Wal-Mart’s Attempt to Kill Employee Choice Backfires

by James Parks, Aug 5, 2008

When Wal-Mart tried to squelch the Employee Free Choice Act by requiring its employees to sit through mandatory meetings that stress the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized, it didn’t expect the idea would backfire.

But after the Wall Street Journal broke the story Friday, folks who had never heard of or discussed the Employee Free Choice Act began talking about it and learning why it’s needed. (You can take action now and tell Wal-Mart to stop intimidating its employees. Sign a petition here.) 

Check out Keith Olbermann, for example. On his show “Countdown,” he interviews Chris Hayes, Washington editor for Nation magazine  (see video). Hayes says:

It’s delicious that they [Wal-Mart] show exactly why the Employee Free Choice Act is so needed. The mechanism of intimidation an employer has over an employee is so powerful that running a union election has become incredibly difficult, almost impossible.

When your employer can have a mandatory meeting and sit you down in a room for hours on end showing anti-union propaganda or telling you who they think you should vote for. And you have to listen to them because you can’t walk out of that room and not get fired. Those are precisely the conditions the Employee Free Choice Act is designed to remedy.

Or Rachel Maddow, who delivered a detailed discussion on why we need the Employee Free Choice Act on her show last Friday on Air America.

Writing at Firedoglake, Michael Whitney from American Rights at Work, points out that this kind of intimidation is nothing new for Wal-Mart.

The bill does what its name says: It gives employees a free choice if they want to join a union. For decades, that choice has rested only with employers like Wal-Mart. Guess what their answer usually is?

Unfortunately for Wal-Mart workers, this kind of intimidation is nothing new.  It’s actually part and parcel for Wal-Mart’s business plan. When Wal-Mart employees stand up for themselves and try to form a union, they face threats, propaganda, discrimination, intimidation and even firings in retaliation.

American Rights at Work has an action here in which you can ask the Federal Election Commission to investigate Wal-Mart’s electioneering.

Writing at cbsnews.com, Kevin Drum agrees that Wal-Mart’s intimidation is “par for the course.”

Few companies are as rabidly anti-union as Wal-Mart, and there was never any doubt where their sympathies lie on this issue. They have a habit of firing workers who try to organize their stores, closing down stores that vote to organize anyway, and outsourcing entire departments when multiple stores vote to organize.

Even pro-business groups are talking about the Employee Free Choice Act. Investment adviser Peter Cohan says Wal-Mart should rethink its opposition to the bill. Writing on bloggingstocks.com, he says: 

It clearly fears the Employee Free Choice Act, which “companies say would enable unions to quickly add millions of new members,” according to the Journal. If  [the Employee Free Choice Act] should pass under an Obama administration, would all Wal-Mart stores suddenly become unionized? And if some of them did, would that really be so bad for Wal-Mart’s business? Its workers would then have higher incomes, meaning they could buy more at its stores.

With its latest anti-Obama warnings, Wal-Mart’s executives seem to be at war with its customers. And that’s not good for its business or its shareholders.

And Fox Business.com—yes that Fox—ran a press release from a union group that condemned Wal-Mart’s action and pointed out:

It should be no surprise that Wal-Mart would stretch the limits of the law in an attempt to deny their workers’ rights and kill the Employee Free Choice Act. The company knows what all union workers know: Workers in unions earn 29 percent higher wages on average, are 62 percent more likely to have employer health coverage, and four times more likely to have a pension.  

Shame on Wal-Mart. The industry leader’s attempts to skirt the law and use scare tactics to alter the outcome of the election is nothing less than disgraceful. 

Wal-Mart’s actions coincide with a broader effort by corporate groups to stop the Employee Free Choice Act. In state after state, deep-pocket front groups, such as the Center for Union Facts and the Employee Freedom Action Committee, are running ads that assail candidates for their support of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would ensure the freedom of workers to form unions without employer harassment.

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