Organizing Wal-Mart

by Dick Meister

Rarely have American unions faced greater challenges — or greater prospects — than on this Labor Day.

And though unions still represent less than 15% of the country's workers, their success — or failure — will have a significant impact on most Americans.

Consider the AFL-CIO's drive to win union rights from Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest private employer, and its drive to oust President Bush and Congress's Republican majority.

Unionizing virulently anti-union Wal-Mart would give labor one of its biggest prizes in years and undoubtedly trigger a resurgence of union organizing nationwide. Ousting Bush and his GOP allies, who are equally opposed to unions, would give labor at least as great a boost and as surely make federal government more responsive to all of us rather than merely the wealthy few.

Although the AFL-CIO is still tooling up for next year's presidential and congressional election campaigns, the Wal-Mart campaign led by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is well underway.

With 3,500 stores nationwide and several hundred more planned, Wal-Mart is by far the nation's largest retailer, alone accounting for 60% of all retail sales. The company's refusal to grant its 1.1 million employees the basic right to a voice in determining their working conditions has kept them in virtual poverty even as Wal-Mart's multi-billion-dollar profits have soared.

Given the company's dominant position in the economy, its unrelenting anti-unionism also has undermined the rights and conditions of millions of other workers, union and non-union alike, throughout the retail industry and US industry generally.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says, "In a world of Wal-Marts, the American middle class would disappear."

Sweeney is not exaggerating. Wal-Mart's attitude is like that of employers in past centuries who were members of a wealthy upper class that dictated the terms of employment to those members of the large underclass whose work created their wealth.

The bosses were always right. They forced most workers to take whatever pay and conditions they offered and do whatever they ordered, denying them the collective action essential to challenging their unilateral actions. That was before the rise of widespread unionization and finally, in the mid-1930s, the firm legal right to unionization and consequent growth of a genuine middle class.

It might as well be the mid-1830s at Wal-Mart, where company manuals instruct managers to be "constantly alert to any signs your associates are interested in a union... Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization. You, as a manager, are expected to support the company's position."

Government investigators, union organizers and many current and former Wal-Mart employees say that has led to firings, demotions, reductions in pay and working hours and other illegal disciplinary action against union supporters.

Organizers have been spied on, denied access to workers and had their literature confiscated. Managers have warned that their stores would close if workers unionized, required workers to attend meetings at which managers show anti-labor videos and speak out against unions. Some managers have called in specialists to help identify their store's strongest union supporters and plan actions against them.

The need for union bargaining rights is painfully obvious. "Sales associates" — more than 70% of them women — typically work 32 hours a week, for pay that averages less than $9 an hour or less than $15,000 a year. More than 40 employees have filed suits charging that they and others often are forced to work additional hours without any pay.

Wal-Mart does not offer retirement benefits. It does offer health care coverage, but to get it employees must pay nearly half the cost. Only about 40% can afford to do so and instead rely on public health services, as do many Wal-Mart retirees. A like number qualify for government food stamp programs and other public assistance.

Which means taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart's profits by providing aid that wouldn't be needed if the company provided decent compensation. The low pay and benefits and heavy reliance an goods supplied cheaply to Wal-Mart by manufacturers in developing countries that treat their workers even worse has enabled the company to keep its prices low.

That means customers are helping Wall-Mart exploit hundreds of thousands of workers here and abroad as well as indirectly adding to their own tax burdens. It also has put great pressures on other retailers and suppliers to try to cut costs and prices by adopting Wal-Mart's primitive labor relations practices.

The AFL-CIO isn't alone in the drive to give Wal-Mart's workers the vital tool of unionization. It's been joined in dozens of cities across the country by supporters from more than 300 other organizations representing women, students, civil rights advocates and others.

But the main burden is on labor. Its future may well depend on the outcome.

(Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based freelance columnist who has covered labor issues for four decades as a reporter, editor and commentator.)