Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in the new New Yorker mag begins with the headlines and summation:

Annals of Spin : Selling Wal-Mart

Can the company co-opt liberals?

… Wal-Mart has hired Democratic P.R. experts to help improve its reputation on such issues as low wages, miserly benefits, sex discrimination, and union busting.

Goldberg tells us, in an essentially political story:

Today, Wal-Mart is the second-largest company in the world in terms of revenue — only ExxonMobil is bigger … and it has developed a reputation as a worldwide colossus that provides poor pay and miserly benefits to its 1.8 million employees. The image of the company is not helped by the immoderation of Sam Walton’s widow and children, who together control forty per cent of Wal-Mart’s outstanding shares, and who are worth roughly eighty billion dollars; they are, by a striking margin, the richest family in America. (They are worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.)

Wal-Mart is traditionally a Republican-leaning company (during the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five per cent of its political donations have gone to Republicans) …

… Wal-Mart is notably unfriendly to unions; in 2000, when meat-cutters at a single Wal-Mart in Texas organized into a collective-bargaining unit, Wal-Mart responded by shutting down its meat counters across Texas and in five neighboring states. It closed an entire store in Quebec, rather than see workers unionize.

… Even Ron Galloway, the maker of a recent pro-Wal-Mart documentary, “Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People Crazy,” has turned against the company. Galloway told me that he now considers Wal-Mart to be a “heartless” employer. “They just instituted a wage cap for long-term employees — people making between thirteen and eighteen dollars an hour. It’s a form of accelerated attrition. They can’t expect me to defend that,” Galloway said.

Writer Goldberg gets inside the war-making “Action Room” in Wal-Mart’s hq, telling us how the colossus fights negative publicity by hiring Democratic spin-masters who’ve worked for Howard Dean and other presidential candidates of the opposition party. He compares the Wal-Mart hq to the National Security Agency hq:

In some ways, the home office is not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency — both contain a large number of windowless rooms and both are staffed by people who are preoccupied by the movement of strangers in their midst. The N.S.A.’s headquarters, though, seemed to me more aesthetically appealing; the Wal-Mart home office resembles a poorly funded elementary school.

For the full fascinating read in the New Yorker, click here.