Big Box Brother
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Big Box Brother Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich It reads like a Cold War thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across...
...Her latest book, "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy," has just been published...
...Her website is www.barbaraehrenreich.com...
...I asked if I could and was denied...
...This is the workplace dictatorship at its brass-knuckled best...
...As for those "moans and sighs" that issued from the hotel room in Guatemala City: Maybe Lynn and his companion were reflecting on the sweatshop conditions they encountered in a Wal-Mart subcontractor's factory...
...We've always known that Wal-Mart is as big, in financial terms, as many sizable nations...
...Three hours into this and still needing to pee, I was told that I need to write an apologetic letter to the company with the details, every detail, that we just went over and then I could use the restroom...
...Kenward not only lost his job, but faced charges of theft...
...Big Box Brother Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich It reads like a Cold War thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across the hall from his quarry...
...Along the same lines, Jeffrey Goldberg provides a chilling account of his visit to Wal-Mart's Bentonville "war room" in the April 2 New Yorker...
...But this isn't a John le Carr...
...Although instructed not to write down anything he saw, he found a "dark, threadbare room" with its walls "painted battleship gray," where only two out of five of the occupants even met his eyes...
...Because she still depends on Target for her health insurance, she asked not to be named, but she told me that Kenward's experience was not unusual...
...It was Wal-Mart, and the two suspects weren't carrying plans for a shoulder-launched H-bomb...
...When companies start imagining that they are nation-states, entitled to spy on, stalk, and imprison their own employees, then we are well down the road to an actual, full-scale dictatorship...
...They're guilty...
...Now you may wonder why a company so famously cheap that it requires its same-sex teams to share hotel rooms while on the road would invest in international espionage to ferret out mixed-sex fraternizers...
...At least the company spy reported hearing "moans and sighs" coming from within the woman's room...
...New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro, who related the story of Wal-Mart's stalking of Lynn and his colleague, also reports that the company's security department is staffed by former top officials of the CIA and the FBI...
...This goes on for about another hour when I say 'Look I have to pee, bad, can I go to the restroom?' Once more, I was told no...
...Finally, after four days of surveillance, including some patient ear-to-the-keyhole work, he is able to report back to headquarters that he has the goods on them...
...In fact, the Cold War thriller analogy is not entirely fanciful...
...But the illusion of state power is not confined to Wal-Mart...
...One of them, James W Lynn, a Wal-Mart factory inspection manager, was traveling with a female subordinate, with whom he allegedly enjoyed some intimate moments behind closed doors...
...Their crime was "fraternization...
...In general, he found the Bentonville fortress "not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency...
...My efforts to get a comment from Target were unavailing, but I did manage to track down a person who worked in security for the Chino store at the time of Kenward's detention...
...Justin Kenward, who worked at a Target store in Chino, California, for three years, wrote to tell me about his six-hour interrogation, in 2003, by the store's "Asset Protection" agents, who accused him of wrongly giving a fellow employee a discount on a video game a year earlier: "After about an hour of trying to tell them that I don't remember anything about that day let alone that transaction, I had to use the restroom...
...It may even have begun to believe that it is one, complete with its own laws, security agency, and espionage system...
...novel, and the powerful institution pulling the strings wasn't the USSR or the CIA...
...Or maybe they were aware of the man spying on them, and were mourning the decline of democracy...
...Unless, as Lynn argues, they were really after him for what is a far worse crime in Wal-Mart's books: openly criticizing the conditions he found in Central American factories supplying Wal-Mart stores...
...Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive...
Vol. 71 • June 2007 • No. 6
