wal-Mart’s not paying a dime to any of these workers.

Everyone knows that Wal-Mart isn’t hurting for money. The article reports that Wal-Mart de Mexico reported $290 million in profits for the second quarter of 2007. Mexico’s National Front Against Wal-Mart (http://www.geocities.com/frentenacionalac/) reports that in 2004 the managing director of Wal-Mart in the United States received an annual salary of $17.5 million dollars.

It always bears repeating, however, that the way that corporations like Wal-Mart make these extortionate amounts of money is on the backs of the workers—paying them little, or in this case, nothing; ignoring occupational health standards; and generally trampling over any rights workers may have. WalmartWatch.com reports that in Mexico “the company has come under fire for a variety of issues including use of maquilas (sweatshops in free trade zones), interfering with the presidential elections of 2006, and desecrating indigenous territory with construction of Supercenters.”

Just like the U.S. military, which ignores the economic draft and calls its troops “voluntary,” Wal-Mart claims that the teenagers who work only for tips at their Mexico stores are “volunteer” workers. It is this same draft—the staggering poverty that many face in Mexico and throughout Latin America, fostered by neoliberal policies that allow U.S. corporations like Wal-Mart to exploit workers around the world—that forces workers to risk life and limb to cross the borders into the U.S. Once here, those immigrants—who labor at some of the lowest paying, harshest jobs—are criminalized by repressive agencies of the state.

As this issue’s article on immigration states, liberation of workers—in the Americas and beyond—will come from “a massive and militant fight back of all workers and oppressed.”