CRITICISM of Wal-Mart may have reached a tipping point, Liza Featherstone writes in Salon.com this week.

"Firing whistle-blowers. Discriminating against women (and, most recently, black truck drivers). Violating child labor laws. Locking workers into stores overnight. Mooching off taxpayers. Disregarding local zoning laws. Mistreating immigrant janitors. Abusing young Bangladeshi women. Paying poverty-level wages in the United States. Destroying small-town America. If you read any newspapers - or even watch 'The Daily Show' - you can probably guess which company has been grabbing headlines for these and countless other charges and offenses."

Wal-Mart, Ms. Featherstone writes, "is becoming nearly as infamous as Enron or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory." And the campaign against it "is a campaign against greed itself, and the current direction of our economy, in which corporations can do as they please regardless of the human cost."

Two large (and sometimes bickering) outfits have set up shop in Washington to pressure Wal-Mart into changing its ways, she points out. Both were started by unions, but after some years of trying to organize Wal-Mart workers, they have decided that - in this age of diminished union power - public pillorying, organized on the Internet, will be more effective.

Many analysts attribute Wal-Mart's anemic share price "to what they call 'headline risk,' which is Wall Street-speak for bad press," she writes. "That lagging stock price may become a critical pressure point for activists pressuring Wal-Mart to change its ways."