Do me a favour, 'k?

Alright, it's the weekend and you probably have tons of other stuff to do. But, if you have an extra 20 minutes (I promise it's really only 20 minutes), take a gander at the link to the right. The one that says "The Story of Stuff, with Annie Leonard".

It's easy to understand, has basic information we all need to know, and doesn't really preach at the end, just lets you decide what to do with the information she has given you. That's easy.

Please, please, please, if you do choose to follow the link, give yourself the 20 minutes and actually watch the entire presentation. She makes some very good points, most of us already know, but, for most of us, we need reminding of. Now shoo, go on now, watch and relearn.

Thanks.

something to think about...

With annual sales of more than $250 billion, Wal-Mart netted $9.1 billion in 2003 profits, more than twice the profits of its leading retail competitors combined, according to the company's most recent annual reports. Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott received a double-digit pay increase in 2003, his salary and bonus payments jumping by 26 percent over the previous year. Including the value of stock received, Scott's pay package soared to $12.44 million. But many of his 1.3 million Wal-Mart employees are paid so poorly they can't even afford health insurance.
Wal-Mart’s employees—more than 70 percent of them women—are paid an average $9.64 an hour if they are full-time employees, according to Business Week. Yet full-time workers, who comprise only about two-thirds of Wal-Mart's workforce, may be scheduled for as few as 34 hours weekly. Even at $9.64 hourly, working 34 hours a week, a Wal-Mart employee earns only $17,043 annually, well under the $18,850 federal poverty guideline for a family of four in 2004.
While 66 percent of workers at large U.S. firms get health coverage on the job, fewer than half of Wal-Mart workers do, an October 2003 AFL-CIO report finds.
Wal-Mart's virulent anti-union policies prevent workers from winning family-supportive wages and benefits. Unionized workers in the retail food industry make more than 30 percent more in hourly wages than their nonunion counterparts, according to a 2002 report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Yet when new employees start at Wal-Mart, they must first watch a video warning them against joining a union, according to author Barbara Ehrenreich, who chronicled her experience working at Wal-Mart in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.
By keeping its workers in poverty, Wal-Mart also impoverishes entire communities: When many residents have less to spend on goods and services, they can't support community merchants—and everyone's income and spending eventually drops.
Big-box retailers and supercenters such as Wal-Mart transform family-supporting, middle-class retail jobs into lower-paying jobs that often leave workers unable to pay bills.
With big-box retailers and supercenters tending to convert communities' union-scale retail jobs to fewer, lower-paying retail jobs, the difference in overall compensation, including wages and benefits, is "as much as $8 an hour," according to an October 2003 report prepared for the city of Los Angeles.
For every $1 wage cut, the local economy loses a total $2.08 as less money circulates through the local economy. If union grocery workers' wages were slashed to match the wages of Wal-Mart workers, their communities would lose between $1.6 billion and $3 billion annually.
If Wal-Mart paid each employee $1 an hour more, it could maintain its profitability level by increasing prices a mere half penny per dollar.

report copied from aflcio.org