Joe Solmonese won’t be shopping at Wal-Mart this season. He and his Human Rights Campaign gave the budget retail giant an abysmal rating on their corporate equality index:
[HRC] is giving Wal-Mart a red “do not buy” rating in its new consumer guide, bestowing a lump of coal on the retail giant just in time for the holiday shopping season.
Citing Wal-Mart’s refusal to offer domestic partner benefits to its gay and lesbian workers, the HRC said Tuesday that the USA’s biggest private employer has “more work to do in furthering equality.” It advised gays and their supporters to shop elsewhere.
Wal-Mart rated a red 40 on a scale of 100, down from a yellow 65 in 2006. It was among 54 companies that scored 45 or lower in HRC’s 2008 Corporate Equality index, which assigns ratings to 519 large companies. Also in the red: Toys R Us, RadioShack and AutoZone.
No, not AutoZone! Where are we going to get our lube jobs!?
Wal-Mart seems unperturbed by the rating. Says USA Today journo Andrea Stone: “[A] Wal-Mart spokesman says he will not “speculate” on whether the rating would hurt holiday sales.” HRC certainly hopes that it will, telling supporters that Wal-Mart is “moving in reverse on equal treatment of their employees and their gay and lesbian consumers.” Well, the store does cater to a specific American population. We’ll leave it at that.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Target got an 80 out of 100. Just so you know…
hells kitchen guy
Gay people shop at Wall-Mart?
Isn’t radio shack a franchise, so the stores are technically individually owned?
GranDiva
People still shop at Radio Shack? I thought all the big-box electronic stores had eaten in to a large part of their market share, and the hardcore tech geeks had even more elite hardcore places for their serious tech shopping.
Leland Frances
Dear HRC Director Joe Solmonese,
I have no problem with your encouraging a boycott of Wal-Mart [save for a bit of class arrogance in assuming that all gays can afford to shop wherever they want]. But can you please tell us how you continue to give Coors a 100% rating despite the fact that some Coors family members who retain significant stock in the company, despite mergers with other brewers, continue to use some of its profits to fund the Heritage Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation [on whose boards they sit] among other leaders in the rabid Antigay Industry?
The larger report on which the guide is based claimed that, before the ratings were arrived at, “a team of researchers investigates and cross-checks … any connections with organizations that engage in anti-GLBT activities,” that one of the criteria was whether a company “[engaged] in action that would undermine GLBT equality,” and that “employers found engaging in activities that would undermine GLBT equality will have 15 points removed from their scores.”
Stockholders of a company are included in my definition of “employers,” the history of the Coors family’s strong ties to the Antigay Industry is well-known including money used to start the extreme Right Wing Heritage Foundation, and their continued participation is as easy to uncover as a Google search so how the hell did Coors end up with any rating higher than 85? Did HRC Business Council member Scott COORS excuse himself from helping to determine Coors’ rating?
Until I see a satisfactory explanation, I will continue to urge people to boycott both Coors and HRC.
Thank you.
Leland Frances
cjc
In any case, will this affect Wal-Mart’s sales? Absolutely not. The vast majority of Americans are more concerned about getting the best perceived “value” for their ever-declining and worthless buck, in order to buy lead-laden or GHB-laden toys from China.
Bill Perdue
NAFTA, Wal-Mart and Hillary Clinton…
Here’s the history. The term Free Trade Agreements was coined by the slick PR types who came up with “Forests with a Future†and “The Right to Work’. The first slogan led to an environmental disaster as industrial giants began clear cutting with a vengeance. The second is used in union busting schemes to undercut union shop guarantees.
In north and central America The FTA’s led to environmental disaster, union busting, the destruction of family farming, and a net drop in the standard of living. Their effects are felt most in Mexico and Central America, less in the US and even less enough in Canada. Unemployment, lowered wages, environmental ruin, foreclosures on homes and farms, the loss of union jobs, vast northward migrations of workers and farmers to escape grinding poverty, an astounding, hazardous growth of credit buying and the ubiquitous spread of Wal-Mart all followed in the wake of the FTA. Richard Berner a leading analyst at Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan says “Serious pressures are mounting on the US consumer on five fronts: Job growth is slowing, surging energy and food quotes are draining purchasing power, adjustable rate mortgages are resetting, lending standards are tightening, and housing wealth will likely decline. Do these dark clouds finally and ominously herald the perfect consumer storm?â€
“Risks to the consumer are rising, and the risk of outright US recession is higher now than at any time in the past six years: Housing is in sharp decline, consumers are vulnerable, and companies may cut capital spending and liquidate inventories.â€
The most immediate cause is the permanent problem of the overextension of credit buying by working people low on income. When massive overtime or a second job aren’t enough out comes the plastic. Consumer credit was a balloon; now it’s the dirigible Hindenburg on steroids. And just as vulnerable.
Bill Clinton also promised a ‘time out’ on NAFTA when he was running in 1992 and he betrayed his constituents by signing it into law. As well, he and the Democrats, as they do now, consistently joined Republicans in giving more and more and more tax breaks to the rich and by deregulating industry. If you wonder why children die of salmonella and why Ford SUV’s like to flip over and why levees and bridges aren’t maintained you don’t have to look beyond deregulation. DOMA and DADT, NAFTA, tax cuts for the rich and deregulation were all bipartisan betrayals.
Hillary Clinton can be counted on to act the same way Bill Clinton did – her ‘time out’ is empty phrase mongering that will only be believed by those who want to believe. She’ll use FTA’s to bust unions and impoverish workers and farmers to make big bucks for bankers and multinational corporations. She, her Democratic congressional colleagues and their Republican cousins are hand puppets for the uberrich.
Wal-Mart and the Clinton Climate Initiative are partners to help bring environmentally-friendly technologies to cities. It’s apart of ‘Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Initiatives’ and human rights, labor and environmental groups say that Wal-Mart’s “green†initiatives lack real impact on global warming, employee health and welfare and pauperization. Wal-Mart passed GM as the world largest corporation in 2001 and aided by bipartisan presidential connections, corrupt laws like laws like NAFTA, government union busting and deregulation, they haven’t looked back. Wal-mart employees are so underpaid that many qualify of Medicaid or Medical. We pay for the health benefits Wal-mart could pay for except, as CNN reports “If Wal-Mart, with its quarter-trillion dollars in annual sales, is almost unimaginably massive, then the Walton’s’ great wealth is its equal in a parallel universe of private fortunes. The Walton family is as rich as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Amid all the talk about how rich Teresa Heinz Kerry is, consider that the Walton family is 117 times wealthier.†Wal-Mart – always low wages.
But hey, the Clintons are Dixiecrats from Arkansas. Hillary Clinton sat on the Arkansas headquartered Wal-Mart Board of Directors for six years – whadja expect?
With Democrats like these who needs Republicans.
A Republican is a baboon in a human suit and a Democrat is a Republican in drag.
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
It is hoped, Bill, that you enjoyed a satisfying US Thanksgiving. For others, we celebrated ours on October 13.
After much thought, and the realisation that the anti-socialist trolls were busy that day, I have decided to write when you comment upon the true facts.
Yes, Bill Perdue, you are always spot on with your succinct and accurate commentary.
I haven’t missed reading the misleading comments of the “regulars”, but I have missed your insights.
Bill Perdue
Thanks Rt. Rev. Dr. RES. I pigged out and loved it.
You and Prof VP do the best one liners and yours were missed.
Two other people are working on connections between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and big business, especially their relationships with HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies.
A couple of weeks after you mentioned seeing it I rented Michael Moore’s SICKO. Seeing these political questions reduced to stats is too dry compared to the powerful impact of watching a Humana doctor accuse herself of murdering patients by denying them treatment and interviews with people who desperately need help and can’t get it.
I’m lucky because I’ve worked for railroads most of my adult life and our union imposed health plans are very good. Ironically, when union members get promoted to being management monkeys’ they go on HMO plans and complain bitterly. We do our best not to smirk.
Jessica
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