Wal-Mart's Green Drive Damaged Long Before Mexico Scandal

沃尔玛一直在鼓吹其SUSTAINABLE business practices since June 2004, when Rob Walton, an avid scuba diver and chairman of the company his father founded, organized a meeting between then-CEO H. Lee Scott and two environmentalists. Wal-Mart was facing a deluge of negative press and litigation over everything from alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and immigration law to sex discrimination, with the latter having produced the largest class-action suit in U.S. history.

Scott came to the meeting simply wanting to get the critics off his back, as author Edward Humes recounted in his 2011 book, Force of Nature. But the meeting with Jib Ellison, a white-water river expert and founder of San Francisco–based consulting firm Blu Skye, and Peter Seligmann, founder, chairman and CEO of Arlington, Virginia–based nonprofit organization Conservation International, changed Scott’s thinking about the future course of one of the biggest companies in the world in terms of revenue.

在沃尔玛的一层楼内，阿肯色州巴斯纳斯·阿肯萨斯·斯坦维尔的总部持久，布里森（Ellish）表示，密苏里州出生的首席执行官，绿色将成为他公司的利润和形象。“李，你要记住的是，人们不希望你进入环境的所有这些都是浪费。你正在为它付出代价，“埃里森说，在哼点的书中叙述了。“如果你真的想了解这方面的整个环境和社会方面的酷炫，这里是：这是一个大规模的商业机会。”

埃里森用洗衣粉来说明waste hurts the bottom line. Back then, laundry detergent was often sold in 120-ounce containers that were about the size of a gallon of milk. But there was a concentrated form sold in a container about the size of a ketchup bottle. At the time, consumers bought a total of 1 billion bottles of detergent in the U.S. each year. If they were all ketchup-size bottles, transportation costs as well as waste would be reduced.

Scott hired Ellison soon after and pushed through those changes. To this day, Wal-Mart executives, store managers and sustainability experts are quick to cite this anecdote to describe a turning point in the company’s history.

沃尔玛首席财务官查尔斯华立整齐总结如何猜测tainability fits into the discount retailer’s financial operations. “Everyday low price starts with being everyday low cost,” he tells亚博赞助欧冠。“Sustainability is a great way to save costs.” The most important priority for the company now, he explains, is to maintain its “productivity loop,” in which Wal-Mart leverages its scale to reduce operating costs, leading to lower prices for its customers, which in turn feed growth, starting the virtuous cycle anew. The company earned $16 billion on $447 billion in revenue in 2011, compared with $9 billion in profits on $256 billion in revenue in 2004, the year of Scott’s change of heart.

安德里亚·托马斯sustainabi高级副总裁lity at Wal-Mart, concurs: “The productivity loop is about getting the absolute best cost for our customers, and sustainability supports that.”

Maybe so. But Wal-Mart’s business model faces challenges in addition to rising energy costs. Like any company’s, Wal-Mart’s continued growth hinges on its ability to tap new opportunities, but more so than perhaps any other company’s, its prospects depend increasingly on social issues as well as environmental ones. For socially responsible investors, who now represent almost one eighth of U.S. assets, the giant, everyday-low-price retailer is one of the largest targets now that tobacco companies have gotten their comeuppance and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the petroleum industry’s role in it have faded from memory. And the recent stories of long-running bribery of local official in Mexico have not helped the retail giant. Moreover, the issues that concern so-called environmental, social responsibility and corporate governance (ESG) investors serve to block the company’s much-needed access to urban and foreign markets, many of whose political leaders and citizens are also troubled by the company’s practices.

简单地说，沃尔玛是来自美国国内外的员工的利益攸关方的领先的弗拉克捕手，甚至作为全球经济疲弱威胁到未来几年的顶级增长。从那个角度来看，斯科特突然拥抱了八年前更可持续的商业模式远未完成。

More broadly, Wal-Mart is a leading indicator of what it will take for companies and investors to come to terms with the growing perception, and perhaps the reality, that the world’s resources are dwindling. As goes Wal-Mart, so goes capitalism, because if a company as focused as Wal-Mart is on minimizing cost can truly go green, so can anyone. But that’s a big “if.”

Don’t tell this to Wal-Mart. The company says it takes “a 360-degree view” of sustainability that includes suppliers, the environment and communities. Its greatest achievement to date, by most accounts, is its supplier sustainability assessment. Introduced in 2008, this innovation has been a green game changer, to hear the company and suppliers tell it. The 33-page form covers energy and climate efficiency, material efficiency, natural-resource usage and people and communities. All of Wal-Mart’s 100,000 suppliers in 60 countries are required to fill it out and take it to heart. On the back of that, in 2009 Wal-Mart announced plans to create a global sustainability index that will provide a consistent measure of every one of its products’ sustainability. Once formalized, the index also is supposed to alter industry and consumer behavior.

此外，公司从2005年的利率提高了美国汽车舰队的效率65％。在其商店中，它已经用LED照明取代了陶瓷金属卤化物聚光灯，每个灯泡的能量成本节省了约50％。此外，沃尔玛能够从加利福尼亚州的垃圾填埋场重定向超过80％的废物，它正在全国各地使用相同的系统。零售商还拥有一系列创新的试点计划，如其在巴西的牛肉可追溯性系统和抗锯齿努力，以及加利福尼亚州和波多黎各等地方的太阳能电池板项目。

Scott wrote in the company’s 2007–’08 global responsibility report: “We have found that there is no conflict between our business model of everyday low costs and everyday low prices and being a more sustainable business. To make sustainability sustainable at Wal-Mart, we’ve made it live inside our business. Many of our environmental sustainability efforts, for example, mean cost savings for us, our suppliers and our customers, so that in both good times and bad times, they will remain part of who we are.”

然而，该公司对大多数份的可持续性转换开始并以节能的节省。根据多伦多的企业骑士骑士的最新可持续发展排名标准普尔500家公司，在3月8日发布，沃尔玛在排名的能源，碳，水和废物的生产率措施中只有十分之一。税收;首席执行官平均工人支付;养老基金地位;员工营业额;领导多样性;支付与环境成就相关联;和安全。该公司没有制作全球最可持续发展公司的企业骑士名单。

If Wal-Mart were to be truly sustainable, it might have to upend its business model, notwithstanding Scott’s assertions. True sustainability requires Wal-Mart to make significant investments to reach 100 percent renewable-energy dependency. It also demands similar expenditures on behalf of associates (what it calls store workers), suppliers and customers so that they live subsidy-free lives — not for their sakes but for the company’s own. All of this means higher costs, at least at the outset.

与此同时，沃尔玛的收入增长表现出放缓的迹象。直到10月31日结束的季度，脚踏交通和同店销售额已下降两年。2011年净新商店开口的百分比百分比为1.5％，而2004年为15％。杂货现在占整体销售额的50％以上，而服装已从2007年的10％下降到目前的10％至7％。由于食物的成本比服装更难以控制，因此沃尔玛销售组合的趋势可能使公司更加难以维持其日常低价模型，而不会看到边缘缩小。

It doesn’t help that the company is up against two long-term structural shifts in the retail industry. The first is technology’s ability to provide price transparency via mobile phones. “Considering half of America is going to a Wal-Mart store, technology is going to play a role in pricing going forward,” says Credit Suisse retail analyst Michael Exstein in New York. Wal-Mart’s “customer may be a lower-end customer, but they have the same access to the price look-up technology as anyone else does, and they are using it.” He adds that it is an open question whether Wal-Mart can grow without hurting its margins. E-commerce as a percentage of total sales in the U.S. jumped from 3.5 percent in fourth-quarter 2007 to 4.8 percent in the last quarter of 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend will only continue upward as technology’s ability to provide price transparency improves. The company is trying to counter the threat that e-commerce poses by exploiting it for its own purposes, but the success of this effort remains uncertain.

Second, rising energy costs are a threat to the revenue side as well as to the cost side of Wal-Mart’s equation. Gasoline prices show no sign of easing, and the company’s stores are currently located outside city centers. Furthermore, competitors that offer better discounts are popping up in high-density areas.

At the same time, Wal-Mart’s tactic of tapping the lowest-cost supplier — typically in countries like China that have lower ESG standards — and shipping the goods to the U.S. faces diminishing returns. The value of the Chinese yuan has been rising against the dollar and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. And given China’s growing attempts to reduce pollution levels and worker unrest, the costs of manufacturing will rise there.

Some analysts remain unconcerned, at least in the short term. When asked whether he takes into account Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts, the typically verbose John Lawrence — a Memphis, Tennessee–based managing director at regional investment banking firm Morgan Keegan who started covering Wal-Mart in 1988, when its founder, Sam Walton, was alive — says, “Yeahhh” in a long, drawn-out way that sounds more like a sigh than conviction. “We look at that,” he says. “They have done really well with all those initiatives.” (A handful of Wall Street analysts say flat out that they do not take Wal-Mart’s sustainability programs into account in their analyses.)

Lawrence is also unfazed by online competition. “Certainly, online is an opportunity for them going forward,” he says. The average consensus among analysts is for the stock to outperform. And it’s clear that most investors hold the same view, in the short run, at least; they are driving the stock price higher. Wal-Mart’s stock jumped from $52.96 on January 5 to $61.10 on March 28.

然而，即使是公司的短期前景也不特别是玫瑰色。沃尔玛的核心客户在美国 - 工人阶级 - 最近的经济衰退被最严重打击，并表现出几乎没有恢复的迹象。三分之一失业的美国人一年没有工作。工人阶级难以通过住房或信用卡利用其资产。

WAL-MART HAS TRIED AND MOSTLY FAILED TO SHOEHORN its stores into new but unwelcoming markets. For more than five years, it has struggled to gain a foothold in the big U.S. cities, where it could tap middle-class and perhaps even upper-class customers — the last places where it doesn’t have a large presence. Project Impact, Wal-Mart’s unsuccessful attempt to go more upscale by offering less but trendier merchandise and compete head-on with rival Target Corp., cost the company roughly $1.85 billion in revenue, according to Phil Terry, CEO of retail consulting firm Creative Good. Wal-Mart has tried to enter several big cities, including Boston, Chicago and New York, but it has largely been boxed out. Major metropolitan cities are home to only about 1 percent of its 4,479 retail stores in the U.S., chiefly because of concerns about competition and the company’s labor practices.

Then there are Wal-Mart’s less than successful international expansion attempts. Its foray in the 1990s into Germany, which gives employees the legal right to a role in corporate decisions through workers’ councils, is a prime example. After clashing with local retail union Ver.di, the company gave up on the country in 1996.

要肯定的是，沃尔玛在北美城市市场取得了成功。它最近赢得了在芝加哥，多伦多和华盛顿开放商店的批准。在去年年底，纽约市市长迈克尔·布隆伯格借给公司进入大苹果的努力。大约在同一时间，加州州长杰瑞布朗否决县政府，当地企业和工会支持的条例草案，这将使沃尔玛和其他大规模商品士在该州城市开辟新店。

These successes could continue, as governments hit hard by the recession look to increase employment and tax revenue. Wal-Mart has created a small-store format of about 10,000 square feet — a fraction of its Supercenters’ average 180,000 — and “pop-up” stores that fit cramped urban locations. The company has also made a major acquisition in South Africa that holds promise for overseas expansion.

沃尔玛一直在获取电子商务业务，如山景，加州的社交媒体科技公司Kosmix，驾驶网络流量并将其转换为销售。“这将变得更重要，对我们所做的事情更重要，”CFO Holley说。“你会看到更多地结婚技术，互联网和手机和商店。”

But it’s no secret that Wal-Mart is aggressively antiunion, which doesn’t sit well with some urban and foreign politicians and has led to a number of divestitures by socially responsible investors. The latest to unload its stake over the issue is Dutch pension fund ABP, one of Europe’s largest pension funds, with more than $300 billion in assets. ABP cited International Labor Organization (ILO) standards as its criteria for selling its €93 million ($126.5 million) in Wal-Mart stock last December. The ILO standards require companies to give workers the right to organize and to allow them to engage in collective bargaining.

“We have excluded Wal-Mart because of their labor relations policy that does not meet international standards,” explains Henk Brouwer, chairman of ABP’s board of trustees. “On the basis of ILO core labor standards, employees should be free to decide whether they want to join a union or not, and companies should not obstruct that.”

ABP’s divestiture is particularly notable because it came after years of extensive engagement with the company. The pension fund’s first letter to Wal-Mart was in 2008 and called for the company to abide by the ten principles of the United Nations Global Compact, which cover human rights, environmental, anticorruption and labor issues.

Over the years ABP has noted Wal-Mart’s improvements, including greater transparency, further development of its sustainability practices, the settlement of many labor-related court cases and more-comprehensive surveys of its store employees.

But it divested after Wal-Mart posted an advertisement at the end of last year for a new director in its human resources division who would continue to support a union-free workplace. “That was a turning point for us,” emphasizes Brouwer. “It confirmed the impression we already had about Wal-Mart’s position toward unions.” Wal-Mart has yet to sign the U.N. Global Compact.

Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter contends that the company does “what is appropriate” wherever it operates by adhering to local laws and customs. He points out that only 5 percent of U.S. retail workers are unionized, so the company is in the “mainstream” of labor relations.

ABP’s divestiture follows that of its fellow Dutch pension fund PNO Media in October 2010 and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund in 2006; both cited the labor issue. And ABP is just one of a growing number of money managers that base their strategies on ESG factors and think Wal-Mart has not done enough there. Even some top U.S. fund managers that are sticking with the company are seeking to sway its senior executives. New York–based TIAA-CREF, for one, has in the past disclosed that it was in discussions with Wal-Mart; it will not confirm or deny if it’s currently engaged with the company. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, another Wal-Mart investor, also declined to comment on its engagements.

Meanwhile, the latest survey by the Washington-based Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment shows that ESG investments in the U.S. reached $3 trillion in 2009, or 12 percent of total invested assets, a 13 percent increase since 2007. Total fund assets governed by policies with explicit ESG rules were $2.51 trillion. More than 1,000 investment managers have signed on to the U.N.’s Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) and its Global Compact, which represent a combined $30 trillion in assets under management. If this trend continues, Wal-Mart’s cost of capital will rise, as will its hurdles for producing shareholder value.

事实仍然是75％的沃尔玛店员工每小时赚到不到12美元，而近三利于2011年6月2011年6月的Wal-Mart工人调查，近2011年6月的沃尔玛工人通过华盛顿湖研究伙伴。沃尔玛在美国雇用了大约140万商店工作人员，使其成为国家最大的雇主。

Some activists think they are enhancing long-term returns. “We certainly believe that shareholder activism can reinforce to boards and executives the critical importance of sustainable practices to the realization of long-term shareholder value,” says Richard Clayton, director of research at CtW Investment Group, a Washington-based activist organization whose members participate in pension plans with more than $200 billion in combined assets. “Unfortunately,” Clayton adds, “it does not appear that Wal-Mart’s rhetoric on sustainability issues, both environmental and workforce-related, has been matched by its actual practice.”

EVEN SUCCESSFUL EXPANSION won’t necessarily sustain Wal-Mart’s profitability. Say the company makes a grander entrance into cities with its smaller store format: Competition will skyrocket, and customer service will matter much more than it has to date, requiring employees to be better trained and better compensated. “The next area of focus for Wal-Mart is going to be their own domestic associates,” says Elizabeth Elliott McGeveran, a Boston-based senior vice president who works on the governance and sustainable investment team covering U.S. and Canadian companies at $160 billion F&C Investments. “They are a really important part of the retail experience.”

Yet with more full-time workers, warehouse chain Costco earns a 27 percent higher operating profit per square foot than Wal-Mart’s competing Sam’s Club, according to John Marshall, New York–based senior capital markets economist at the capital stewardship program of labor union United Food and Commercial Workers. For salespeople to be fully productive, ESG investors contend, they must have a higher degree of knowledge than their competition, which will mean higher wages for some. Also, the investors say, store employees should work as teams, but that requires a relatively small pay gap between manager and sales staff. Although Wal-Mart doesn’t disclose its workers’ salaries, its pay structure is thought to be much more highly stratified than that of its competition.

F＆C Investments'cmgeveran表示，“沃尔玛需要对成本保持压力，但它需要以不牺牲工人的经验为代价的方式进行压力。”

性别歧视是管理和员工之间的另一个争论。在拖累十年的多元化美元诉讼中，终于终于驳回了美国最高法院的美国最高法院，该公司被指控对妇女的全国性的工资歧视。原告，代表160万现任和前女性员工，声称，歧视导致他们的薪酬明显减少，而不是男性同行。

法院裁定原告没有足够的证据作为课程诉讼。在一个不同意见的意见中，Ruth Bader Ginsburg认为没有正式的规则，沃尔玛经理可能是“他们不知道的偏见偏见”。投诉不太可能消失，而是预计将分为较小的案例。一个由1月27日提交的女性联系人，主要是在五个南方国家。

The class-action suit is not the first time the retailing giant, which employs about 2.2 million associates in 27 countries, has come under scrutiny for its labor practices. In 2005 the Public Broadcasting Service reported the high number of Wal-Mart employees’ children who qualify for government lunches because their parents live below the working-poverty line. There has been a separate discrimination complaint from minorities who work at the company. In the U.S., Wal-Mart store employees include more than 255,000 African-Americans and 169,000 Hispanics.

Wal-Mart suffers from “reasonably frequent allegations of unequal employment practices of discrimination against mainly women and ethnic minorities,” says Tim Macready, Sydney-based chief investment officer of $600 million investment manager Christian Super. For two years Wal-Mart has been on Christian Super’s watch; it remains on the list for two reasons, both related to labor issues: the sex-discrimination lawsuits and the company’s oversight of supplier labor standards.

医疗保健福利,或洛杉矶ck thereof, continue to be a concern. Over the years the retailer has yo-yoed on its health care policy. Last October, with costs rising, the company cut benefits for future employees, rendering all new part-time hires who work less than 24 hours a week ineligible for health insurance. It also disallowed new store employees who work between 24 and 33 hours a week from insuring their spouses. In addition, premiums for the most popular health care plan rose by 36 percent this year. “The current health care system is unsustainable for everyone, and, like other businesses, we’ve had to make choices we wish we didn’t have to make,” says spokesman Rossiter.

Says F&C’s McGeveran, “Wal-Mart carries quite a heavy burden and a poor reputation related to its workers, and I think that’s a problem.”

威尔玛被姗姗来迟地解决了一些问题。它颁布了减少员工营业额的措施，并增加了其员工调查的数量。自2011年初以来，该公司已授予100多万自由健康筛查，并考虑扩大其155个独立拥有的步入诊所所提供的服务，这可能是其员工的医疗保健费用的方式。这种扩张也可以带来更多的客户。

The retailer is also trying to make food more healthy and healthy food more affordable. In January 2011 it started to reduce sodium in the groceries it sells by 5 percent and ban all trans fats in thousands of prepackaged foods. It also has pledged to reduce price premiums on certain healthy products, saving customers an estimated $1 billion a year. “We think a mother shouldn’t have to pay more for organic and sustainable products for her family,” says CFO Holley. “We work with farmers locally and regionally for sustainable farming. And by the way, if it’s grown locally, it’s a lot quicker and easier and cheaper to get the produce into our stores.”

与此同时，该公司采取了进一步的措施来解决妇女问题的担忧。九月，沃尔玛以200亿美元的价格开展了200亿美元，为期五年的活动，以增加其供应链中女性拥有的业务。其全球妇女的经济赋权倡议将教育女性农民和6万名工厂，全球关于决策技能和200,000名低收入妇女在美国职业技能。这些远离这一领域的唯一举措。

“Our commitment to developing and advancing women — everywhere — is an absolutely vital part of our global business strategy,” says Holley.

These efforts have impressed analysts like Credit Suisse’s Exstein. “There have been so many initiatives in the past two years,” he says. “They are acting like a 21st-century company, when I would argue that for most of the 20th century they acted like a 19th-century company in terms of what socially was expected of them, and they are trying to lead on some of these topics.”

AT FIRST GLANCE, WAL-MART'S recent operating performance calls to mind the glory days. In the third quarter of fiscal-year 2012, which ended on October 31, it recorded its first increase in same-store revenue year-over-year after declines going back nine consecutive quarters. Same-store revenue was also up for the most recent quarter, ended January 31. The improvement in same-store sales reflects several moves.

在2010年晚些时候开始,沃尔玛重新10 000 products to its stores — 10 percent of the inventory at its Supercenters — including plus-size clothing, accessories and traditional items like fishing and hunting gear. It also reintroduced what it calls “actionality,” whereby the company features products like prepackaged foods ranging from dried dates to doughnuts, or a complete meal set, in the center of the aisles, to highlight a sale or an idea. There, for example, a customer might find in one display all the items needed to bake a cake: flour, sugar, baking soda, frosting, aluminum pans and birthday candles or holiday decorations.

Wal-Mart also brought back layaway payments during the past holiday season. Between October 17 and December 16, customers had the option of putting 10 percent down on a total purchase price of more than $50, for a $5 nonrefundable fee. Although CFO Holley would not give the numbers, store managers II spoke with said this turned out to be a highly popular option for the retailer’s customers and associates alike, especially for expensive items like LG’s 32-inch LCD television and the Apple iPad.

但是这一切都只是为了长远来帮助沃尔玛。很多取决于其基于南非桑顿的公开交易的超市连锁店收购Massmart的命运。沃尔玛于2011年6月购买了51％的股份，该交易是上个月最终确定的。

For Wal-Mart this acquisition points the way forward abroad, not only in South Africa but in Africa as a whole, and not only in product sales but in supplies. It will take decades for Africa to develop economically to the point where China is now, and that could help sustain Wal-Mart’s low-cost sourcing model. Says Jeff Davis, senior vice president and treasurer of Wal-Mart: “The culture of Massmart is very similar to the culture of Wal-Mart.”

沃尔玛赢得了南非政府的批准，因为它正在继续Massmart的环境努力，因为它建立了100万兰特（1300万美元）的基金，以利用当地的供应商网络。南非在ESG问题周围实施了更全面的法律标准，而不是一些发达市场。例如，法律要求其养老基金考虑“任何可能重大影响基金资产的可持续长期绩效的任何因素，包括环境，社会和治理特征的因素。”即便如此，南非服务业工人，南非商业，餐饮和盟友联盟的大型南非联盟也采取了法律行动，反对交易，并要求政府为当地供应商设定了更高的采购标准。尽管南非申诉法院上个月批准合并，但联盟表示，如果目前的行动失败，它将追求其他法律途径。

警告Saccaw的发言人Mike Abrahams，“我们预计沃尔玛打算朝着协议，工人权利，雇佣合同，福利，工资和相关问题的侵蚀。”

根据南非监管机构的收购的条款，目前的劳动协议必须保持三年三年。

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart laid out between $13 billion and $14 billion worldwide on acquisitions and capital expenditures during the fiscal year ended January 31 — before spending anything on ESG issues. With sales growth expected to continue at its recent pace of 5 to 7 percent in the year ahead, further sustainability efforts could soon hurt the bottom line.

At the same time, the number of ESG investors is only likely to grow. Behemoths BlackRock, with $3.5 trillion in assets under management, and Fidelity Investments, with $1.5 trillion, are two large U.S. money managers that are said to be considering integrating ESG factors into their normal investment processes for certain fund groups.

1月份，$ 1.3亿元债券巨型太平洋投资管理公司签署了U.N.的PRI和全球契约。基于斯德哥尔摩的ESG咨询公司GES投资服务有70个客户在资产中有70亿欧元，建议客户与沃尔玛一起参与或排除它，因为劳动问题。

并非所有ESG投资者都关注了医疗保健等问题。伟尾资本管理首席执行官Rich Donovan是一家以纽约的对冲基金投资，投资于留意残疾人的公司，具有他的疑虑。“公司的重要成功因素之一是人力资源，您希望保持其富有成效;你想让他们保持健康，“Donovan说。他说，如果医疗保健伤害了沃尔玛雇用人的能力，“这是你绝对应该看的东西。”但是，他补充说，“我怀疑医疗保健福利会对股东价值产生影响。”

Other ESG investors see the health care and other social issues in much broader terms. David Schick, an analyst for securities firm Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. in Baltimore, for one, says his research team has become more attuned to social questions and how consumers view labor issues. “When you’re Wal-Mart’s size, public perception clearly matters,” says Schick. “Whether you are looking at environmental concerns, labor concerns, or, gosh, the color of your logo, they matter.”

Wal-Mart is finally aware of the problem. Whether it can solve it is an open question. • •