Wal-Mart's foreign labor practices get failing grade

Wal-Mart's foreign factories are not up to snuff, according to inspectors. Wal-Mart said that it performed 13,600 initial and follow-up inspections of foreign factories in 2005 where it contracts to buy clothes, shoes, toys and other goods. While the quantity was good, the grades garnered were not.

Although the most recent Wal-Mart report said that the company performed more audits than any other company in the world, a more obvious statement could not have been written. Seeing as Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer, shouldn't it have performed more audits than anyone else?

Inspectors found moderate to severe violations at 89 percent of factories in 2005, up from 79 percent in 2004. While labor violations and other kinds of violations at foreign plants and factories is nothing new to large American firms (just as Nike), Wal-Mart will most always have some kind of violative effect on some of the factories it contracts with to manufacture goods that give consumers "everyday low prices."

Those low prices are an cumulative effect of many things -- don't think the world is just a good place when you can buy fabric chairs for $4.99 and footballs for $1.88. The fat is trimmed somewhere, and conditions in foreign factories are generally the first on the list here.