Wal-Mart Employees Team With Occupy Wall Street to Protest Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum
Wal-Mart Employees Team With Occupy Wall Street to Protest Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum
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The art world isn't the only community greeting Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton's new Crystal Bridges Museum with skepticism. A group of Wal-Mart employees are planning workshops and educational events in half a dozen cities across the country on Friday to coincide with the opening of the multimillion-dollar, Moshe Safdie-designed institution in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Members of the Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Wal-Mart), an activist group dedicated to improving working conditions for the company's employees, will team up with branches of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Saint Louis, Miami, Oakland, and San Francisco to distribute information about the Walton family's labor practices and policies. "If there's ever a case of the one percent, it's the Walton family," OUR Wal-Mart spokesman Ben Waxman told ARTINFO.
The current and former Wal-Mart associates participating in the demonstrations take issue with the fact that Walton has spent millions of dollars on a museum while her family's organization, Wal-Mart, recently raised health care premiums and has capped salaries for many of its employees. "I have a problem with my pay being capped, but somehow there's money to do something of this nature," said Mary Pat Tifft, who has worked at a Wal-Mart branch in Wisconsin for 23 years and says her pay has been capped for six.
In addition to speaking about the recent cutbacks in health care, participating Wal-Mart associates will share their own personal experiences working for the retail giant. "It's very difficult to feed your family on poverty wages," said Waxman. "Many people at the Occupy Wall Street encampments don't have direct experience with this kind of hardship, so I think it should be pretty powerful." (This isn't the first time OWS has linked up with an art-related cause. For the past several weeks, OWS protesters have lent their support to Sotheby's locked-out union art handlers, first by infiltrating the auction house and then by protesting outside.)
Throughout the lead-up to the grand opening of the museum, Walton and other Crystal Bridges officials have been careful to emphasize that the institution is a completely independent venture unconnected to Wal-Mart. "I don't feel aligned with the corporation at all," museum director Don Bacigalupi told NPR. He noted that no one from the Wal-Mart corporation is involved in the day-to-day operations of Crystal Bridges, and that Walton invested her own money in the museum. Still, as NPR mentions, Walton's fortune is built on Wal-Mart stock. Wal-Mart's perceived connection with the museum is enhanced by the fact that the Walton Family Foundation gave $1.2 billion for an endowment, making the museum among the wealthiest in the country. The Wal-Mart Foundation also gave a $20 million gift to provide free admission to all visitors. Before Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas, was also best known as the headquarters of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Walton's Five and Dime, the original variety story that launched the family's fortunes, remains open in town today as a Wal-Mart museum.)
As Crystal Bridges holds its opening ceremony and Veteran's Day celebration in Bentonville's town square on Friday, another protest organized by the Occupy Bentonville group, which is not affiliated with OUR Wal-Mart, will take place in the town square as well. In response to news of the protests, Rod Bigelow, deputy director of operations and administration at Crystal Bridges, told ARTINFO, "The events on the Bentonville town square are about celebrating America, art, and culture and the new exciting possibilities coming to our region with the opening of Crystal Bridges. The freedom to assemble on public property is among the constitutional rights that make our country great, so those who have chosen to use the downtown square location are within their rights. But in doing so, it is our hope that the protestors respect not only our veterans, but also the museum and its mission of art appreciation, education and accessibility for all.” It is not clear whether any Wal-Mart employees will attend the Occupy Bentonville event on Friday.
Tifft said she first learned about Crystal Bridges after reading an article about the museum online, and is concerned about how it is being financed. "I've heard though the Internet different ways of informing people as to where the money is coming from, because it might be kind of a touchy subject with the associates," said Tifft. Most of her coworkers have not discussed the museum at work, she added. "I don't know how many associates are aware of it."
Wal-Mart announced in late October that it would stop offering health benefits to part-time employees and increase premiums for those already enrolled. In light of these cutbacks, news of the luxurious museum "is almost like pouring salt into the fresh wound," said Tifft. "Now they've got all this money that they're able to do this art museum with." Asked whether she would be attending any of the demonstrations on Friday, Tifft replied, "I believe I'll be working that day."
Comments
First, I need to say that as a former single parent and person once without a college degree (until I was in my 30's), I understand the hardship of many people in this country. I have struggled. I have worked crap jobs with crap pay. And I moved to Bentonville from southern California in 2006.
The article states that, "Wal-mart employees take issue with the fact that Walton has spent millions of dollars on a museum while her family's organization, Wal-Mart, recently raised health care premiums and has capped salaries for many of its employees." If you are not happy being a Wal-mart employee then work somewhere else!!! If you do not like Wal-mart for whatever reason then you can CHOOSE to not work there and not shop there! Go see what the pay is at Target or McDonalds-- I can guess it isn't much different.
Crystal Bridges Museum is an amazing gift that this section of the United States has been given. So many men, women and children will get to go to this museum, free of charge and experience the history of art in America. Please explain to me how that is a bad thing?
The article also says, "I have a problem with my pay being capped, but somehow there's money to do something of this nature," said Mary Pat Tifft, who has worked at a Wal-Mart branch in Wisconsin for 23 years and says her pay has been capped for six." Well shoot, I would also be miffed if I were in her shoes. But her issue has nothing to do with Alice Walton deciding to open a museum in an area of the country that will greatly benefit from it in so many ways (creating new jobs, exposing people to arts and culture, bringing in more tourism dollars to the area and so on). I am sorry if you do not agree with her decision but it is her money. Oh gosh, she is opening up a museum!!??! How horrible!! What a terrible way to spend her gazillions of dollars. Get over it.
It all sounds so dreadfully unfair and 19th Century----this billionairess spending her money frivolously (?) while the employees at the root of her riches go wanting, chained to their weaving looms. That is, until you do some fact checks. Fact checks which the union organizers and political left would prefer not be discussed.
Fact 1. As the previous poster noted, it is HER money. She could be spending it, privately, on a cloistered private collection in an art-museum barn on her ranch in Texas or buying 24K gold harnesses for her horses. And no one would be the wiser. We wouldn't be having the discussion. Instead, she's gone public. And what a great gift to the public this is.
Fact 2. Walmart corporate (through the Walmart Foundation) only donated $20 million to this museum. That money is earmarked to assure that entrance to this billion dollar museum will always be free. Free to everyone----visiting well-to-do tourists as well as hourly warehouse workers. And free parking, too. Sounds pretty populist in intent to me. Not to even consider that 20 million is a few drops in the bucket of all charity that Walmart corporate spends. Shall the organizers insist their employer suspend ALL charity? Shall there be no more Walmart Community Scholarships? Shall Walmart never again dispatch truckloads of FREE survival goods to disaster-stricken areas after hurricanes or tornadoes, for example? If that were to be, then I'd be first in line to protest because indeed the corporation would be greedy then.
3. The museum is not tied to their employer. The only link is that Alice Walton and the family foundation holds Walmart stock. Uh-oh. Maybe I should sell my few WMT shares (and I DO mean few)else they come knocking at my door questioning how much I give the Methodists.
4. This is the part that gets me the most. It's the math part (and perhaps those who can't do this easy ciphering shouldn't deserve to be making much more than chain store pay). If you could transfer foundation money back to the operating funds of the corporation (which would be oddly unprecedented I believe) and take 1.2 billion bucks spent on this and devote it to and divide it among 2.2 million Walmart workers but then also amortize that money over a few decades (as would be in a foundation gift, annuity or endowment) then it would amount to a mere pittance per employee per year pre-tax. Maybe enough to buy dinner for two at Cracker Barrel once a year (even with a BOGO-free coupon). Hardly enough to impact health-care benefits. I'd take a museum built anywhere, Bentonville or New York, over this alternative. Leave benefits and wages to the corporation.
5. If we must protest such things, then let it all out! Let's take on the Guggenheims for their tainted money rooted in the American West being ravaged years ago by copper smelting and more. Let's vilify the good of the Ford Foundation and insist that money go back to the assembly line workers. After all, wasn't there that terrible Battle of the Overpass thing with Henry Ford's henchmen?
If you dig enough (and sometimes with just a small stick) you will find questionable sources of the largess backing dozens and dozens of charitable foundations and their good works.
6. Walmart benefits are inline with other retailers of the same ilk. It is as simple as that. Target, KMart, Walmart, Dollar General? What's the difference? Not enough to discuss, and the recent ballyhooed (by anti-Walmarters) changes in health care benefits, in my understanding, bring Walmart more or less in line with Target. In other words, new part-time workers at Walmart will not have health care offered, yet Target NEVER did have such for part-timers. Current Walmart part-timers get to keep their health package. If that's an issue, then why aren't the protests lining up in Minneapolis at Target main offices? Sorry for the pun, but Walmart, being much bigger, is an easier, lazy-person's target. And the news would not be as titillating if one protests in a big, somewhat generic city where Target is. It becomes more 'Hollywood' and headline grabbing here in the land that not only inspired one of the key business success stories in the world, but also provided the backdrop for origins of the Beverly Hillbillies sitcom: Gee whiz, Mabel. Look at that hick woman in Arkansas blowing her money on Dolly Parton posters.
If you don't like art, then don't visit this museum, or any other. If you don't like Walmart, then don't work there and don't shop there.
The attitude reflected by this Wal-Mart associate is just foreign to me. One additional comment, I would like to post, not mentioned above in the previous well-spoken arguments, is that years ago businesses began offering something called a "benefits package" to decrease absences due to illness, make health care accessible by buying in bulk rather than independent policies and recruit or lure the best possible employees for their businesses. What was once a "benefits package" now turns into "demand by protest."