Wal-Mart The Movie: The High Cost of Low Price

November 12, 2005BC PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

Click on picture to enlage poster

Sunday, at 7 p.m. at the VanCity Theatre, director Robert Greewald’s much-praised and controversial new film Wal-Mart - The High Cost of Low Price will première in Vancouver as a benefit screening for Vancouver’s COPE municipal party.
You know Wal-Mart’s inglorious history. Child exploitation. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart Stores agreed to pay $135,540 to settle federal charges in the U.S. that it violated child labour laws in Connecticut, Arkansas and New Hampshire.
Wal-Mart’s culture of crime and greed. In March of this year, only eight short months ago, Wal-Mart paid $11 million to settle charges that it employed hundreds of illegal immigrants to clean its stores across the United States.
Workers have been illegally fired for trying to form a union, and Wal-Mart spends millions to thwart workers basic rights, giving its union-breaking staff priority on resources (like corporate jets) over even higher-placed managers. In 2000, meat cutters at a Wal-Mart in Texas voted for the union — and Wal-Mart promptly violated the law by shutting down the meat-cutting department in the store and, for good measure, closed every other meat-cutting department in 179 other stores across the U.S. and Canada, just to make sure they had stamped out any smell of unionism.
And let’s not forget Wal-Mart’s shuttering of their Jonquierre, Québéc store, in May of this year, after its employees received union certification. A former employee at that store has filed a class-action suit in the Québéc Supreme Court claiming that Wal-Mart, in closing the store, “violated the rights of its workers” by breaching the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees freedom of association to all citizens.
Then there’s Wal-Mart’s wage policies, which deny its workers the basic right to a living wage, not to mention the off-the-clock work they force on their employees, and unequal pay and treatment to which they subject their employees. Wal-Mart’s discriminatory policies in regards of their female staff have resulted in the largest workplace-bias lawsuit in U.S. history.
You know the story: poverty-level wages, with a staff turnover rate of 50% a year; destruction of local businesses due to predatory pricing (an Iowa State University study found that in the first decade after Wal-Mart arrived, the state lost 111 men’s and boys’ apparel stores, 116 drug stores, 153 shoe stores, 158 women’s apparel stores, 161 variety stores, 293 building supply stores, 298 hardware stores, and 555 grocery stores); numerous labour law violations, ranging from illegal spying on employees and falsification of time cards to avoid paying overtime to fraudulent record keeping and illegal firings for union organizing; the record-holder for the most suits filed against a U.S. company by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Wal-Mart had to pay a $750,000 fine for blatant discrimination in Arizona against the disabled. The judge even ordered Wal-Mart to air commercials confessing their guilt); and more, much more.
But you don’t know the whole story. You won’t gain a true insight into Wal-Mart corporate practices until and unless you attend this Sunday evening’s screening of Wal-Mart — The High Cost of Low Price. Until you hear for yourself the shattering experiences of the current and former Wal-Mart employees Greenwald interviewed, this story will be little more than words on a screen. Sunday evening. See you at the VanCity theatre.

Remembrance Day 2005: A Pittance of Time

November 11, 2005PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

On November 11, 1999 Terry Kelly was in a Shoppers Drug Mart store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. At 10:55 a.m. an announcement came over the store’s PA system asking customers who might still be on the premises at 11:00 a.m. to give two minutes of silence in respect to the veterans who had sacrificed so much for all of us.
Terry found himself moved by the store’s role in adopting the Legion’s “two minutes of silence” initiative, and felt that the retail outlet’s contribution in educating the public to the importance of remembrance was both appropriate and laudable.
When 11 o’clock arrived, an announcement was again made asking for “two minutes of silence” to commence. All customers, with the exception of a man who was accompanied by his young daughter, showed their respect.
Terry’s chagrin at the conduct of the father who was demanding service from the store’s clerks rather than show appropriate respect, in the process setting a poor example for his daughter, was later channeled into a beautiful piece of music, titled A Pittance of Time. VanRamblings today presents Mr. Kelly’s award-winning, moving video of A Pittance of Time.

Paris is Burning: Racism, Poverty and Police Brutality

November 9, 2005PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

VanRamblings first became aware of the divide between Muslim Arab immigrants and the majority French population seven years ago during a screening of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy when, in the film’s opening scene, the Muslim, Arab and black janitorial staff at a chic Paris travel agency break out into song decrying the exploitative treatment each experiences at the hands of the French, and the pervasive sense of exclusion each feels, their diaspora to France hardly welcome despite the necessity of their labours.
Now, in fall 2005, after almost two weeks of violent clashes between youth and police, as the world looks on in stunned disbelief at the destruction of the social fabric in France, many of us our looking for answers as to why “a tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion” is engulfing France.
As Doug Ireland writes in his piece, Why Is France Burning? The Rebellion of A Lost Generation, “To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.”

It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes — of both right and left — to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.

In the course of his essay, Ireland suggests that the events of the past two weeks can be attributed to institutionalized racism and a long, inglorious exploitation of 10% of the population who have consistently been locked out of political decision-making, and denied access to basic education, housing and social services. The history of such treatment of the Muslim, Arab and black population dates back almost a half century.
During the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion, the government recruited labourers and factory and menial workers from France’s foreign colonies. These immigrant workers, primarily from North Africa, were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of manpower caused by two World Wars, killing many French men, and slashing native French birth-rates. Moreover, these immigrant workers were favoured by industrial employers as passive, unlikely to strike and cheaper to hire. Literacy, too, was a disqualification, because an Arab worker who could read could educate himself about politics and become more susceptible to organization into a union.
Upon arrival and since, these Arab workers were and are warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos — known as cités (Americans call them ‘the projects’) — specially built and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn’t “pollute” the larger metropolitan centres. Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are dilapidated, sinister places, housing the hopeless and the alienated, an undereducated, oppressed and rage-filled population of the dispossessed.

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Tech Tuesday: Happy Patch Day!

November 8, 2005Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

As is the case the second Tuesday of each month, today Microsoft will deploy the latest set of critical patches for your Windows XP operating system. These “patches” — as indicated in the latest Microsoft Security Bulletin — include critical system components and security fixes to keep those dastardly hackers out of your computer, and the regular monthly updated version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. In order to keep your computer secure, it is necessary to download these updates at your earliest possible convenience.
What is that you say? You’ve set your Windows Update facility to download critical patches automatically? Well, according to Stephen Manes at PC World magazine, “Microsoft’s Automatic Updates service may be automatic, but it is definitely not instantaneous … The only way to ensure that you’ll get updates immediately is to surf to Microsoft’s Windows Update Web site and explicitly request them.”

According to a Microsoft product manager responsible for this stuff, up to five days may elapse before every PC with Automatic Updates turned on actually gets updated. There’s no way to know whether your machine is at the front of the line or the back; the only way to jump the queue is to head directly for Microsoft’s update site. It’s also the only way to collect “optional” updates, such as new versions of Windows Media Player, which never arrive automatically.

So there you go. You’ve got your PC security work cut out for you today.
Create a Windows CD for Your Computer If You Don’t Have One
Why many computer manufacturers insists on selling computers that require you to create up to nine recovery disks rather than selling you a computer that comes with a certified version of Windows, on disk, VanRamblings will never know (a word to the wise, never purchase a computer which doesn’t come bundled with an OEM copy of Windows).
If you’re one of those unlucky folks who are stuck with a computer without an available Windows XP OEM disk, help is at hand.
Lincoln Spector, writing in this month’s edition of PC World, suggests that you download Bart Lagerweij’s free Preinstalled Environment Builder to create a bootable Microsoft Windows XP installation disk. Having this self-made disk on hand is worth anywhere up to $300 to you, and may serve to rescue you from potential disaster should your Windows XP OS go on the fritz. Save yourself a world of heartache. Create the Windows disk if your computer didn’t come bundled with a standalone Windows XP disk.