Labour Takes on Wal-Mart

Labour takes on Wal-Mart

The company is already spending millions to beat back threat

From CounterPunch

By Joanne Wypesjewski

Even among its friends, few would say that the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is a radical powerhouse of a union. Yet alone among US labor organizations it has the honor of knowing that every day 2,000 people are warned of its cunning and muscle, of the threat it poses to individualism, free enterprise and the American way.

Those 2,000, on average, are the new recruits assembled daily for an eight-hour orientation preparatory to becoming Wal-Mart "associates". In addition to instruction in Sam Walton's life, philosophy and the Wal-Mart cheer ("Give me a W, Give me an A" and so on, including "Give me a Squiggly", accompanied by Sam's signature butt-shake), they are shown a videotape called "You've Picked a Great Place to Work". So great, in fact, that "unions have been targeting Wal-Mart for years.” Without early innoculation and regular anti-union booster shots, it's implied, any worker might be open to contagion. Alan Peto is one of the stricken. A cashier at a Sam's Club, (a son-of-Walmart membership warehouse chain) in Las Vegas, Peto has become a major in-store supporter of the union organizing drive there. If it weren't for Wal-Mart's relentless alerts, he says, "I would not even have known to go to the UFCW".

Behind the speculative hocus pocus that came to symbolize the American economy in recent years, there was always the sturdier and less alluring reality of the service sector. Enron was supposed to have been the dynamo and the future; all the while those distinctions belonged to Wal-Mart. While the Houston energy giant puffed up, then collapsed, the Arkansas discount emporium was piling up a fortune the old-fashioned way: squeezing the lowest prices from suppliers, paying basement wages and flattening competitors by sheer scale.

When it releases its 2001 year-end figures on February 19, Wal-Mart is expected to leap to the Number 1 spot on the Fortune 500, with 1.2 million employees and revenues exceeding $220 billion, making it not only the biggest retailer but the biggest corporation in the world.

Wal-Mart's executives credit their success to low prices, customer satisfaction and respect for the individual. They point also to the company's listing on Fortune's annual poll of "100 best to work for", the result of a random national survey of employees. Wal-Mart's website boasts that the company is "the leading employer of people of color in the United States" and "one of the leading employers of senior citizens and the disabled".

Yet most Wal-Mart employees are moving on out, not up. When Barbara Ehrenreich went to work for $7 an hour at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis for her book Nickel and Dimed, she did so to test whether the wage would cover living expenses and still allow her to pay rent after one month. It didn't, an experience that might partly explain why 700,000 new people churn through the company each year, representing an annual turnover rate of 70 percent.

Last December Wal-Mart agreed to pay $6.8 million to settle lawsuits in twelve states, charging its distribution centers with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. A sex discrimination suit in California accuses the company with systematically favoring men in pay and promotions, a case that could become a nationwide class action later this year.

National Labor Relations Board trials are either pending, under way or recently completed involving stores in Las Vegas; Kingman, Arizona; Newcastle, Pennsylvania; College Station and Jacksonville, Texas; Pueblo, Colorado; Grafton, West Virginia; Orlando, Florida; Alliance, Ohio; Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

There are two ways to consider that NLRB activity. Clearly the UFCW is galvanizing Wal-Mart workers, creating brushfires for the company across the country; just as clearly Wal-Mart is tying up the union in litigation, inviting unfair labor practice charges as a hedge against actual unionization.

"I don't think there's enough brainpower in all of organized labor combined to figure out how to take on Wal-Mart and win-and I don't mean that with any disrespect", an organizer with one of the more activist unions tells me. Look at its size, he says, its turnover, its popularity, its money. This is a company willing to spend half a million dollars per store to stop an organizing drive, and it has 4,382 stores. "What are its weak points? There must be some, but I don't think anyone knows what those are."

The UFCW isn't straining to publicize its Wal-Mart campaign, which began about five years ago. If, as some union people say, this is guerrilla warfare, then we're at the stage where the rebels are in the hills, making some daring raids to signal their presence but attempting no major offensives. At the AFL-CIO convention in Las Vegas late last year, Wal-Mart employees spoke from the stage as part of a tableau of workers in struggle, but when earlier I'd asked the UFCW PR man about the campaign, he seemed more intent on steering me toward an upcoming ladies' lunch on another, tidier topic. Unions don't favor struggles with no end in sight, and who can blame them? The UFCW has no choice but to go after Wal-Mart, if only to defend the wage and benefit levels it has negotiated with other employers.

In Las Vegas, UFCW Local 711, with about 7,000 members, represents workers at all the big grocery stores in town as well as some at Rite Aide and other retailers. Wal-Mart employs about 4,000 across the city. There's no small-town business left for it to destroy there, but its fourteen stores (including four 220,000-square-foot Super Centers, which sell just about everything) have an obvious advantage over companies that in another context would be considered corporate behemoths. A top clerk at Albertson's supermarket gets $15.63 an hour, plus full health benefits and pension. "Associates" at Wal-Mart make $8 to $10, at Sam's $9 to $12, in both cases with miserable health and pension plans. Against this, what is the competitor's strategy: consolidate, extract concessions or die, all grim prospects for workers.

Roberta West, president of Local 711, and Bill Meyer, of the UFCW International's strategic programs department, say that whenever the union begins recruiting at a Wal-Mart, management pre-emptively increases wages. It was an uptick in wages for new hires at the Sam's Club that prompted Alan Peto to action. He'd been at Sam's for about five years and hadn't so much minded that he'd had to wait 180 days to qualify for health benefits and one year for dental; or that insurance money was withheld from his paycheck the whole time he was waiting and continued to be extracted every payday afterward. He'd not complained about the $350 deductible (which, with the co-pays, discourages 62 percent of Wal-Mart workers from participating in the health plan); or about the cashier production reports that every week were posted to show how many items per hour he'd rung up relative to other cashiers. He always cringed at the Sam's cheer, though never felt impelled to petition against it. But he and other longtime workers did petition over the wage increases, which didn't apply to them.

After a manager interrogated him, he came into work with a tape recorder, was labeled a "disruptive force" and given a "D-Day", the highest level of discipline Wal-Mart metes out short of termination. In line with the company's other infantilizing personnel policies, the manager sent Peto home to "think about what you did" and to write an essay, or "action plan", about why he wanted to come back to work and what he would do to reform. The next day, his penance having been accepted, he checked out unfair labor practices on the Internet and contacted Local 711.

Two years later the NLRB is about to hear their case. In the interim the store's management has used every tool of the unionbuster's dark art: more anti-union videos, compulsory meetings, anti-union literature dominating the break room, an exemplary firing, excess hirings to dilute the union's voting strength, sprouting of an employee Vote No Committee, one-on-one interrogations, stepped up surveillance of pro-union workers for "time theft", even a "Vote No" addition to the Sam's cheer.

In the store's outdoor smoking area one afternoon in December a woman named Betty who works in jewelry was fighting mad about being followed, being timed on break; about strange things happening in her department, a $123 Christ figurine that she found on the floor, a 14K gold bracelet that wound up amid the trash, items turning up with the wrong price tags.

She was mad because, not yet qualified for the insurance she'd been paying toward for ten months, she had to lay out $1,300 for dental work; because managers had confiscated her friend Mona's chewing gum; because anyone on the Vote No Co could call in sick, come in late, chew gum and suffer no consequences; because so much was going on that was just "disgraceful". "We're going to win this thing", she said taking a last deep drag from her cigarette. "Now I better go before they fire me."

Driving away I noticed an ad in a bus shelter for "Radio Free Wal-Mart", 1230 on the AM dial, KLAV. The call-in show, put together by the UFCW, airs every Tuesday night from 6 to 7 Pacific time, and streams over the web via www.walmartworkerslv.com.

A recent program featured Marty Levitt, the former unionbuster. As far back as the early 1970s, when it was only ten years old, Wal-Mart was formulating its anti-union policy, Levitt said; he was the management consultant, or "what I prefer to call the corporate terrorist". Since then, he said, Wal-Mart has spent "hundreds of millions of dollars exclusively on unionbusting programs". Talk about a long-term strategy.

Back in Vegas, the UFCW's Bill Meyer tells me, "At times I feel like that Chinaman in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. You know, this may take twenty or thirty years."

Excerpted, with permission, from www.counterpunch.org.

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