The usual batch of critical e-mails about Wal-Mart wasn't waiting in my in-basket on Thursday morning.
Wal-mart Stores Inc. held a U.S. manufacturer's "summit" in Bentonville the day before. I've covered politics in Northwest Arkansas since 1998. I can't recall another time when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. held a big event without sparking at least a few critical e-mails from liberal groups. These missives always proclaimed Wal-Mart to be an evil empire and that the latest event was a cynical ruse.
Now, before somebody fills this gap in my basket, let me post a disclaimer here. I've heard many good and bad things about Wal-Mart over many years. I'm not taking one side or the other. I'm just pointing out something I consider interesting and possibly even significant.
Those past criticisms never did slow Wal-Mart down, to put it mildly. So maybe the critics just gave up, I wondered -- briefly. Then I dismissed that notion. The regular criticism may never have had much effect but it didn't cost much either. Or so I thought.
Net surfing failed to turn up the expected articles claiming that the latest "Made in America" summit, to find suppliers in the United States, was all just a sham. So I tried political stories. We have a confirmed socialist running for president. He's challenging a former board member for Wal-Mart in the Democratic primary. Surely he had something to say. Not really, it turns out. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, likes to directly criticize the Walton family and their huge concentration of wealth. But the source of that wealth -- the company -- gets off just about scot-free, a search of recent news articles about Sanders shows.
I finally found something almost critical about Wal-Mart in a recent union press release. That said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn't deserve support in her race against Sanders because she once sat on Wal-Mart's board and worked against unions as a lawyer. Then I found news articles about how Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, sent out a memo about the same time to remind union leaders that it's against AFL-CIO rules to take sides in presidential primaries.
The most substantial thing in this search was a June 30 article in Buzzfeed. Two top leaders of "OUR Wal-Mart," which organized high-profile sit-ins and such against the retailer, had been fired. They are Dan Schlademan and Andrea Dehlendorf. They were replaced by someone more savvy with new media. That article linked to an April blog entry in the Washington Post. Turns out that the Service Employees International Union spent $15 million on efforts to get the minimum wage up to $15 an hour -- and many members wondered aloud why their union dues were going to support a campaign that wouldn't necessarily add one new member to their union.
Quoting sources, the Post reported that the United Food and Commercial Workers, the big sponsors of OUR Wal-Mart, cut its support for the group by more than half after new UFCW leadership was elected in December. Oh, and the new leadership got elected in part by making the money spent on such causes a campaign issue. Staff that used to work for OUR Wal-Mart have been reassigned.
The situation illustrates "the challenge of justifying investments in campaigns that primarily benefit non-members," as Post writer Lydia DePillis pithily put it.
Now, one can argue that a union spending half as much money but with a tighter focus is a more credible threat. Still, we're talking David and Goliath here. David was just handed a smaller smooth stone.
The union changes explain my lack of e-mails. They don't explain why Wal-Mart suddenly isn't much of an issue in a presidential race between a socialist and a former board member. I can't prove a thing yet, but I suspect Wal-Mart's plan to raise wages, its recent and decisive intervention on the Confederate flag issue and how it helped trim a religious freedom bill at the state level might -- might -- have made the world's largest company less of a villain in the eyes of the left. Add to that a long history of energy conservation at their stores, their recent drive to provide basic banking services at a low cost, and the fact that "Made In America" would benefit union manufacturing if it works.
I'm not saying anybody on the left side of the political scale is about to sing Wal-Mart's praises, but the criticism's noticeably more muffled.
Doug Thompson is a political reporter and columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at dthompson@ nwadg.com.
Commentary on 07/11/2015