Wal-Mart stocks its shelves with garments made in Burma. Brutal repression, widespread human rights violations and a government tied to drug thugs has brought international condemnation of the country's dictatorial regime. But the record of the Burmese military dictators was not enough, apparently, to keep Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, from stocking its shelves with garments made in Burma.

Since December 1999, Wal-Mart Canada has imported almost 70 tons of garments from Burma. Despite Wal-Mart claims that it broke its Burma connection in January of this year, records show continued imports from Burma to Wal-Mart as recently as May.

Burma's drug thugs and military dictators are tied together in an economic and political alliance of repression and exploitation. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has condemned Burma for "widespread and systematic" violations of the prohibition on the use of forced labor. Burma has been censured for allowing the modern-day practice of slavery. Drug money and revenue from trade relations with few multinational corporations has kept the regime firmly in place, and riding on the backs of an increasingly impoverished population.

[transnational.org's comprehensive anti-Wal-Mart info digest]. 

Wal-Mart is rabidly anti-union, it pays very low wages, its health-care benefits are only available after 2 years employment, and then only affordable to 36% of employees, and it is an an unrepentant and recidivist violator of employee rights, drawing repeated convictions, fines, and the ire of judges from coast to coast.

And then there's China. For years, Wal-Mart saturated the airwaves with a "We Buy American" advertising campaign, but it was nothing more than a red-white-and-blue sham. All along, the vast majority of the products it sold were from cheap-labor hell-holes, especially China. As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee reports, "In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst," adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one corporation "is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions."

[transnational.org's comprehensive anti-Wal-Mart info digest]

Wal-Mart is frequently accused of promoting gun-ownership. As the USA's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart is also its biggest gun-seller. Campaigners for tighter gun-control laws accuse Wal-Mart of marketing firearms irresponsibly and being too lax in selling weapons to teenagers. When rock star Sheryl Crow alluded to this on a recent record, Wal-Mart magnanimously banned it from their 2500 stores.

[From Corporate Watch - www.corporatewatch.org.uk]