October 22, 2006

Harvey and Bob Weinstein
The Weinstein Company
345 Hudson Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10014

Dear Harvey and Bob Weinstein,

Wal-Mart is America’s biggest employer and Lee Scott has untold power to shape the American economy and our way of doing business. As an entertainment industry leader, you can appreciate the reach that his decisions have.

Here’s how he uses that power: Wal-Mart pays poverty wages to hundreds of thousands of employees, misleads America about how little it pays them, and lobbies against raising the minimum wage. It even caps the wages of employees so that their pay can never go up. It takes in billions in profits—$11 billion last year alone—and pushes its employees and their children to use Medicaid. It discriminates systematically against women employees, and ignores laws it doesn’t like. It sends American jobs to China and elsewhere, then uses overseas sweatshops where workers are treated terribly. Finally, it lobbies in Washington against rules that would make our ports safer from terrorist attack.

Wal-Mart’s refusal to fix these problems and to live up to its responsibilities are the very reason Lee Scott is making big promises to clean up its environmental record. We will applaud real results on environmental issues when we see them, and put them in the context of Wal-Mart’s record on the things working families care about most. Listen to Wal-Mart employees who protested at their store last week about new Wal-Mart’s wage and hour rules:

Henry Gonzalez, the garden department manager at the [Hialeah Gardens, Florida, Wal-Mart] store, said, "People were unhappy that they were going to cut all of our hours, and some people in my department were even being cut back to just six hours a week. How is someone supposed to pay the bills on that?" (New York Times, Oct. 17, 2006)

Even the filmmaker Ron Galloway, who made a movie about his love for Wal-Mart, quit the company’s ‘Working Families’ front group last week because of the way it treats its employees:

I understand Wal-Mart has to find a way to grow earnings and increase shareholder value, but I don't believe they should do it on the backs of their long-term employees. (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 11, 2006)

Wal-Mart’s size and power bring with them special responsibilities to the American people. Lee Scott needs to be held accountable for decisions that hurt working families.

Our unions and allies around the country—including independent environmental groups—have dared to challenge Wal-Mart’s worst business practices. I ask you to challenge Mr. Scott to address these issues as well.

Sincerely,

Anna Burger
Chair, Change to Win