Chritianity Today
Deliver Us from Wal-Mart?
Christians are among those sounding the alarm about the ethics of this retail giant. Are the worries justified?
by Jeff M. Sellers | posted 04/22/2005 09:30 a.m.
... As it has grown into a powerhouse with sales of $256.3 billion—more than the sales of Microsoft and retail competitors Home Depot, Kroger, Target, and Costco combined—Wal-Mart has become a lightning rod nationwide in local tempests of moral outrage. Church leaders (primarily mainline, liberal, and Roman Catholic) have joined grassroots activists fearful that mindless global market factors will steamroll human dignity....
Such anger perplexes other Christians who think of Wal-Mart as a family-friendly place and a company founded on the biblical values of respect, service, and sacrifice. Founder Sam Walton's autobiography indicates he taught Sunday school in his church, prayed with his children, and had a strong sense of calling to better people's lives. With the Protestant values of respect for the individual, thrift, and hard work, Walton was eager to improve customers' living standards through low prices.
"Is Wal-Mart a Christian company? No," said former Wal-Mart executive Don Soderquist at a recent prayer breakfast. "But the basis of our decisions was the values of Scripture."
Indeed, based in the Bible Belt town of Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart has a tradition of tailoring its service to churchgoing customers. It sells only the sanitized versions of hip-hop cds bearing warnings of objectionable content. Responding to a campaign by the largest evangelical mutual fund group, The Timothy Plan, to keep Cosmopolitan magazine covers out of view of Wal-Mart customers, the company slapped plastic sheathes over suggestive women's periodicals and banned "lad mags" such as Maxim.
Wal-Mart knows its churchgoing, Middle America market. When Target Corp., a top competitor, refused to allow Salvation Army bell-ringers in front of its stores last Christmas, Bentonville seized the public-relations moment. Wal-Mart pledged to match the amount that Salvation Army bell-ringers collected at its stores.
In addition, according to Forbes magazine, Wal-Mart has become the largest retailer of Christian-themed merchandise, with well over $1 billion in sales of such items as VeggieTales videos and The Purpose-Driven Life books.
Some Christians may be thankful for the values behind the Wal-Mart phenomenon, but others are voicing some of the unprecedented hostility toward the company. A biblical look at the retailer's labor issues may help Christians, among the one-third of Americans who visit Wal-Mart at least once a week, to discern whether they honor God in purchases and investments in the company.
Wages of Sin?
A common charge against Wal-Mart is that it doesn't pay a "livable wage."
Wal-Mart officials say the company's full-time hourly workers average $9.68 an hour, with a new, inexperienced worker beginning at $7 to $8 per hour. Wal-Mart's average hourly wage produces an annual income of $20,134.40, which is slightly more than the federal poverty level for a family of four ($19,350). Given that many "full-time" Wal-Mart employees work 34-hour weeks, though, the resulting average annual income of $17,114.24 falls well short of that standard for a family of four.
Are Wal-Mart wages sinfully low? Especially in the 19th century, Protestant and Catholic leaders made the theological case for livable worker wages. The industrial economy of the era was a human-rights disaster, prompting Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper to follow Pope Leo XIII's example and help spark Christian labor union movements.
In the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII argued that just wages should be determined not by the market but by that which is required to sustain family life. Pope John Paul II echoed that position in his 1991 Centesimus Annus. As Kuyper put it, "God has not willed that one should drudge hard and yet have no bread for himself and his family."
But does this mean that all jobs (flipping burgers, stocking shelves, etc.) should pay enough to support a family of four? Not necessarily. Theologians emerging in modern economies tend to emphasize merit as the primary grounds for pay, more amenable to market realities. In Biblical Principles and Business: The Foundations, Francis A. Schaeffer disciple Udo Middelmann notes that scriptural emphases on personal effort, contribution, and merit model the primary biblical bases for just pay.
Middelmann complains that "a world where choices do not have effects, and where different intellectual and material contributions lead to equal distribution of resulting wealth, is a world unknown to man."
That is, God creates all humanity equal, and we strive to provide equal opportunity to all, but Scripture does not command equal outcomes. ...
[I]it's hard to show that markets, governments, or Christian ethics obligate businesses to pay shelf stockers enough to support a family of four. If this be evil, then it is the free market that is evil. ...
<http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/005/17.40.html>
Carl