The Wall Street Journal reports today that Wal-Mart has joined the fight against Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a piece of legislation designed to make it easier for workers to unionize.
In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.
According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise.
The actions by Wal-Mart — the nation’s largest private employer — reflect a growing concern among big business that a reinvigorated labor movement could reverse years of declining union membership. That could lead to higher payroll and health costs for companies already being hurt by rising fuel and commodities costs and the tough economic climate.
The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don’t specifically tell attendees how to vote in November’s election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.
Wal-Mart joins in this latest anti-union adventure with groups bearing such Orwellian names as the “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace” and the “Employee Freedom Action Committee,” because we all know how committed Wal-Mart is to a free and democratic workplace. It is after all Wal-Mart’s workers who vote for the company’s CEO, not its shareholders.
Business-backed organizations are also running ads aimed at building opposition to the bill, including the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which counts several hundred industry associations as members. Another group, the Employee Freedom Action Committee, is run by former tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman. The groups, which aren’t affiliated with each other, say they have a total of $50 million in funding. Neither will disclose which companies or individuals have provided funding.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made defeat of the legislation a top priority. In the past six months, it has flown state and local Chamber members to Washington to lobby members of Congress. On Thursday, the Chamber began airing a television ad in Minnesota and plans to run ads in other states as part of a broader campaign.
Amplifying the downright Orwellian absurdity of this fight, the business coalition that opposes the EFCA portrays itself as a “David” facing the “Goliath” of organized labor, because corporate lobbyists are spending less money than their labor counterparts, who are–make no mistake–fighting for their very lives, for the very possibility that organized labor will survive in America in the twenty-first century.
I wish I had some clever turn of phrase or incisive analysis to offer on this matter, but I don’t.
Let me be short, then: what Wal-Mart is doing is vile. Given the massive corporate campaign to block the EFCA, it is very reasonable for us to assume that Wal-Mart’s workers might actually want to unionize, if given a fair chance. Wal-Mart, however, doesn’t want to let them unionize and will do everything it can to stop them.
Through almost all of its 48-year history, Wal-Mart has fought hard to keep unions out of its stores, flying in labor-relations rapid-response teams from its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to any location where union activity was building. The United Food and Commercial Workers was successful in organizing only one group of Wal-Mart workers — a small number of butchers in East Texas in early 2000. Several weeks later, the company phased out butchers in all of its stores and began stocking prepackaged meat. When a store in Canada voted to unionize several years ago, the company closed the store, saying it had been unprofitable for years.
Being able to organize or join a labor union is, I believe, a fundamental right of all free persons. Wal-Mart, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, the Employee Freedom Action Committee, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce apparently want to use their collective clout to make it hard for their workers to exercise that right. They are, from this perspective, by definition against freedom. They are fundamentally opposed to democracy. They want to restrict their workers’ choices and want to keep all negotiating leverage for themselves, leaving none for labor.
Which of course comes as no surprise.