By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal
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Wal-Mart’s Manufacturing Recovery? (The Hill)
Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Damon Silvers says that Wal-Mart's manufacturing initiative is really just an attempt to make people forget the company's influence on offshoring jobs.
Sadly, even Wal-Mart’s poster child for its U.S. manufacturing initiative, Element Electronics, seems to be little more than window dressing. Wal-Mart sells Element televisions marketed as “American-assembled” at Wal-Mart stores nationwide, yet as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, the TVs arrive in the U.S. nearly completely assembled from China in boxes labeled “Assembled in the U.S.A.” Workers in South Carolina check for defects, install a memory card and put the TVs back in the boxes, to be shipped to Wal-Mart. This is not the kind of high-skill, high-investment manufacturing that will help rebuild the American middle class.Wal-Mart says it wants to be part of the solution of rebuilding our manufacturing sector. But to walk the walk, Wal-Mart needs to sell a much higher percentage of goods in its stores that are actually manufactured in the U.S., thus helping to stop the offshoring of jobs and creating real, quality manufacturing jobs in America. And if Wal-Mart wants to really make a difference for American families, the company should listen to its 1.3 million associates when they speak out for “$15 and full time” — an income a person can actually live on.
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