Walmart turns a blind eye to factory safety
Bentonville, AR – January 4, 2013 – When Walmart's chief executive, Michael Duke, appeared at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in New York this month, a raucous crowd of protesters awaited him. Walmart was confronting reports of bribery in Mexico, a wave of labor demonstrations in the United States and, perhaps most critically, questions about a grisly fire that had killed 112 workers at a Bangladeshi garment factory used by several Walmart suppliers.
"We will not buy from an unsafe factory," Duke told the audience. "If a factory is not going to operate with high standards, then we would not purchase from that factory." But Duke's reassurances that Walmart enforces high standards in the global clothing industry appear to be contradicted by inspection reports it requested and some of Walmart's own internal communications: Just two weeks before Duke's vow, a top Walmart executive acknowledged in an email to a group of retailers that the industry's safety monitoring system was seriously flawed.
