February 26, 2006

Dear Lee Scott:

My modest advice for Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart.

Dear Lee Scott:

Pay your employees higher wages, give them better benefits, improve their working conditions, permit union organizing, and you will have a more effective workforce and a better company.

Do the smart thing. Make your company an example of the best in America when it comes to worker treatment. Demand from your foreign suppliers that they improve their worker's living and working conditions. Use your huge financial clout for good, not for exploitation and greed.

Talk to Ray Anderson at Interface, the largest carpet manufacturer in the world, about how you can take another path, a path that respects your workers and earth's resources and makes Wal-Mart a sustainable company.

If you continue with your present policies, your company will ultimately fail because it cannot sustain itself based on taking from the earth and humanity and giving nothing in return. Don't be shortsighted. Your place in history can be one of virtue and good, or it will be one of avarice and injustice. I fear your business soul is on the road to iniquity and degradation if you don't do the smart and good things. You may lose your job trying, but you will set and example others will follow.

I have no doubt you will ignore this advice, but you will remember me and everyone else who has given it to you when the time comes for you to be judged by history and, I am sure in your own eyes, by your maker.

Sincerely yours,

Stephen McArthur

1 comment:

DecemberFlower said...

Given the some of training videos Walmart shows to its new employees, I don't see anything like this ever happening.

It's a nice dream, though.