Wal-Mart: Discounting The American Dream

862 Words4 Pages
Globalization is the integration among nations of political views, products, ideas, and cultures. It helps by stimulating innovation, communication, and offers developing countries to catch up with industrialized countries. With the use of advanced technologies, large corporations can supply the world populous with consumer goods that would only be available in 1st world countries. Despite the numerous contributions that globalization has brought, it also carries with it disadvantages. Large corporations, through globalization and expansion, foster the notion of inequality by further separating the economic gap between the developing and industrialized nations, oppressing laborers, and exploiting women across cultures. The primary issue for…show more content…
The United States serves as a prime example, where it houses Wal-Mart, one of the largest corporations in the world. Nicholas Copeland and Christine Labuski, authors of "The World of Wal-Mart: Discounting the American Dream", discusses about Wal-Mart's practices. Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton who wished to build a place where the American Dream was available for everyone. Despite his wishes, Wal-Mart's practices undermine the American Dream. With globalization, Wal-Mart has gained large amounts of wealth and achieved major influence across the world at the cost of their worker's well-being. Wal-mart discriminates its workers by cutting their payroll or firing them for the sake of maximizing profits. The book exemplifies Wal-Mart's greed by stating that "meeting Wal-Mart's demands often means firing employees or compromising their well-being, sometimes by cutting corners on their wages, health, and safety" (Copeland and Labuski 24). This mistreatment is due to the corporation's knowledge that the country is in a state of economic instability and there will be citizens seeking employment. Since these workers are desperate, Wal-Mart has control over their payroll and can manipulate it to meet their quota. Globalization, in Wal-Mart's case, creates inequality in the workforce, which affects not only…show more content…
In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, Betty Dukes and 1.6 million women filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart for gender discrimination due to lower wages of female employees than men. The Supreme Court ruled against Dukes case because her lawyers could not prove that discrimination occurred at all of the stores that the 1.6 million women were employed. On an international level, Nike realized that young unmarried South Korean women in their culture needed income to support their family and dowry. Due to the knowledge that these female workers would not form unions as it would affect their income (Enloe, 216), Nike used them as a form of cheap labor. Nike monitored their employments by “replacing newly married women with unmarried novices” (Enloe, 217) to maintain lower wages and reduce unions. Following the mid 1980s, Korean women began to unionize and the Nike manufacturing outsourced to Indonesia, where the female workers are more satisfied with their wages. Many companies, such as Nike, continue to exploit women for their cheap labor in order to maximize their profits at minimal
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