Opponents of Wal-Mart to Coordinate Efforts

Led by Wal-Mart's longtime opponents in organized labor, a new coalition of about 50 groups - including environmentalists, community organizations, state lawmakers and academics - is planning the first coordinated assault intended to press the company to change the way it does business.

In the next few months, those critics will speak with one voice in print advertising, videos and books attacking the company, they say. They also plan to put forward an association of disenchanted Wal-Mart employees, current and former, to complain about what they call poverty-level wages and stingy benefits.

The critics have already begun lobbying in 26 states for legislation intended to embarrass Wal-Mart by disclosing how many thousands of its employees do not receive company health insurance and turn to taxpayer-financed Medicaid.

"We recognize that we are much more likely to win the battle against a giant like Wal-Mart if we act on multiple fronts," said Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club, which has joined the coalition. "You don't want to challenge Wal-Mart just on health care or just on the environment or just on sex discrimination. You want to pressure them on all three. This is an assault on a business model. We're not trying to shut Wal-Mart down."

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Like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of old, Wal-Mart has become a target because of its extraordinary size and power. It has 1.2 million workers in the United States, and its 3,600 stores sell more than one-quarter of the shampoo, disposable diapers and toothpaste bought nationwide.

The new offensive by Wal-Mart's detractors is far bigger than earlier efforts. Previously, the company's main antagonist was the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which sought, without much success, to unionize Wal-Mart workers. That union, along with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Service Employees International Union, has formed a new coalition that includes student groups, antisprawl groups and antisweatshop groups.

Showing the breadth of the new coalition, senior officials from Common Cause and the National Partnership for Women and Families have agreed to serve on the board of a new group that will coordinate the efforts. The executive director of the coordinating group is Andy Grossman, who was executive director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

"We're focusing on Wal-Mart because of the huge impact it has on each of the different parts of American life it touches," said Mr. Grossman, whose coordinating group is called the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics. "They do provide goods at the lowest price, but that sometimes comes at a high cost to society."

As part of this new wave of activity, unions are working closely with the attorneys general of several states to determine whether Wal-Mart is violating laws barring child labor, off-the-clock work and false advertising. The United Food and Commercial Workers said it would announce this month a new Web site that would seek to enlist Wal-Mart critics nationwide in the pressure campaign.

A while back, PBS' Frontline did a program on Wal-Mart called Is Wal-Mart Good for America?, which the right immediately smeared as "economic terrorism". The show laid out the ways in which Wal-Mart uses its size and clout to control its suppliers, including those in China. The company is not above essentially blackmailing suppliers by threatening to take their business off-shore, where costs are lower and the profit-margin for the company is higher. American workers get hurt as a result of these power plays, as do their unions.