My occassional clean-up of left-over stuff, just the antidote for Sunday easy reading–

On the Wal-Mart Front–Good News, Bad News: The Beast has thrown in the towel, pretty quickly I might add, on the on-line DVD rental biz. Netflix’s head start in the business tailor-made for couch potatoes and parents with no baby sitters was just too much even for the Beast—Wal-Mart announced it will start promoting Netflix on its own site and end its independent foray into the market.

And Good For Morley Safer: Man, someone has some balls over there at 60 Minutes. After Alice Walton wrote a nice little check for $35 million to buy a painting, Morley wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times attacking her, and, more important, the paper of record for not making any mention of how dear Alice came by her fortune.

Attack on Sweatshops in Turkey: Business Week reporter Aaron Bernstein had an interesting piece in the May 23rd issue on a deal between leading anti-sweatshop groups and 8 companies that will “devise a single set of labor standards with a common factory-inspection system. The goal: to replace today’s overlapping hodgepodge of approaches with something that’s easier and cheaper to use—and that might gain traction with more companies.” Though I do think Aaron is a bit naive when he says the experiment “will shed light on a fundamental conflict between multinationals’ desire for decent factories and their constant search for the cheapest suppliers.” C’mon, these guys—Nike and Gap, for example—don’t give a hoot about decent factories except when they have a spotlight shining on them that they can’t avoid.

Apparently, this deal gives the group a chance to blow the whistle on the suppliers who violate standards. We’ll see how the actual monitoring works in reality. And the bottom line is: this kind of monitoring is only a band-aid. It still accepts a system that, even if it doesn’t kill or poison people, takes advantage of their bodies for cheap labor. The real issue will be wages: companies usually only tell their suppliers to pay the country’s minimum wage while many of the anti-sweatshop groups are pushing for living wages based on what it costs to actually pay rent, food and the basics.

United Flight Attendants Forced to Sell T-Shirts: This is how pathetic United Airlines is to its workers. I already reported on the attack on the workers’ pensions and how a judge gave permission to United to terminate pensions for 134,000 workers. To dramatize their plight, a group of flight attendants put together a calender where…they don’t wear a whole lot. They are also selling T-Shirts. While it’s truly sad that workers have to resort to this, the flight attendants have got a political mission in mind.

Here’s what they say is their mission:

Our mission is to create a national awareness to the naked truth that no retirement fund is completely secure and that there is a definite crisis in the pension guaranty system. Make certain that your retirement plan is not sitting on a time bomb. Take an active role in your future and start now to plan for your retirement years. You can never start too soon.

Go ahead…buy some by going to here.

Coming Up This Week: More on the attack on AFL-CIO workers’ seniority; ideas about organizing, and the pension crisis.