Are you stupid? WalMart Does Not "BUY AMERICAN"

cool shit

I boycott walmart on its christian status alone.

do not buy from there, you are supporting slavery.

chinese children are making your products.

12 out of 190 billion they spent..
seems almost insignificant.

godamn I cringe everytime I go into Walmart. I hate that place.

Plus they make you jump through hoops to get anything on their shelves. I gave up.

Shok what were you trying to sell them?

fog juice

Once you are in it's smooth sailing though.

Hey whatta ya know! We can thank George Bush Sr. for this surge in economic booms because he was the U.S. Ambassador to China!

I used to try to get an order from Wal mart when I was an exporter in China. The price they offered will be so low that only slave and prison labors can produce, and of course, those wal mart people knew it.

They are some mother fucking blood suckers.

Right on Hyatla!

We've allowed the big corporations to get away with slavery far too long. We need to tell the feds we're not gonna buy from companies that outsource to slave labor.

The American people hold all the cards economically on this planet and need to stand up and use their power of boycott to straighten this country and world out.

And your last visit to china was when?

I boycott walmart because of all the trailer trash you would have to come in contact with in there. *shudder*

global economy my ass!


these monster stores have killed small businesses

True, but unfortunately most people don't give a damn if they can save a buck wading through the aisles of shit at walmart at the cost of American jobs and local businesses.

I think the "made in America, by Americans" took a dump after Sam Walton died and his sons took over..

I guess I'll buy more stuff at Wal-Mart. Thanks for the tip.

Enjoy your shopping, but be sure to wash everything before you use. They are very possibly tainted with blood, sweat, tears of a 10 year old girl.

Made in China
By Hamish McDonald
October 18, 2003


When Australian mums and dads buy their kids a Paddle Pop or Calippo Frost at the beach this summer, few will bother to read the fine print on the wrapper. If they do, they will see, close to the seam or under a fold, the words "Made in China".

For the past three years, all iceblocks sold under the venerable Australian brand Streets have been made in a Shanghai factory. The owner of Streets, the Anglo-Dutch food and detergent giant Unilever, says no jobs were lost in the move. It's just that it was difficult and expensive to produce such "seasonal innovations" in Australia.

After three years, Unilever is evidently content with Chinese production - and why not? Industry sources in China say it has cut costs on these icebocks by 40 per cent, even allowing for shipping to Australia.

The same sources say it would be technically possible to do the same with Streets' milk-based ice-creams like the Cornetto without changing the taste or reducing food safety standards. The Shanghai factory would not even need to import the milk powder: the Chinese Government is vigorously promoting a dairy company named Yili in Mongolia as the domestic answer to Nestle, in an economy-wide drive to build "famous Chinese brands".


WHO can compete with China on labour costs? The fear being expressed in Minto is echoed around the world, and not just in affluent Western countries like Australia. Even Mexico, the cheap-labour neighbour of the United States, says it has lost 218,000 jobs to China since 2001, and more are going.

More than a year out from the US presidential election, China is fast becoming the whipping boy for the "jobless recovery" in the American economy, with President George Bush's Republicans and Democrat rivals competing to flay Beijing for keeping the yuan pegged to the falling US dollar and maintaining its cost advantage.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the president of the European Union, Romano Prodi, worries aloud about the "de-industrialisation of Europe". On a recent trip to Beijing, the Prime Minister, John Howard, was careful not to buy into this argument, playing bilateral trade as a "win-win" deal, with Australians getting cheap manufactures from China while selling ever-larger volumes of liquefied natural gas and metal ores. He is certain to play on this theme again when the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, visits Australia next week.

But with China enjoying a strong surplus in its dealings with Australia - it exports $14 billion to Australia, while Australia's exports to China are about $9 billion - the trade relationship is different to that of previous "lucky country" resources booms to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

The AMWU has a log of steady job losses in the past three years, many to China: 50 from Rheem, 900 from Sunbeam, nearly 800 from Email factories, hundreds from lift makers Otis and Schindler, more than 400 from railway rolling stock makers Clyde Engineering and Goninans, and 60 from Barbeques Galore.

Unions say metal-working industries are in such decline that Australian technical colleges are no longer teaching the skills for them. Chinese competition is now hitting the car-component industry, with potentially devastating job losses for South Australia and Victoria.

To understand why factory jobs are moving to China, look to Futian, a small port city on the steamy coast of China's Fujian province. In the Guoshi Footwear factory that makes 4 million pairs of Nike- and Adidas-look-alike running shoes a year, Zhang Ning, a 22-year-old woman from an impoverished village far away in mountainous Sichuan, is happy to be earning 800 yuan ($141) a month plus three meals a day and a bed in a cramped company dormitory.

Guo Qidi, the factory manager and one of the family that owns it, said his 2000 mostly migrant workers like Zhang are happy to work nine days straight with just a single day off to earn 40 yuan a day overtime. His Sandic brand shoes ship out for about 50 yuan or $8.80 each, about half the cost of the Nike runners pouring out of the US giant's tightly guarded factory down the road.

Further south in Shekou, a village turned city on the Pearl River delta just around from Hong Kong, three mates from Geelong have turned their tiny catering equipment business into a China-based manufacturing outfit called Volume Tableware that sells into Europe as well as Australia, employing 270.

-x-

The factory boom is creeping inland, meanwhile, as once backward provinces get into the game of offering tax holidays, cheap sites in new industrial zones and infrastructure. And always, out of deeply impoverished provinces like Sichuan, come tens of millions of young job seekers ready to work for even less than the official minimum monthly wage of 700 yuan.

"One of the flatware [knives and forks] makers we know recently advertised 30 positions at 350 yuan plus board, and got 300 applications," Montgomery says.

The foreign investment flow doesn't show much sign of slackening. With foreign direct investment expected to reach some $79 billion this year, more and more big corporate names are announcing plans to open new production lines in China. The South Korean electronics giant Samsung recently announced it was shifting all its personal computer production to China, following a trend set by Japanese and Korean makers of colour TVs and DVD players.

Like these consumer electronics firms, foreign car makers are rushing to meet demand from China's estimated 200 million middle-class consumers who have recently gained access to credit cards and car finance from Chinese banks. Following the successful launch of locally made Audi saloons by Volkswagen, German car makers are offering further up-market choices. DaimlerChrysler last month announced it would set up a $1.7 billion plant with Beijing Automotive Industry to make 25,000 Mercedes-Benz cars a year. A few days later BMW said its joint venture with China's Brilliant would lift output from 8000 cars to 30,000 next year.

At the ultra-modern VW plant in the north-eastern city of Changchun, the powertrain engineering manager, Xu Shili, says the Audi fours and sixes turned out by his 3000-yuan-a-month elite workers are "better than those we make in Germany". With car makers increasingly outsourcing whole component assemblies, and investment regimes in China and India becoming less restrictive, final manufacture in expensive, unionised home bases will become less attractive.

Shanghai has moved to tighten the supply linkage by creating an industrial park, "International Automobile Town", around a VW plant in its outlying Jiading area. The park has drawn in 180 domestic and foreign companies since 2001, with a total investment of more than $4 billion under way and a further $1.2 billion signed up recently from component makers like Germany's Kostal automotive electrics group.

With a glut of car production already seen in China, and world capacity already 25 per cent above actual production of 60 million cars, some of this Chinese output is already starting to hit foreign markets. VW shipped its first exports of Shanghai-made Passat luxury cars to South-East Asia in May this year. Honda is building a plant in southern Guangzhou city that will export all its 50,000-car annual output to Europe and Asia, while Toyota will build a $400 million plant nearby to make 300,000 car engines a year for export. General Motors is shipping Chinese-made Buick vans to the Philippines, and will soon export a sports utility vehicle engine to the US.

Under pressure from the Chinese Government and their own cost-cutters, foreign auto makers are setting higher and higher quotas for Chinese-made components. Ford Australia this year cancelled a contract with an Australian glass manufacturer as part of Ford's global effort to buy $1.4 billion of Chinese auto components, an AMWU researcher, Nixon Apple, reported recently.

China is now the world's second-largest producer of motorcycles, and is exporting into Vietnam and other South-East Asian countries at a profit margin of just 50 yuan or $8.80 a bike.

Certainly, China's manufacturing explosion is not all negative for other low-cost rivals. Its appetite for high-level components like semiconductors is benefiting producers in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia.

This year's SARS epidemic has also reminded everyone of the risks involved in doing business in China, not just from disease and disaster but political convulsion. "It's been a wake-up call for industry," says Dean Montgomery. "The big investment banks are advising their clients to have an alternative manufacturing base in case China gets shut down."

Even so, much of the new investment that would have provided jobs in places like Indonesia and the Philippines is now going to China, and remaining factory work in rich countries like Australia is under more threat. Even high-tech producers, like the US bearings maker Timken which moved into China in the 1990s at the same time it shut its Ballarat factory, keep a wary eye on their 3000 Chinese counterparts, and not just for fakes of their own products - a constant worry for foreign investors. "We see them coming up the quality curve as well," says Timken's Beijing representative, Jim Gresh.

None of the simplistic remedies being touted by Western politicians - a float of China's currency, the removal of subsidies and tax breaks for exporters, or the domestic market openings promised under China's World Trade Organisation membership - can do away with the fact that Zhang Ning and scores of millions like her will work in factories for 800 yuan a month.