Bailey83221 (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bailey83221) wrote,@ 2004-12-23 00:38:00 |
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Wal-mart articles.
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.
Index:
California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber discovered that Wal-Mart was encouraging its workers to apply for public assistance
Fortune: Should We Admire Wal-Mart?
Economist: Retaliating first, Wal-Mart in Canada
Jacksonville, Texas Meat Cutters
Rocky Mountain News: Rally for union bid
Overview of Wal-Mart:
Criticism of Wal-Mart From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(much of the old links to articles has been moved to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart#E
How unionizing Wal-Mart will help American Workers (Click here)
"According to Cornell University’s office of labor research, 74% of U.S. employers currently wage moderate to extremely aggressive anti-union campaigns, Wal-Mart among them. While spokesperson Christi Gallagher maintains that the company is “pro-associate, not anti-union,” Wal-Mart does everything from asking store managers to call a 24-hour hotline at the slightest sign of union activity to flying a ten-person labor team into stores to talk to employees."
--From Fortune Magazine May 3, 2004
Ask yourself: Why are U.S. employers so against unions?
The 21st century robber barons:
Where do all these savings go, when Wal-Mart hires low wage workers?
Where does the money go when some Wal-mart locations gives its employees food stamp applications when they are hired?
To the Walton family, CEO's and founders of Wal-mart:
Forbes top 400 richest people in America FIVE of the top 10 richest people in America are Wal-Mart family members
The Walton family is as rich as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined.
Links and Articles
The Nation:
Down and Out in Discount America
California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber....was...tipped off by dissatisfied workers. [H]er office discovered that Wal-Mart was encouraging its workers to apply for public assistance, "in the middle of the worst state budget crisis in history!" California had a $38 billion deficit at the time, and Lieber was enraged that taxpayers would be subsidizing Wal-Mart's low wages, bringing new meaning to the term "corporate welfare."...The Wal-Mart documents--[were] instructions explaining how to apply for food stamps, Medi-Cal (the state's healthcare assistance program) and other forms of welfare....Public assistance is very clearly part of the retailer's cost-cutting strategy. (It's ironic that a company so dependent on the public dole supports so many right-wing politicians who'd like to dismantle the welfare state.)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Wal-Mart's Welfare Dependency
by Sally Lieber
Fortune Magazine, March 8, 2004:
Should We Admire Wal-Mart?
Some say it's evil. Others insist it's a model of all that's right with America.
Who are we to believe?
There is an evil company in Arkansas, some say. It's a discount store--a very, very big discount store--and it will do just about anything to get bigger. You've seen the headlines. Illegal immigrants mopping its floors. Workers locked inside overnight. A big gender discrimination suit. Wages low enough to make other companies' workers go on strike. And we know what it does to weaker suppliers and competitors. Crushing the dream of the independent proprietor--an ideal as American as Thomas Jefferson--it is the enemy of all that's good and right in our nation.
There is another big discount store in Arkansas, yet this one couldn't be more different from the first. Founded by a folksy entrepreneur whose notions of thrift, industry, and the square deal were pure Ben Franklin, this company is not a tyrant but a servant. Passing along the gains of its brilliant distribution system to consumers, its farsighted managers have done nothing less than democratize the American dream. Its low prices are spurring productivity and helping win the fight against inflation. It is America's most admired company.
Weirdest part is, both these companies are named Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
The more America talks about Wal-Mart, it seems, the more polarized its image grows. Its executives are credited with the most expansive of visions and the meanest of intentions; its CEO is presumed to be in league with Lex Luthor and St. Francis of Assisi. It's confusing. Which should we believe in: good Wal-Mart or evil Wal-Mart?
Some of the allegations--and Wal-Mart was sued more than 6,000 times in 2002--certainly seem damning. Yet there's an important piece of context: Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million people. That's three times as many as the nation's next biggest employer and 56 times as many as the average FORTUNE 500 company. Meaning that all things being equal, a bad event is 5,500% more likely to happen at Wal-Mart than at Borders.
One consistent refrain is that Wal-Mart squeezes its suppliers to death--and you don't have to do much digging to find horror stories. But while Wal-Mart's reputation for penny-pinching is well deserved, so is its reputation for straightforwardness--none of the slotting fees, rebates, or other game playing that many merchants engage in. Nor has it ever been accused of throwing around its buying power improperly, as Toys "R" Us (and, long ago, A&P) was for demanding that its suppliers not sell to rivals.
Another rap on Wal-Mart--that it stomps competitors to dust through sheer brute force--seems undeniable: Studies have indicated a decline in the life expectancy of local businesses after Wal-Mart moves in. But this morality play is missing some key characters--namely, you and me. The scene where we drop into Wal-Mart to pick up a case of Coke, for instance, has been conveniently cut. No small omission, since the main reason we can't shop at Ed's Variety Store anymore is that we stopped shopping at Ed's Variety Store.
Evil Wal-Mart's original sin, then, was to open stores that sold things for less. This was a powerful idea but hardly a new one. The basic discipline of discounting had been around for at least a century--honed by department stores in the 1870s, by the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs in the 1890s, and then by chain stores like Woolworth and A&P. Though founder Sam Walton added a twist--a small town, he realized, could support a big store--he didn't invent the rules of discounting. He just followed them better than anyone else.
Not surprisingly, that's how the people running Good Wal-Mart see their story. They cast their jobs in almost missionary terms--"to lower the world's cost of living"--and in this, they have succeeded spectacularly. One consultancy estimates that Wal-Mart saves consumers $ 20 billion a year. Its constant push for low prices, meanwhile, puts the heat on suppliers and competitors to offer better deals.
That's a good thing, right? If a company achieves its lower prices by finding better and smarter ways of doing things, then yes, everybody wins. But if it cuts costs by cutting pay and benefits--or by sending production to China--then not everybody wins. And here's where the story of Good Wal-Mart starts to falter. Just as its Everyday Low Prices benefit shoppers who've never come near a Wal-Mart, there are mounting signs that its Everyday Low Pay (Wal-Mart's full-time hourly employees average $ 9.76 an hour) is hurting some workers who have never worked there. For example, unionized supermarkets in California--faced with studies showing a 13% to 16% drop in grocery prices after Wal-Mart enters a market--have been trying to slash labor costs to compete, triggering a protracted strike. The $ 15 billion in goods that Wal-Mart and its suppliers imported from China in 2003, meanwhile, accounted for nearly 11% of the U.S. total--contributing, some economists argue, to further erosion of U.S. wages.
Where you stand on Wal-Mart, then, seems to depend on where you sit. If you're a consumer, Wal-Mart is good for you. If you're a wage earner, there's a good chance it's bad. If you're a Wal-Mart shareholder, you want the company to grow. If you're a citizen, you probably don't want it growing in your backyard. So, which one are you?
And that's the point: Chances are, you're more than one. And you may think each role is important. Yet America has elevated one above the rest.
The consumer--as an entity with distinct rights and wishes--didn't exist before the first mass retailers called it into being. Even then it met with resistance. Early in the last century, a mayoral candidate in Warsaw, Iowa, proposed to fire city employees caught shopping from a catalog; in the 1930s, 27 states imposed special taxes on chain stores. But as organized labor began its slow decline, a new type of political activity--consumer activism--came to the fore. Other countries passed laws that protected workers and the small businesses that employed many of them. But in America, antitrust laws were designed to protect consumers.
Wal-Mart swore fealty to the consumer and rode its coattails straight to the top. Now we have more than just a big retailer on our hands, though. We have a servant-king--one powerful enough to place everyone else in servitude to the consumer too. Gazing up at this new order, we wonder if our original choices made so much sense after all.
This growing unease with the cost of "low cost" is the No. 1 threat facing Wal-Mart. And the company has begun to get it. "Shoppers could start feeling guilty about shopping with us," says spokeswoman Mona Williams. "Communities could make it harder to build our stores." Hence a flurry of corrective actions. Wal-Mart's new television spots advertise happy employees instead of low prices. It has ramped up its PR and lobbying efforts. And its leaders have begun to take external criticism more seriously. As Robert Slater quotes CEO Lee Scott in Slater's recent book, The Wal-Mart Decade, "Instead of throwing [a critical] article in the trash and saying it's inaccurate, we now say, 'Is it possible that this is true?'"
How far Wal-Mart's self-examination will go remains to be seen. A corporation can't be expected to stop growing, as many critics would like. But it can be expected to live up to its own rhetoric. Consider Ford Motor Co. Founder Henry Ford had a mix of motives when, in 1914, he announced the $ 5 day--a stunning increase over the prevailing wage. But among them was his recognition that the promise of a car for Everyman would ring hollow if his own workers couldn't afford one. Now Wal-Mart has been brought face to face with its own contradiction: Its promises of the good life threaten to ring increasingly hollow if it doesn't pay its workers enough to have that good life.
It's important that this debate continue. But in holding the mirror up to Wal-Mart, we would do well to turn it back on ourselves. Sam Walton created Wal-Mart. But we created it, too.
The Economist: Feb 24th 2005
Retaliating first, Wal-Mart in Canada
A labour union's pyrrhic victory
(Pyrrhic: war dance of ancient Greece;
Pyrrhic victory - a victory that is won by incurring terrible losses.)
WHEN Wal-Mart moved into Canada just over a decade ago, the American retailing behemoth arrived with a splash, buying 122 stores of Woolco, a foundering chain. It turned down the chance to buy ten further Woolco outlets, including what was reputedly the most profitable of them all, because their workers belonged to a labour union.
Time has not tempered Wal-Mart's hatred of organised labour. On February 9th, the firm said that it would close the first of its stores anywhere in North America to unionise. Officially, the store, at Jonquière, a town some 400km (250 miles) north-east of Montreal, is shutting for economic reasons. It was “struggling” and had never turned a profit, the company said.
But few Canadians believe this. Wal-Mart refused to release any financial numbers for the store; in its decade in Canada, it has never previously shut down an outlet. The popular interpretation is that Wal-Mart was sending a message—especially to heavily-unionised Quebec—that it will not allow unions across its threshold.
Reaction was swift. There were bomb threats at other Wal-Marts. Columnists spoke of “capitalist terrorism” and called the closure “brutal and savage”. Some people questioned the aggressive tactics of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union involved. But very few sided with Wal-Mart. Bernard Landry, the leader of the opposition Parti Québécois, has called for a boycott of the retailer.
Further closures may follow. In January, the provincial government's labour board recognised the union at a second Wal-Mart store in Quebec, at St-Hyacinthe, east of Montreal; the board is considering a request for recognition at a third store. The UFCW is recruiting at another dozen of the 44 stores in Quebec and at twice that number elsewhere in Canada.
Its is no accident that the union's organising campaign has progressed furthest in Quebec and, to a lesser degree, Saskatchewan. Both provinces have deep social-democratic traditions, and labour laws that allow a workplace to be certified as unionised without a vote, as long as a majority of employees sign union cards. Wal-Mart calls this provision “undemocratic” and an invitation to coercion and abuse by union heavies. Labour activists counter that it protects workers from company intimidation prior to a vote. Tellingly, all votes held to unionise Wal-Mart stores have ended in failure.
The Jonquière store's closure came just a week after the union had given up on negotiations and asked the provincial government to name an arbitrator to impose a binding labour contract. The chances that the contract would have been favourable to Wal-Mart were “highly remote”, said one of its managers.
The union reckons that Wal-Mart pays its workers (“associates” it calls them) up to 40% less than its competitors. Staffing levels, workloads, benefits and job security also figure prominently among the UFCW's concerns. Even the much-ridiculed cheering session which associates are obliged to take part in at the beginning of their shifts is on the union's list of issues to be negotiated.
If the St-Hyacinthe store, said by the UFCW to be one of the most profitable in Canada, is next to be shut down, it won't be before Wal-Mart's lawyers try to get rid of the union. On February 18th, they filed a court challenge to the store's card-based certification. In Saskatchewan, too, the company is fighting the union in court as well as on the shop floor. “You have to take them on on several fronts,” says Paul Meinema, a UFCW leader in Saskatoon. He denies that the closure of the Jonquière store has sent a chill through the union's efforts in Saskatchewan.
The same cannot be said of the UFCW's efforts to unionise Wal-Mart workers in the United States. News of the Jonquière store's closure was widely reported south of the border. Two days later all 17 workers of the car-maintenance department at a Wal-Mart in New Castle, Pennsylvania voted against joining the union. The Jonquière closure “showed us just how far the company was prepared to go to keep unions out,” said a worker.
Jacksonville, Texas Meat Cutters
...Earlier, the company eliminated meat-cutting jobs from its entire grocery operation after some butchers voted to bring in a union1...
...Wal-Mart has a history of keeping unions out and has no shops staffed by organized labor. In 2000, meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas, voted in a union, then were quickly demoted to sales associates2....
Labor Research Association July 7, 2003:
Legal win for Wal-mart Union
Excerpt:
Three years of legal battles finally produced a stunning win for the UFCW. In June 2003, an National Labor Relations Board judge ordered Wal-Mart to restore the meat department to its prior structure, complete with meat-cutting, and to recognize and bargain with the union over the effects of any change to case-ready meat sales, for which purposes Local 540 will represent the workers.
Rally for union bid
Wal-Mart tire, lube workers in Loveland get show of support
By Janet Forgrieve, Rocky Mountain News
February 24, 2005
LOVELAND - About 100 union supporters gathered Wednesday to support organizing attempts by workers at Wal-Mart's Tire & Lube Express here, an effort that's drawn international attention.
If a majority of the 20 eligible workers vote Friday to become part of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, it could signify the first union inside Wal-Mart, the retail giant that has successfully fought other unionizing efforts in the United States and Canada.
Wednesday's rally, spearheaded by Jobs with Justice, a Denver- based nonprofit coalition of labor and community groups, proved rowdy but orderly. Supporters began across the street from the Supercenter at 1325 Denver Ave., then marched to the front of the store chanting in support of the Wal-Mart workers.
"We want to show that we support a free, fair and uncensored election," said Heidi Zwicker, director of Jobs with Justice. "And if they choose to have union representation, we want to hold Wal-Mart accountable to bargain with them for a contract."
The Loveland vote comes in the wake of a similar, failed attempt in Pennsylvania. This month, all 17 workers at a Tire & Lube Express in New Castle, Pa., voted not to join UFCW Local 880, ending an attempt to unionize that began more than four years ago.
New Castle workers were intimidated into voting no, Zwicker said, with the election coming around the same time Wal-Mart said it would close a store in Canada that had just voted in the UFCW.
Wal-Mart said it was closing the store in Jonquiere, Quebec, because it was unprofitable, and the retailer said it couldn't handle the cost of a unionized work force, including hiring 30 more employees.
Also, so much time had gone by between July 2000, when those workers petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for certification, and the Feb. 11, 2005, vote that many, if not all, of the original organizing workers had left and been replaced by new employees.
The Loveland group, which petitioned the NLRB late last year, is already down to six of the original 17 workers, said Ernie Duran, president of Local 7, which also represents about 17,500 Front Range workers for King Soopers, Safeway and Albertsons.
Wal-Mart has a history of keeping unions out and has no shops staffed by organized labor. In 2000, meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas, voted in a union, then were quickly demoted to sales associates.
Shortly after, Wal-Mart did away with meat-cutting jobs companywide in favor of packaged meat.
The Loveland rally came on the same day that Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott gave a talk to a Los Angeles-based business group, calling the UFCW's financial and political interests "out of touch."
"Our critics are framing the debate about Wal-Mart's role in society in ways that would actually harm the people whose interests they claim to represent," Scott told business leaders at Town Hall Los Angeles. "I believe that if you look at the facts with an open mind, you'll agree that Wal-Mart is good for America."
In January, Wal-Mart spent an undisclosed amount on national full-page newspaper ads designed as an open letter from Scott, saying it wanted to set the record straight on the wages and benefits offered to its 1.2 million U.S. workers.
The Loveland crowd included Josh Noble, the Tire & Lube employee who started the union ball rolling.
"We have to educate the workers in the store about the union," Noble said. "Right now, they're scared."
Wages and health care benefits aren't fair and competitive now, Noble said.
"They want to pay as little as possible - we do the job of four or five people and get paid for half a person."
Workers also are fighting for affordable health care and workplace dignity, speakers said.
The gathering drew support from several union factions in addition to the UFCW.
Al Baccili, a Teamster since he was 18 and a 33-year veteran of United Parcel Service in New York, showed up from his Fort Collins home.
"I've walked a lot of picket lines," said Baccili, 86. "I've been retired for 26 years, and I'm still a union man."
.
.
Index:
California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber discovered that Wal-Mart was encouraging its workers to apply for public assistance
Fortune: Should We Admire Wal-Mart?
Economist: Retaliating first, Wal-Mart in Canada
Jacksonville, Texas Meat Cutters
Rocky Mountain News: Rally for union bid
Overview of Wal-Mart:
Criticism of Wal-Mart From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(much of the old links to articles has been moved to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart#E
How unionizing Wal-Mart will help American Workers (Click here)
"According to Cornell University’s office of labor research, 74% of U.S. employers currently wage moderate to extremely aggressive anti-union campaigns, Wal-Mart among them. While spokesperson Christi Gallagher maintains that the company is “pro-associate, not anti-union,” Wal-Mart does everything from asking store managers to call a 24-hour hotline at the slightest sign of union activity to flying a ten-person labor team into stores to talk to employees."
Ask yourself: Why are U.S. employers so against unions?
The 21st century robber barons:
Where do all these savings go, when Wal-Mart hires low wage workers?
Where does the money go when some Wal-mart locations gives its employees food stamp applications when they are hired?
To the Walton family, CEO's and founders of Wal-mart:
Forbes top 400 richest people in America FIVE of the top 10 richest people in America are Wal-Mart family members
The Walton family is as rich as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined.
Links and Articles
The Nation:
Down and Out in Discount America
California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber....was...tipped off by dissatisfied workers. [H]er office discovered that Wal-Mart was encouraging its workers to apply for public assistance, "in the middle of the worst state budget crisis in history!" California had a $38 billion deficit at the time, and Lieber was enraged that taxpayers would be subsidizing Wal-Mart's low wages, bringing new meaning to the term "corporate welfare."...The Wal-Mart documents--[were] instructions explaining how to apply for food stamps, Medi-Cal (the state's healthcare assistance program) and other forms of welfare....Public assistance is very clearly part of the retailer's cost-cutting strategy. (It's ironic that a company so dependent on the public dole supports so many right-wing politicians who'd like to dismantle the welfare state.)
San Francisco Chronicle:
Wal-Mart's Welfare Dependency
by Sally Lieber
Fortune Magazine, March 8, 2004:
Should We Admire Wal-Mart?
Some say it's evil. Others insist it's a model of all that's right with America.
Who are we to believe?
There is an evil company in Arkansas, some say. It's a discount store--a very, very big discount store--and it will do just about anything to get bigger. You've seen the headlines. Illegal immigrants mopping its floors. Workers locked inside overnight. A big gender discrimination suit. Wages low enough to make other companies' workers go on strike. And we know what it does to weaker suppliers and competitors. Crushing the dream of the independent proprietor--an ideal as American as Thomas Jefferson--it is the enemy of all that's good and right in our nation.
There is another big discount store in Arkansas, yet this one couldn't be more different from the first. Founded by a folksy entrepreneur whose notions of thrift, industry, and the square deal were pure Ben Franklin, this company is not a tyrant but a servant. Passing along the gains of its brilliant distribution system to consumers, its farsighted managers have done nothing less than democratize the American dream. Its low prices are spurring productivity and helping win the fight against inflation. It is America's most admired company.
Weirdest part is, both these companies are named Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
The more America talks about Wal-Mart, it seems, the more polarized its image grows. Its executives are credited with the most expansive of visions and the meanest of intentions; its CEO is presumed to be in league with Lex Luthor and St. Francis of Assisi. It's confusing. Which should we believe in: good Wal-Mart or evil Wal-Mart?
Some of the allegations--and Wal-Mart was sued more than 6,000 times in 2002--certainly seem damning. Yet there's an important piece of context: Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million people. That's three times as many as the nation's next biggest employer and 56 times as many as the average FORTUNE 500 company. Meaning that all things being equal, a bad event is 5,500% more likely to happen at Wal-Mart than at Borders.
One consistent refrain is that Wal-Mart squeezes its suppliers to death--and you don't have to do much digging to find horror stories. But while Wal-Mart's reputation for penny-pinching is well deserved, so is its reputation for straightforwardness--none of the slotting fees, rebates, or other game playing that many merchants engage in. Nor has it ever been accused of throwing around its buying power improperly, as Toys "R" Us (and, long ago, A&P) was for demanding that its suppliers not sell to rivals.
Another rap on Wal-Mart--that it stomps competitors to dust through sheer brute force--seems undeniable: Studies have indicated a decline in the life expectancy of local businesses after Wal-Mart moves in. But this morality play is missing some key characters--namely, you and me. The scene where we drop into Wal-Mart to pick up a case of Coke, for instance, has been conveniently cut. No small omission, since the main reason we can't shop at Ed's Variety Store anymore is that we stopped shopping at Ed's Variety Store.
Evil Wal-Mart's original sin, then, was to open stores that sold things for less. This was a powerful idea but hardly a new one. The basic discipline of discounting had been around for at least a century--honed by department stores in the 1870s, by the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs in the 1890s, and then by chain stores like Woolworth and A&P. Though founder Sam Walton added a twist--a small town, he realized, could support a big store--he didn't invent the rules of discounting. He just followed them better than anyone else.
Not surprisingly, that's how the people running Good Wal-Mart see their story. They cast their jobs in almost missionary terms--"to lower the world's cost of living"--and in this, they have succeeded spectacularly. One consultancy estimates that Wal-Mart saves consumers $ 20 billion a year. Its constant push for low prices, meanwhile, puts the heat on suppliers and competitors to offer better deals.
That's a good thing, right? If a company achieves its lower prices by finding better and smarter ways of doing things, then yes, everybody wins. But if it cuts costs by cutting pay and benefits--or by sending production to China--then not everybody wins. And here's where the story of Good Wal-Mart starts to falter. Just as its Everyday Low Prices benefit shoppers who've never come near a Wal-Mart, there are mounting signs that its Everyday Low Pay (Wal-Mart's full-time hourly employees average $ 9.76 an hour) is hurting some workers who have never worked there. For example, unionized supermarkets in California--faced with studies showing a 13% to 16% drop in grocery prices after Wal-Mart enters a market--have been trying to slash labor costs to compete, triggering a protracted strike. The $ 15 billion in goods that Wal-Mart and its suppliers imported from China in 2003, meanwhile, accounted for nearly 11% of the U.S. total--contributing, some economists argue, to further erosion of U.S. wages.
Where you stand on Wal-Mart, then, seems to depend on where you sit. If you're a consumer, Wal-Mart is good for you. If you're a wage earner, there's a good chance it's bad. If you're a Wal-Mart shareholder, you want the company to grow. If you're a citizen, you probably don't want it growing in your backyard. So, which one are you?
And that's the point: Chances are, you're more than one. And you may think each role is important. Yet America has elevated one above the rest.
The consumer--as an entity with distinct rights and wishes--didn't exist before the first mass retailers called it into being. Even then it met with resistance. Early in the last century, a mayoral candidate in Warsaw, Iowa, proposed to fire city employees caught shopping from a catalog; in the 1930s, 27 states imposed special taxes on chain stores. But as organized labor began its slow decline, a new type of political activity--consumer activism--came to the fore. Other countries passed laws that protected workers and the small businesses that employed many of them. But in America, antitrust laws were designed to protect consumers.
Wal-Mart swore fealty to the consumer and rode its coattails straight to the top. Now we have more than just a big retailer on our hands, though. We have a servant-king--one powerful enough to place everyone else in servitude to the consumer too. Gazing up at this new order, we wonder if our original choices made so much sense after all.
This growing unease with the cost of "low cost" is the No. 1 threat facing Wal-Mart. And the company has begun to get it. "Shoppers could start feeling guilty about shopping with us," says spokeswoman Mona Williams. "Communities could make it harder to build our stores." Hence a flurry of corrective actions. Wal-Mart's new television spots advertise happy employees instead of low prices. It has ramped up its PR and lobbying efforts. And its leaders have begun to take external criticism more seriously. As Robert Slater quotes CEO Lee Scott in Slater's recent book, The Wal-Mart Decade, "Instead of throwing [a critical] article in the trash and saying it's inaccurate, we now say, 'Is it possible that this is true?'"
How far Wal-Mart's self-examination will go remains to be seen. A corporation can't be expected to stop growing, as many critics would like. But it can be expected to live up to its own rhetoric. Consider Ford Motor Co. Founder Henry Ford had a mix of motives when, in 1914, he announced the $ 5 day--a stunning increase over the prevailing wage. But among them was his recognition that the promise of a car for Everyman would ring hollow if his own workers couldn't afford one. Now Wal-Mart has been brought face to face with its own contradiction: Its promises of the good life threaten to ring increasingly hollow if it doesn't pay its workers enough to have that good life.
It's important that this debate continue. But in holding the mirror up to Wal-Mart, we would do well to turn it back on ourselves. Sam Walton created Wal-Mart. But we created it, too.
The Economist: Feb 24th 2005
Retaliating first, Wal-Mart in Canada
A labour union's pyrrhic victory
(Pyrrhic: war dance of ancient Greece;
Pyrrhic victory - a victory that is won by incurring terrible losses.)
WHEN Wal-Mart moved into Canada just over a decade ago, the American retailing behemoth arrived with a splash, buying 122 stores of Woolco, a foundering chain. It turned down the chance to buy ten further Woolco outlets, including what was reputedly the most profitable of them all, because their workers belonged to a labour union.
Time has not tempered Wal-Mart's hatred of organised labour. On February 9th, the firm said that it would close the first of its stores anywhere in North America to unionise. Officially, the store, at Jonquière, a town some 400km (250 miles) north-east of Montreal, is shutting for economic reasons. It was “struggling” and had never turned a profit, the company said.
But few Canadians believe this. Wal-Mart refused to release any financial numbers for the store; in its decade in Canada, it has never previously shut down an outlet. The popular interpretation is that Wal-Mart was sending a message—especially to heavily-unionised Quebec—that it will not allow unions across its threshold.
Reaction was swift. There were bomb threats at other Wal-Marts. Columnists spoke of “capitalist terrorism” and called the closure “brutal and savage”. Some people questioned the aggressive tactics of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union involved. But very few sided with Wal-Mart. Bernard Landry, the leader of the opposition Parti Québécois, has called for a boycott of the retailer.
Further closures may follow. In January, the provincial government's labour board recognised the union at a second Wal-Mart store in Quebec, at St-Hyacinthe, east of Montreal; the board is considering a request for recognition at a third store. The UFCW is recruiting at another dozen of the 44 stores in Quebec and at twice that number elsewhere in Canada.
Its is no accident that the union's organising campaign has progressed furthest in Quebec and, to a lesser degree, Saskatchewan. Both provinces have deep social-democratic traditions, and labour laws that allow a workplace to be certified as unionised without a vote, as long as a majority of employees sign union cards. Wal-Mart calls this provision “undemocratic” and an invitation to coercion and abuse by union heavies. Labour activists counter that it protects workers from company intimidation prior to a vote. Tellingly, all votes held to unionise Wal-Mart stores have ended in failure.
The Jonquière store's closure came just a week after the union had given up on negotiations and asked the provincial government to name an arbitrator to impose a binding labour contract. The chances that the contract would have been favourable to Wal-Mart were “highly remote”, said one of its managers.
The union reckons that Wal-Mart pays its workers (“associates” it calls them) up to 40% less than its competitors. Staffing levels, workloads, benefits and job security also figure prominently among the UFCW's concerns. Even the much-ridiculed cheering session which associates are obliged to take part in at the beginning of their shifts is on the union's list of issues to be negotiated.
If the St-Hyacinthe store, said by the UFCW to be one of the most profitable in Canada, is next to be shut down, it won't be before Wal-Mart's lawyers try to get rid of the union. On February 18th, they filed a court challenge to the store's card-based certification. In Saskatchewan, too, the company is fighting the union in court as well as on the shop floor. “You have to take them on on several fronts,” says Paul Meinema, a UFCW leader in Saskatoon. He denies that the closure of the Jonquière store has sent a chill through the union's efforts in Saskatchewan.
The same cannot be said of the UFCW's efforts to unionise Wal-Mart workers in the United States. News of the Jonquière store's closure was widely reported south of the border. Two days later all 17 workers of the car-maintenance department at a Wal-Mart in New Castle, Pennsylvania voted against joining the union. The Jonquière closure “showed us just how far the company was prepared to go to keep unions out,” said a worker.
Jacksonville, Texas Meat Cutters
...Earlier, the company eliminated meat-cutting jobs from its entire grocery operation after some butchers voted to bring in a union1...
...Wal-Mart has a history of keeping unions out and has no shops staffed by organized labor. In 2000, meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas, voted in a union, then were quickly demoted to sales associates2....
Labor Research Association July 7, 2003:
Legal win for Wal-mart Union
Excerpt:
Three years of legal battles finally produced a stunning win for the UFCW. In June 2003, an National Labor Relations Board judge ordered Wal-Mart to restore the meat department to its prior structure, complete with meat-cutting, and to recognize and bargain with the union over the effects of any change to case-ready meat sales, for which purposes Local 540 will represent the workers.
Also:
Labor News:
NLRB Judge Orders Wal-Mart To Bargain With UFCW In Texas
For more on the meat cutters:
In These Times:
Wal-Martyrs
Fortune Magazine May 3, 2004:
Up Against the Wal-Mart
The Las Vegas union fight against Wal-Mart More on the Texas meat-packers battle.
(1) Wal-Mart Wins a Round In Its Struggle To Keep Unions At Bay Voice of America, 25 February 2005
(2) Rally for union bid Rocky Mountain News, February 24, 2005
Rally for union bid
Wal-Mart tire, lube workers in Loveland get show of support
By Janet Forgrieve, Rocky Mountain News
February 24, 2005
LOVELAND - About 100 union supporters gathered Wednesday to support organizing attempts by workers at Wal-Mart's Tire & Lube Express here, an effort that's drawn international attention.
If a majority of the 20 eligible workers vote Friday to become part of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, it could signify the first union inside Wal-Mart, the retail giant that has successfully fought other unionizing efforts in the United States and Canada.
Wednesday's rally, spearheaded by Jobs with Justice, a Denver- based nonprofit coalition of labor and community groups, proved rowdy but orderly. Supporters began across the street from the Supercenter at 1325 Denver Ave., then marched to the front of the store chanting in support of the Wal-Mart workers.
"We want to show that we support a free, fair and uncensored election," said Heidi Zwicker, director of Jobs with Justice. "And if they choose to have union representation, we want to hold Wal-Mart accountable to bargain with them for a contract."
The Loveland vote comes in the wake of a similar, failed attempt in Pennsylvania. This month, all 17 workers at a Tire & Lube Express in New Castle, Pa., voted not to join UFCW Local 880, ending an attempt to unionize that began more than four years ago.
New Castle workers were intimidated into voting no, Zwicker said, with the election coming around the same time Wal-Mart said it would close a store in Canada that had just voted in the UFCW.
Wal-Mart said it was closing the store in Jonquiere, Quebec, because it was unprofitable, and the retailer said it couldn't handle the cost of a unionized work force, including hiring 30 more employees.
Also, so much time had gone by between July 2000, when those workers petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for certification, and the Feb. 11, 2005, vote that many, if not all, of the original organizing workers had left and been replaced by new employees.
The Loveland group, which petitioned the NLRB late last year, is already down to six of the original 17 workers, said Ernie Duran, president of Local 7, which also represents about 17,500 Front Range workers for King Soopers, Safeway and Albertsons.
Wal-Mart has a history of keeping unions out and has no shops staffed by organized labor. In 2000, meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas, voted in a union, then were quickly demoted to sales associates.
Shortly after, Wal-Mart did away with meat-cutting jobs companywide in favor of packaged meat.
The Loveland rally came on the same day that Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott gave a talk to a Los Angeles-based business group, calling the UFCW's financial and political interests "out of touch."
"Our critics are framing the debate about Wal-Mart's role in society in ways that would actually harm the people whose interests they claim to represent," Scott told business leaders at Town Hall Los Angeles. "I believe that if you look at the facts with an open mind, you'll agree that Wal-Mart is good for America."
In January, Wal-Mart spent an undisclosed amount on national full-page newspaper ads designed as an open letter from Scott, saying it wanted to set the record straight on the wages and benefits offered to its 1.2 million U.S. workers.
The Loveland crowd included Josh Noble, the Tire & Lube employee who started the union ball rolling.
"We have to educate the workers in the store about the union," Noble said. "Right now, they're scared."
Wages and health care benefits aren't fair and competitive now, Noble said.
"They want to pay as little as possible - we do the job of four or five people and get paid for half a person."
Workers also are fighting for affordable health care and workplace dignity, speakers said.
The gathering drew support from several union factions in addition to the UFCW.
Al Baccili, a Teamster since he was 18 and a 33-year veteran of United Parcel Service in New York, showed up from his Fort Collins home.
"I've walked a lot of picket lines," said Baccili, 86. "I've been retired for 26 years, and I'm still a union man."
