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Panelists both supporting and opposing retail giant Wal-Mart and its business practices square of

Wal-Mart is the largest corporation in the world. It generates hundreds of billions of dollars in sales each year and employs millions of workers both at home and abroad. But at a conference Saturday sponsored by the UCLA Labor Center, critics declared the one-stop shopping megastore was not good for America.

Held in Ackerman Union, the conference invited labor leaders, academics and politicians to discuss Wal-Mart’s business strategies and the company’s effects on organized labor, working people and the economy and environment, among others.

Some Los Angeles communities have recently been buzzing about such topics because of battles over Wal-Mart’s continued growth in Southern California, especially in regards to the contested construction of stores in Inglewood and Rosemead.

“As the largest private sector employer in this country, in the world at this stage, Wal-Mart is leading the pack now, but it’s leading it in the wrong direction,” Terese Bouey, assistant director of AFL-CIO’s organizing department, said during the conference.

Bouey and other conference speakers criticized Wal-Mart on a myriad of issues, arguing that the company causes wage depression, pays its workers too little, burdens taxpayers and damages the environment.

While the vast majority of the organizers, speakers and 500 conference participants were Wal-Mart critics, the climax of the conference was a debate between both Wal-Mart proponents and denouncers.

Ted Balaker of the Reason Foundation along with California State University economics professor Glen Whitman argued that Americans benefit from Wal-Mart’s low prices, which give people with lower incomes money to spend elsewhere. The two also said Wal-Mart is successful because it provides services that American people desire and said the company should be untouched by policies limiting its growth or sales “Now that people were getting a better deal buying toothpaste, carrots and soap, they had money to buy other things,” Balaker said. “Policies shouldn’t give (Wal-Mart) any special perks, but policies shouldn’t also give it special problems.”

But Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at UC Santa Barbara, and Jonathan Tasini, president of the Economic Future Group, said Wal-Mart’s low prices come with high costs in other areas, and that despite its smiling image, the company is creating wealth for the rich on the backs of working people.

Lichtenseitn and Tasini also said Wal-Mart’s effect on the United States and the rest of the world is detrimental because it ignores the human and civil rights of its workers and depends on taxpayers to subsidize its low wages.

“It is immoral that people who work full time (for Wal-Mart) cannot support their family,” Tasini said.

A Wal-Mart representative was invited to attend the debate, but the director of Wal-Mart’s California corporate affairs, Cynthia Lin, said the company declined the request.

“While our company would be pleased to participate in a fair debate, this conference appears to be, regrettably, a one-sided event organized by Wal-Mart critics, for Wal-Mart critics,” Lin said in an e-mail to conference organizers.

Scott Sia, a first-year math student, said he was glad he came to the conference and felt more informed about the issues surrounding Wal-Mart. After the debate, Sia said he hadn’t been convinced that Wal-Mart was good for the United States. Local battles

Some local politicians at the conference slammed Wal-Mart’s efforts to expand in Southern California in front of a crowd that seemed to mostly agree with the speakers’ points.

Wal-Mart currently has 57 stores in the five-county Southern California region, said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and is trying to spread into more Los Angeles communities.

Recently, Romero said, community residents in the city of Rosemead have been in a struggle against Wal-Mart, which the city council previously approved for construction.

But in an election in March, anti-superstore activists mobilized voters to replace two of the council’s Wal-Mart supporters with opponents.

“Right now in California, Rosemead is ground zero in this major fight against the ‘Wal-Martization’ of the economy of California,” Romero said. She said Wal-Mart burdens taxpayers because its employees, who do not earn a living wage, must still use public welfare services.

“Every individual, every taxpayer, every working family, every man, woman, child and baby in California is subsidizing Wal-Mart,” she said.

Chairman of the state labor committee, Sen. Richard Alarcón, D-San Fernando Valley, told conference participants about a recently introduced bill that would require more financial accountability from large corporations.

According to the proposed bill, those companies with 20,000 or more workers who rely on public assistance must reimburse the state for those funds.

State assembly member Jerome Horton, D-Inglewood, echoed other critics and said California’s taxpayers pay about $98 million each year to subsidize Wal-Mart’s health care.

“I believe that the taxpayers of California should have a choice, to decide should we be subsidizing the largest corporation in the world,” Horton said.

Horton was previously involved in a successful struggle against Wal-Mart’s expansion into Inglewood, one of the communities he represents.

According to a pamphlet distributed by conference organizers, the Inglewood city council voted down Wal-Mart’s expansion in 2004. Wal-Mart then introduced a ballot initiative to build a store almost the size of 17 football fields, the pamphlet said, but the ballot measure was defeated.

“It was not (Wal-Mart’s) goal to bring a store and jobs to this community, it was their goal to lower the standards of every retailer in this community to their level, and if that occurred, Inglewood ... would not have been able to employ its youth, it would not have been able to afford to take care of its schools, it would not have been able to afford to be able to take care of the environment, the roads, the congestion that would have been created by this super store,” Horton said.

“It was inappropriate, it was simply wrong for any retailer to come into any community and exploit that community.” International struggles

International critics of the megastore spoke at the conference of international efforts to unionize stores, raise employee wages and improve workers’ conditions in countries such as China, Canada and Mexico.

Paul Meinema, vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Canada National Council, outlined struggles to unionize stores in Canada. And Billy Hung, from the Chinese Working Women’s Network, explained Wal-Mart’s detrimental effects on Chinese women.

According to some conference organizers, 10 percent of all Chinese imports are exclusively for Wal-Mart and over 3,000 Chinese factories produce goods for the corporation.

Hung said many of the conditions of Wal-Mart’s workers in China are deplorable and many laborers work between 12- and 18-hour days for little pay.

Speaking through a translator, Flora Guerrero, from the Frente Civico pro Defensa del Casino de La Selva, Teotihuacan, Mexico, an organization that argued against Wal-Mart’s construction of a store less than a mile from Mexico’s Pyramid of the Sun, a sacred, historic site, scolded Wal-Mart’s effects in Mexico.

“The megastores in my country, in Mexico, not only destroy the micro economy and our environment, they are destroying our culture, our roots, our forms of eating, our uses and customs. And for us, it’s a type of neo-liberalist penetration, and some would refer to it as a penetration of North American imperialism,” Guerrero said.

“If we ask ourselves is Wal-Mart good for America or good for the world, we say no it is not,” she said. “We see it as a cancer, an economic cancer, a cultural cancer, an environmental cancer.”