I was shocked and a little delighted to read a July 2 AP report called “Wal-Mart Validates Gay Workers.” The article disclosed that Wal-Mart became the ninth of “the 10 largest Fortune 500 companies [which] now have rules prohibiting discrimination against gay employees.” The down-home image that Wal-Mart projects usually seems more in keeping with the Cracker Barrel’s exclusionist philosophy. For a few days I had warm feelings for the chain.
For those of us living in the Midwest, this down-home appeal has a certain political connotation of “family values;” that is to say, Anti-Choice, Anti-Gay. Sam Walton, the now deceased founder of the chain, is generally well respected as a Walt Disney of commerce, a truly “family”-friendly figure (though he had a business strategy that destroyed small-town shopping districts). Sam Walton was, in many ways, the small-town traditional boy made good. This is epitomized in the following anecdote from Bethany Bultman in her book Redneck Heaven: “A Cessna landed and a sort of rangy-looking guy got out with his seven hunting dawgs...the next thing anybody knew, the dogs were behind one of the hangars takin’ a leak. But [The witnesses]’ve been Wal-Mart shoppers ever since.”
My support for gay rights overshadowed my support for workers’ rights. I almost wished I had a car to drive to the nearest Wal-Mart and show my moral support through my very limited purchasing power. But then I saw the insidious truth behind the recognition; it is mostly irrelevant due to the corporate attitude toward workers.
The division between gay inclusion and employee disenfranchisement is thickened by the real-people commercials, which feature testimonials about the benefit of low prices for the family (usually traditional, definitely heterosexist). They fail to mention their workers’ low wages, which undercut the competition. According to the KPFT report the average yearly income for an employee in the Houston area in 2002 was $11,000. This is why their gay inclusion policy is less generous than it seems. Consider also that the health insurance they offer is so expensive that only 38 percent of the employees can buy it. In some ways the inclusion policy is tokenism at its worst. How can they include a group of employees when their innate policy is to keep the majority of their employees disenfranchised?
The true diabolical nature of Wal-Mart’s tokenism is that not only do their business practices work to economically disenfranchise their own work force, but their business practices disrupt and impoverish the employees of other business as well. According to a USA Today report, “Retail giant Wal-Mart faces challenges on many fronts,” the recent supermarket strikes and lockouts in California are in part due to the plan to open 40 Wal-Mart superstores in Southern California. These stores will make existing supermarkets less economically viable. So it’s not surprising that the grocery store corporate management wants to cut overhead in the same place Wal-Mart does — investment in their employees. This culminates in the simple fact that it does no good to be included if one will probably just make a subsistence wage.