Take the money and run: how food banks became complicit with Walmart Canada’s hunger producing employment practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT For decades critics have identified Walmart Canada’s employment practices – characterized by inadequate wages with few benefits – as contributing to household food insecurity (HFI). Walmart Canada also opposes unionization drives which would result in higher wages and benefits through the collective bargaining process. In a remarkable example of image management, Walmart Canada now brands itself as an important ally in reducing the HFI its employment and anti-union practices create by entering a partnership with the major food bank association in Canada, Food Banks Canada (FBC). We carry out a critical case study of this partnership that examines the contradictions between Walmart’s operating culture and FBC’s goal of reducing HFI. We conclude that by entering into a partnership with Walmart Canada and ignoring its own policy documents describing how low-paid work and inadequate benefits create HFI, FBC has become complicit in maintaining the structures and processes that create and perpetuate the HFI that threatens Canadians’ health. We then specify the implications these developments have for addressing HFI and the inequitable distribution of other social determinants of health.