Walmart has always been an uneasy fit for the bike-commuting, kitchen-composting, backyard-chicken-raising denizens of Portland. Coca-Cola is practically in the business of increasing the incidence of diabetes.” Commissioner Steve Novick, who led the push for the do-not-buy list, wrote in a blog post, “You have to start somewhere-and we might as well start with a company that is openly, notoriously and extravagantly bad to the bone.” Others in the city’s investment portfolio might be next, he warned: “General Electric is a poster child for tax evasion. Walmart “exerts considerable downward pressure on wages” it “significantly reduced health insurance benefits for part-time employees” by changing eligibility standards it “has focused on fast, low-cost production at the expense of basic safety measures for employees.” It isn’t clear what, if anything, the retailer could do to regain favor. In Portland, the city council expressed a diffuse constellation of grievances. In the past few years, students have exhorted universities to divest from companies that profit from coal and other fossil fuels. But if it reinforced the public revulsion to apartheid, the authors suggest, it may have hastened the end of the regime in other ways. A 1999 study of the anti-apartheid movement found that the divestment campaign did little harm to the target companies’ stock prices. The effects of such campaigns are hard to measure. Sweden’s pension funds sold their Walmart bonds last fall, and, in 2006, Norway’s Ministry of Finance excluded Walmart from its pension fund, citing alleged human-rights and labor violations.ĭivestment campaigns typically have specific pressure points the best-known effort, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, was aimed at getting companies to withdraw from South Africa to oppose apartheid. The fund managers also raised concerns about Walmart’s alleged bribery of Mexican officials-a scandal that the company has spent more than four hundred million dollars investigating. Last year, two large Dutch pension funds said that they would no longer invest in Walmart because of its labor practices, especially its fierce opposition to unions. city to formally divest from the retailer, but in Europe institutional investors have been rejecting Walmart for years. In 2016, when the last bond matures, the city council will be rid of Walmart investments entirely.

Portland’s Walmart holdings had represented about three per cent of its portfolio of roughly one billion dollars. The first of the city’s five Walmart bonds reached maturity and will not be replaced. Earlier this month, Portland began to cut Walmart out of its investment portfolio.

The walmart effect by charles fishman