"Our goal isn't to close Wal-Mart down. It is to make it a better, more humane company toward its employees and the communities it is in"
About this Quote
There is a tactical softness to Greenwald's phrasing that’s doing hard political work. “Our goal isn’t to close Wal-Mart down” pre-empts the easiest smear leveled at labor campaigns: that they’re anti-business wrecking crews. By clearing that hurdle first, he reframes the fight as reform rather than sabotage, inviting moderates, shoppers, and even uneasy shareholders to see participation as reasonable rather than radical.
Then he pivots to the real demand, tucked inside the language of improvement: “better, more humane.” “Humane” is the tell. It implies the current system is, at least in practice, inhumane - a moral indictment disguised as a modest request. Greenwald isn’t arguing about a line item; he’s arguing about dignity. The word also sidesteps wonky debates about wages and benefits by casting them as baseline human obligations, not perks to be bargained down.
The sentence is also carefully split between “employees” and “the communities it is in,” widening the coalition. Wal-Mart doesn’t just have workers; it has a footprint - on small businesses, local wages, zoning fights, public assistance budgets. By invoking communities, Greenwald signals that the company’s costs are often socialized even as profits are privatized.
Context matters: Greenwald, a documentary director, speaks in campaign-ready language because his medium is persuasion at scale. This is the rhetoric of consumer-era activism: keep the door open to reform, but make the moral temperature unmistakable.
Then he pivots to the real demand, tucked inside the language of improvement: “better, more humane.” “Humane” is the tell. It implies the current system is, at least in practice, inhumane - a moral indictment disguised as a modest request. Greenwald isn’t arguing about a line item; he’s arguing about dignity. The word also sidesteps wonky debates about wages and benefits by casting them as baseline human obligations, not perks to be bargained down.
The sentence is also carefully split between “employees” and “the communities it is in,” widening the coalition. Wal-Mart doesn’t just have workers; it has a footprint - on small businesses, local wages, zoning fights, public assistance budgets. By invoking communities, Greenwald signals that the company’s costs are often socialized even as profits are privatized.
Context matters: Greenwald, a documentary director, speaks in campaign-ready language because his medium is persuasion at scale. This is the rhetoric of consumer-era activism: keep the door open to reform, but make the moral temperature unmistakable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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