A growing number of major European retailers have so far announced this week that they will participate in a plan to upgrade fire and safety in Bangladesh — including Spanish retailer Inditex, parent company of Zara, British retail giants Primark and Tesco, as well as H&M. The latter being the largest purchaser of garments made in Bangladesh. The agreement, known as the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, comes on the heels of a catastrophic incident at the Rana Plaza building, the worst in the history of the global garment industry, which collapsed on April 24, trapping over a thousand workers in the rubble. Labor groups have continued to exert pressure on major American companies, including Walmart and Gap, to take part in the new safety agreement. According to the New York Times, however, both companies have so far refused to sign the new agreement. Gap, which is reported to offer the strongest opposition to the new plan, is said to be concerned that the agreement would entangle the company in legal cases filed by American lawyers on behalf of workers in Bangladesh and seeks reduced legal liability. Walmart, which has been independently conducting factory inspections in Bangladesh since a fire killed 110 in November, has rejected the agreement’s inclusion of “dispute resolution mechanisms”. Europe as a whole accounts for 60 per cent of the country’s clothing exports, according to the Times. Italian fashion label Benetton, British retailer Marks & Spencer and Spanish retailer Mango became the latest European companies to agree to sign a contract that will mandate independent safety inspections of factories, as well as cover the costs of repairs. According to the Associated Press, the new pact also calls for retailers to pay up to $500,000 a year toward the effort, and to halt business with any Bangladesh factory that refuses to make safety improvements.The new agreement would be legally binding, as opposed to Walmart’s independent safety plan announced on Tuesday, which is voluntary and was criticized by labor groups such as the AFL-CIO.”It’s not surprising, and the timing is fishy,” Brian Finnegan, global worker rights coordinator at the AFL-CIO, remarked to the Huffington Post.”The whole point of what we’re doing is to make it binding and enforceable,” he added.Prior to the large factory collapse companies including PHV, which oversees well-known American labels such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Izod, had already agreed to sign the new safety pact.Bangladesh hosts some 5,000 garment factories and employs 3.6 million garment workers. According to AP that makes the country the third-biggest exporter of clothes in the world after China and Italy.In addition to hazardous working conditions, pay for workers in Bangladesh is severely depressed as a result of government anti-union efforts and the scarcity of employment. Compensation for workers in the country is one of the lowest worldwide, with an average pay of $38 per month.Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium and one of the sponsors of the safety agreement, praised its potential.“This agreement is exactly what is needed to finally bring an end to the epidemic of fire and building disasters that have taken so many lives in the garment industry in Bangladesh,” said Nova.Documents provided to the Times indicate that Walmart had sourced clothing from the collapsed factory through a Canadian contractor. The American retailer, the second-largest producer of clothing in Bangladesh, is considered one of the main barriers to cementing the safety agreement. … Read More
Home-made bombmaking: New US teen craze?
Joshua Prater, a student at Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe, Arizona was arrested on Tuesday after a cleaning lady found what later turned out to be a home-made bomb in his house. The woman noticed a strange device with wires sticking out while doing her regular cleaning. She took the device to the local fire station, where police specialists identified it as an improvised explosive device (IED). “They had it X-rayed, they saw it was a valid IED. It was something that wasn’t big, but could cause serious injuries and the death of someone,” said Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley as cited by KTAR Newsroom. The device was disabled and the house where it was found searched where more explosives were discovered. The 18-year-old was arrested by police on charges of possessing a prohibited weapon. Prater’s possible plan for using the IED are being investigated. On the same day, 18-year-old Mason Beuning was detained in Gainsville, Florida for allegedly stealing from a local Walmart store items which could be used for making an IED. The bomb squad searched the teenager’s home and found a device. “It was a small device. Definitely would have injured someone who was right next to it, but the device was not something that would cause a great amount of destruction,” Gainesville Police Officer Ben Tobias said as cited by ActionNewsJax.com. Beuning’s friends, questioned by police, said the device was assembled just for fun, to explode it in the woods. The arrests come at the time when the US is on alert, following the Boston Marathon bombings which three people dead and over 200 injured. Two young men who emigrated to the US from Russia in 2001 were accused of the attack using improvised explosive devices. That tragedy has led to people starting questioning the effectiveness of the anti-terror campaign the US has been engaged in since 9/11. “I believe this was a massive failure of the surveillance state that we’ve created in America. Since 9/11 we spent over $700 billion on national security and a lot of that is surveillance with video cameras, with massive data collection, with fusion centers, and none of those helped to deter or detect any terrorist plot. And while the surveillance video was useful in reconstructing what happened it didn’t prevent it,” American lawyer Jesselyn Radack told RT. Now with the information on making anything, including bombs, being available online, cases of teens building IEDs is becoming more common. A week ago a teenage girl in Florida was arrested for allegedly “discharging weapons or firerarms” on the grounds of her school in the town of Bartow. 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot says she was only carrying out an experiment, mixing substances in a plastic bottle. The chemical reaction tore the bottle’s cap off and led to the girl being taken away to police department. At the end of April, a New Jersey teenager was charged with possession of explosive devices, when police discovered 6 IEDs in different stages of assembly in his house. That was part of the police’s investigation into bombing threats left at the boy’s school on the same day Boston Marathon bombs went off. … Read More
Police: Man on meth crashes car into Walmart then randomly attacks bystanders
A man who crashed his car into a San Jose Walmart Sunday morning and began randomly beating people with a metal club was likely under the influence of methamphetamine, police said. The incident occurred just after 11 a.m., as a man who has not yet been named crashed his red Oldsmobile Cutlas into…
Walmart considers paying in-store customers to deliver online orders
Walmart is reportedly considering a new service that would add an unusual twist to the delivery process by crowdsourcing it to customers. Under the plan, which is still in the early planning stages, the company would pay in-store shoppers to rent space in their vehicles and have them deliver products… … Read More
Employee Benefits: Costco vs. Sam’s Club
http://www.youtube.com/v/B_5vttTJxgA?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata More: Employee Benefits: Costco vs. Sam’s Club
Keiser Report: Walmart Prison (E417)
http://www.youtube.com/v/EwvlFywk5UY?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Read more: Keiser Report: Walmart Prison (E417)
New York City Council Wages War on Walmart
In a city where the unemployment rate is
9.1 percent, above both the statewide and national average,
you’d think that mayoral candidates would be competing to attract
businesses and jobs. ;
And in a city where the cost of living is so high that the city
pays $3,000 a month for landlords to house the “homeless” in
rooms without kitchens or private bathrooms, you’d think that
mayoral candidates would be competing to welcome a discount
retailer that would allow residents to save money on clothing and
groceries.
Yet this is New York City. Instead of laying out a welcome mat
for Walmart, the Democratic mayoral candidates are trying to keep
the company out of the city. An
account in The New York Times recently quoted the
speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, declaring, “As long
as Wal-Mart’s behavior remains the same, they’re not welcome in New
York City…New York isn’t changing. Wal-Mart has to
change.” ;
Maybe Quinn can make “New York isn’t changing” the slogan of the
mayoral campaign she launched over the weekend. The candidate who
would be the city’s first woman and first lesbian mayor turns out
to be, on economic development questions, the spokeswoman for
stasis.
If previous generations of New York leaders had taken the “New
York isn’t changing” approach, the place would still be called New
Amsterdam, and we’d all be speaking Dutch. ;
Quinn’s die-hard opposition to Walmart undercuts the claim
sometimes made by her defenders that she would be a worthy
successor to the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, for
all his nanny-state excesses — banning large soft-drinks,
trans-fats, and smoking in bars — has been steadfast in
articulating the principle that whether to shop at Walmart is a
decision for individual consumers, not a decision for city
officials to substitute their own judgments for those of
individuals. “This city should be open to business for anyone who
wants to come here,” is how the mayor
put it at a press conference in 2011, according to an account
in the Wall Street Journal. “You should let the marketplace
decide.” ;
In opposing Walmart, Quinn is acting less like Bloomberg, and
more like the Democratic mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, who
explained his opposition to allowing the store to open in the city
by saying,
“Wal-Mart makes their money and runs to the Midwest and deposits it
in the bank. I want the money to stay in our neighborhoods and
employ neighborhood people.” ;
Imagine if the rest of the country took that sort of
narrow-minded attitude toward Boston-based businesses such as
Fidelity Investments, New Balance sneakers, or Legal Sea
Foods? ;
The objections to Walmart by the politicians are without merit.
An economic policy official in the Obama administration, Jason
Furman, described
the company as “a progressive success story,” observing that
shopping for groceries there yields savings equivalent to a 6.5
percent raise for families in the bottom income quintile. ;
As for complaints about the labor practices of Walmart’s
contractors in Communist China, plenty of other vendors of
China-made products are already operating in New York City, from
the Apple stores to Pearl River Mart. Poor labor conditions?
Walmart jobs may not be as cushy as slots volunteering for the
Quinn mayoral campaign, but at least they are paid. Plenty of New
Yorker labor under worse conditions washing dishes in restaurants
or delivering food, or maybe without jobs at all. Who does Quinn
think she is to deprive them of the choice to work at Walmart if
they decide they want to do so?
Is it that Walmart employees are not represented by a labor
union? Neither are most of the workers at Bloomberg News, yet we
haven’t yet heard any calls by Quinn to kick the mayor’s financial
news and information company out of the city. The New York
Post
notes that she is endorsed by a union that represents grocery
store workers. ;
Truth is, in a modern world, it’s hard to stop New Yorkers from
shopping at Walmart. They can drive outside the city limits or go
online to Walmart.com. Or
they can move away from the city to a place where the politicians
have a more enlightened view of economic liberty. A Quinn
administration, or the prospect of one, may be enough to drive some
New Yorkers to do just that. … Read More
