On Mar 27, 2007, at 11:08 AM, Jim Straub wrote:
> This would explain wal-mart's interest in the whole thing, but not
> stern's.
Stern wants desperately to be taken seriously by CEOs and the business press. No doubt Scott and Dach understand this and saw him as a big fat sitting duck with a target painted on his back.
What does labor get out of this alliance? Not much, I'd guess. Stern is not approach WMT from anything like a position of strength (see sitting duck reference, above). WMT has lots of power, a huge PR budget, and very skilled flacks. In his interview with The American Prospect Online that I posted here yesterday, Stern admitted that he had no idea what WMT wanted as a health insurance program - he may be lying about that because you can imagine that it's some version of the Massachusetts plan. (He praised ArnieCare in the interview, which is a crock.) His claim that we can all just get together and solve the problem pragmatically is Perot-like in its idiocy.
This NYer piece, with that quote about co-opting NGOs, pretty much closes the debate on what's going on with this weird alliance. Stern may think he's a partner - or, more grandly, he may think he's using WMT - but he's become a PR tool for one of the cleverest corporations in business history.
Doug