ASDA

The mother of a young stroke victim was outraged to be fined £20 fine for parking in a disabled bay at a supermarket. A warden slapped a ticket on Claudia Love's car as she shopped at the Asda store in Middleton Street, Long Eaton, with her six-year-old daughter, Rhianne.

The youngster suffered a severe stroke when she was just 16 months old and is also epileptic. She finds it hard to talk and her right side is very weak. When her mother struggled back to the car with her shopping, she was horrified to find a ticket on her windscreen.

The mum-of-two could not see a parking attendant in the car park and instead rang the telephone helpline on the ticket, but was told by an operator she must pay the fine. After intervention from the Evening Telegraph, Asda said it will revoke the ticket if Ms Love returns to the store, as she had a genuine reason for parking in a disabled bay.

The disabled parking space used by Miss Love is reserved for Blue Badge holders, but confusion exists over exactly who is eligible for one, as each local authority can implement its own minimum age restrictions. In Derby, the policy is that Blue Badges can now be applied for when a child reaches two.

The Asda car park at Long Eaton used to be pay and display, but it now offers three hours' free parking with disabled and mother and toddler spaces. The area is marshalled by store staff and tickets are issued if overdue parking takes place. Fines start at £20 and increase if they are not paid on time.

Supermarkets operate different policies for policing where shoppers can park in store car parks. Asda, in Middleton Street, Long Eaton, has disabled and mother and toddler parking bays. Because it is a town-based store it is marshalled by staff and fines of £20 issued for incorrect parking.

Somerfield, in Osmaston Road, Derby, does not own its car park, which is operated by the council. Parking is free and there are no distinguished disabled or parent parking spaces.

Sainsbury's, in Kingsway Retail Park, Derby, has trolley wardens who check their car parks for incorrect parking. The store has disabled and mother and baby spaces and if people are seen in the wrong place a sticker is placed on their car window to alert the driver of the parking policy.

Safeway, in Victoria Avenue, Borrowash, has disabled and mother and toddler spaces. If cars are in the wrong place, the driver is either confronted when they leave the store or an announcement for the driver to return to their car is made over the tannoy.

Morrisons, in Sir Frank Whittle Road, Derby, has car park patrols and if people park in disabled or mother and baby spaces who are not entitled to, a notice is placed on the car window warning them about their wrong parking.

Co-Op, in Wollaston Road, Derby, has no policy on policing the car park and does not fine customers. The store does have disabled car parking spaces.(Source: Derby Evening Telegraph)

The Asda website proclaims that Asda stores are Stores of the Community ... playing a positive part in all aspects of local life and proudly boasts of its 'company investment in Britain over the past five years… creating over 25,000 new jobs.' Asda claims to provide job opportunities by opening new stores, but according to a survey by the British Retail Forum an average of 276 jobs is lost for every new supermarket that opens in the UK. In 2000 Asda was exposed in a Panorama documentary as a buyer of produce from a supplier using illegal and exploitative labour.

Fenmarc is Asda’s main potato supplier. Due to ‘Just-in-Time’ production methods, labour requirements can fluctuate depending on demand and for that reason many use agency labour, in this case an agency called FP Personnel. When presented with forged documents the suppliers, with deadlines to meet, don’t ask too many questions. The programme investigates the lives of immigrants, many from Eastern Europe, who are unable to enter the country legally, pay gangmasters large amounts of money for forged documents, and are then paid well below the minimum wage for unreliable irregular work and left with almost nothing to live on.

This is not an isolated event for Asda or any other supermarket. According to trade union researcher Don Pollard, "If you removed the entire illegal labour supply there would be, I think, a collapse in the supply chain in the whole food industry." When challenged on its relations with gangmasters, Asda spokeswoman Christina Watts said, "Bear in mind that we're talking here about workers being employed by employment agencies, casual workers being supplied to a supplier of ASDA. These aren't ASDA colleagues. We are three steps down the chain here." However, according to Professor Tim Lang of Thames Valley University, "In power terms the supermarkets are by far the greatest accretions of power. So they have proportionally more responsibility."

Asda's final comment on the matter was, "We can play a part, we are playing a part, with an ethical trading policy that's robust and demanding, but we cannot do the job of the government, the police, the immigration service, all the other people who are involved. We're pulling our weight, we're playing our part but it's complex and other people need to do the same." As the much-publicised tragedy of the Morecombe Bay cockle pickers shows, this is an ongoing problem that supermarkets and others are still failing to address.

In May 2004, 175 workers were sacked by Europackaging in Birmingham because they had joined the GPMU trade union. The workers had been forced to work 84-hour weeks on the minimum wage, often with no days off for weeks at a time. When the remaining workers went on strike, they were threatened with sacking too. Some staff remain on the picket line, meanwhile asylum seekers have been brought in to do the work instead. Europackaging supplies several major supermarkets including Asda.

Tony Burke, Deputy General Secretary of the GPMU said, "The treatment of our members there is utterly appalling. This is exploitation of British citizens just because English in not their first language and some of them do not speak much English at all. Now, if what is being alleged about taking on asylum seekers is true, that's a whole new ball game. It is highly illegal and dangerous for those individuals, and supermarkets ... need to know of these circumstances as soon as possible.” An Oxfam report, Trading Away our Rights: Women working in global supply chains, specifically mentions Asda/Wal-Mart and Tesco as companies which exploit workers in the countries that supply their products.

According to Oxfam, Wal-Mart's preferred tactic is to nominate just one supplier from each category of produce, in a mutually exclusive deal. Unbelievable as it may seem, these agreements are often entirely verbal, making it easy for the supermarket to back out at any time it chooses. The supplier is thus under a lot of pressure to continually supply low-cost, high-quality produce (and, of course, all of the same size, shape and colour...) for the season. This informality also means that supermarkets can delay payments, often a problem for a supplier working on a tight budget. A Chilean exporter dealing with Asda and Tesco is quoted as saying, "They are interested exclusively in their own business, they do not want me to sell to another supermarket... If I want to, I am told, 'Well, stay with them, then.”'

Many UK supermarkets have also adopted the Ethical Trading Initiative, which deals more specifically with labour standards. However, some inspections only cover packhouses and not farms. Supermarkets often claim their supply chains are too complicated to find and inspect all the farms (even though they keep reducing the number of farms they deal with) another intrinsic problem with being a supermarket). Even when inspections do take place, it seems they are often no more than token gestures involving checklists, with no involvement of workers and insufficient attention to the concerns of women and temporary workers. According to a wine grape farmer in South Africa, "People visit the farm, but it is a waste of time. No goals were set, there was no checking to see whether we were complying with the ETI's requirements." Another said farm checks were 'mostly just questionnaires.'

Wal-Mart has its own 'code of conduct' for its international suppliers. However, it refuses to disclose any factory names and addresses, making any independent monitoring of its practices very difficult. The National Labor Committee in the US did manage to track down a factory producing toys for export to Wal-Mart; none of the workers they spoke to were even aware that the company had a code of conduct. Wal-Mart has become famous as a bad employer. The company policy of temporary employment means it does not have to care about the long term consequences of the way in which it treats its employees. Management rules worked out by the company advise keeping an employee at work only if he or she can be fully used, if not the worker is asked to leave. If there is a job which needs more time than specified in a contract then the workers stay after hours without being paid.

Rather than paying its employees a decent wage, Asda calls them 'colleagues' and offers them motivational tips involving 'Miles of Smiles', 'Pockets of Pride', and 'Going the Extra Mile'. Joanna Blythman describes the staff area in the Asda store she worked in as 'a little bit like being back at primary school', with wall displays including a history of Wal-Mart and league tables of colleagues' performance at work, with 'public declarations made in an almost Maoist spirit of self-criticism'. All this is inflicted on people who are paid £4.62 an hour initially, rising to £5.06 after 12 weeks (unless they're under 18, then they get £3.82, rising to £4.18), at a time when the minimum wage was £4.50 and the Low Pay Unit was recommending a minimum of £5.38.

Wal-Mart appears not to object to racial and gender discrimination practice in its stores, and this accounts for a considerable proportion of the many lawsuits brought against the company. A famous racial suit concerned the firing of a white woman who had a black boyfriend. The company is suspected of institutional racism. According to Bill Quinn Wal-Mart never develops its stores in predominantly minority areas. It's also worth remembering that a lot of the most exploited workers at other points along the supermarket supply chain in other parts of the world are women and black. The majority of fruit pickers and packers and factory workers in developing countries are women, often migrants and immigrants, usually on short-term contracts or no contract at all. For more detail on this see the Oxfam report Trading Away our Rights.

Asda-Wal-Mart refuses to disclose the suppliers of their own-brand products. In the US it seems some 'Made in U.S.A' labels conceal overseas suppliers. In 1998 an examination showed that only 20% of Wal-Mart goods were American in origin (the rest of the items were found to be from 43 other countries). After the Federal Trade Commission charged Wal-Mart with not identifying the country of origin on clothing items listed on its Internet sales site, Wal-Mart removed the items, apparently preferring not to disclose where the clothing was made. Followed swiftly by other major supermarkets, Asda is aiming for massive expansion of many of its stores without having to go through the usual planning application process. They do this by putting an extra mezzanine floor in the superstore, effectively doubling the size of the retail area.

As there is no visible change from the outside of the building, there is no legal requirement for the company to apply for planning permission, although the development often has a lot of impact on local retail patterns, i.e. putting many smaller retailers out of business. A Guardian article from February 2004 reports that Asda plans to install mezzanines in 40 of its stores. In most cases the extra space is used to expand the store's non-food products, putting it in direct competition with the high street. The same article reports that 13,000 specialist shops closed between 1997 and 2002.

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