Protesting Walmart CEO Mike Duke
Protesting Walmart CEO Mike Duke
DRUM leaders, members, youth, and community supporters joined allies to protest, hold Walmart CEO Mike Duke accountable, and demand for justice. Just days after the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh, where clothes for Walmart were made, Mike Duke had the audacity to come to NYC to speak on “Global Womens’ Economic Empowerment” when his company’s employees across the world, who are mostly women, who make less than $40/month; are not allowed to unionize; are not afforded protection of local labor laws/demands such as fire safety in the name of maximizing profits; forced to take food stamps despite being employed at Walmart due to their “Always Low Wages.”
Guardian: Walmart chief Mike Duke upbeat despite rough year for retail giant
Bloomberg News has reported that at a garment industry meeting in Bangladesh in April 2011, a regional Walmart executive said the firm would not share the expense of safety improvements to local factories, including fire safety issues, as the price would be too high.
However, in New York, Duke said the firm did not make a judgment call between profit and safety. When asked if the firm would pay its suppliers more and thus make it easier for them to afford safety standards, he said: “There is no conflict. We will not back an unsafe factory. This is not a price discussion,” he said.
That comment was unlikely to satisfy some of the protesters on the streets outside the council, some of whom had come to specifically demonstrate about the Bangladesh disaster.
Kazi Fauzia, who works with low wage group DRUM, said she saw Duke as a hypocrite whose supply chain exploited low wage workers in Bangladesh with little regard for their pay or their safety. “This is not just. Walmart should pay higher wages and they have to do more on fire safety,” she said.
WalMart, we will shut you down! In every city, in every town!
