Walmart: an (in)effective multinational corporation

By: Hazuk Asghar

Throughout the 21st century, multinational corporations have become increasingly important and have had an increasing presence in the international realm. These corporations are businesses and companies that have expanded their business activities and presence beyond their domestic borders in order to facilitate the production of goods. Specifically, Walmart is one of the world’s largest and most influential transnational corporations and has played a vital role to meet consumer needs and demands. However, its international presence as a multinational corporation has not had entirely positive benefits. Rather, under an era of globalization, Walmart has been an ineffective transnational corporation by creating and maintaining imbalanced labour relations among its employees, which reinforce Marxist ideologies through inequality and the exploitation of workers.

Established in 1962, Walmart is an American retail business that is regarded as the world’s largest corporation in terms of revenue, employment opportunities, and global consumption. Under an era of globalization that has increased interconnectedness and transnational activity, Walmart has expanded across North American borders into nearly every region of the world, including both developed and developing nations. While this may appear beneficial, Walmart’s international presence and activity has put its effectiveness as a multinational company into question through its enforcement and maintenance of unequal labour relations. As one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, Walmart has been known to take advantage of its workers in an exploitative manner in order to produce inexpensive goods that maximize its profit. One way this is achieved is through low wages for its employees. The company often pays workers below the minimum wage level and less than half the domestic median income, with American workers earning as low as $4.25 per hour and receiving $12 000 yearly. This has also extended to nations like China, where Walmart’s employees do not receive adequate salaries and are unable to receive employee benefits, such as healthcare and paid leave. Such actions are aggrandized since Walmart has enforced pay caps and reductions in worker’s salaries at the domestic and international level to ensure that it remains competitive in financial markets. Another way Walmart creates imbalanced labour relations is through its arduous and impoverished work environments, where it emphasizes market growth over employee satisfaction and well-being. For instance, in China, the corporation instills a system where managers make employees work unscheduled hours without pay, often in unsanitary and unsafe environments that transmit disease vectors. While Walmart’s increasing international presence can offer means of employment and income for its workers, these benefits are often substandard and fail to maintain equitable work relations between labourers and the company. Instead, the corporation has historically fostered poor labour wages and unsafe work environments.

Thus, it is reasonable to infer that Walmart’s presence as a transnational corporation has not been entirely beneficial. Through low wages, Walmart establishes a monopoly within the economy by generating revenue but failing to provide workers with financial stability and monetary compensation. This is aggravated through its recognition as a top employer in America and overseas, allowing the corporation to use its perceived legitimacy in order to garner workers and exploit them through low salaries. While this increases the corporation’s profit and efficiency, lower wages displace workers and create an imbalance of payments that fail to recognize the labour used to produce goods. Consequently, this allows Walmart to create an unsuitable work setting as it expands its activity within and beyond America. The corporation displays little concern regarding the suitability of its work environment, enabling it to focus solely on the quantity of output produced by workers rather than the quality of the conditions they work under. Ultimately, Walmart’s actions form dominant and subordinate relations in the economy where inequality exists among the workers and owners of capital in both monetary and social terms. The company abandons moral and ethical values and puts their desire for profit and inexpensive goods over financial equality in the economy and employee well-being in the work environment.

In turn, Walmart’s actions strengthen Marxist ideologies by creating a marginalized class of people whose only role is to take part in the production process and manufacturing of goods. Marxism is an ideology that sees capitalism as a tool that allows the exploitation and marginalization of workers. Walmart’s actions exemplify this through exploitation of the working class by conducting its production process in a hierarchical way that makes workers a group who depend on the corporation. Through the creation of two distinct categories of people (the workers and the corporation), Walmart ultimately makes it difficult to provide workers with autonomy as they become integrated into the working class and are exploited and mistreated. This creates a sense of dependency and subordination within the economy as workers become part of a group whose identity is tied to the corporation and who cannot make gains without the capitalist system they belong to. Interestingly, globalization has intensified Marxist relations between Walmart’s workers and the corporation. This is because in an era of increased interconnectedness and expansion of business activity around the world, Walmart’s presence has perpetuated the global realm and has conducted its business in a globalized manner. Consequently, this allows the company to incorporate workers from around the world and use its perceived image as an influential company to hire employees and dictate how the system will operate in terms of employee conduct, wages and salaries, etc. Ultimately, this increases the power of Walmart relative to its workers around the world and leaves them in a subordinate status, thereby reinforcing Marxist relations. For these reasons, Walmart’s actions as a multinational corporation promotes imbalanced labour relations that effectively mirror Marxism within the international realm of production.

It is the view of this article that multinational corporations and their activity are not necessarily beneficial in the international realm. While corporations like Walmart are able to serve the needs of consumers through the creation of goods and services, its activity within and beyond America places its workers at a disadvantage through imbalanced and hierarchical labour relations between employees and the corporation. In turn, this reinforces Marxism by creating and sustaining a class-based division between workers and the company where the work of employees is commodified, and they find themselves in a state of consistent exploitation.