Why Wal-Mart Workers Need EFCA

[Omaha Steve]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/4508/why_wal-mart_workers_need_efca

By Nelson Lichtenstein

Since liberal Democrats and their labor supporters introduced the Employee Free Choice Act into Congress earlier this year, opposition to the legislation has reached a fever pitch. The main line of attack from corporations and business trade associations zeroes in on EFCA’s “card check” provision, which would give union advocates the option of avoiding a contentious and often employer-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election. The provision would allow a majority of workers in any given workplace to enroll in a union via a simple card-signing.

A typical corporate response to the bill—which remains in committee in both the House and the Senate—came from Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest company. The proposed labor law would “effectively eliminate freedom of choice and the right to a secret-ballot election,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Daphne Moore said in March, a few days after the bill was introduced. “We believe every associate or employee should have the right to make a private and informed decision regarding union representation.”

So Wal-Mart champions worker freedom. To get a sense of that company’s Orwellian definition of the concept it is useful to revisit the scene of a union organizing effort at Wal-Mart’s Kingman, Ariz. discount store. One might well look at dozens of other failed organizing attempts at Wal-Mart, but this campaign in the late summer of 2000 was exceptionally well-documented. The account that follows is based not only on NLRB reports and opinions, but on an authoritative Human Rights Watch report and internal company documents that were put in the public domain after litigation before the labor board and the federal courts.

Summers are hot in Arizona, and the young men who work in Wal-Mart’s Tire and Lube Express (TLE) department get their hands dirty, have few prospects for promotion and are well aware that similar blue collar jobs in garages and car dealerships pay a lot more. Such was the case in Kingman where an otherwise humane manager, under corporate pressure to keep labor and maintenance costs down, refused to spend the $200 needed to repair an air-cooling system essential in the 110 degree heat. So the TLE workers got in touch with the United Food and Commercial Workers, which on August 28, 2000, filed a petition with the nearby Phoenix office of the NLRB to represent as many as 18 automotive service technicians.

The reaction from Wal-Mart managers, both at the Kingman store and at corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., was virtually instantaneous. Within 24 hours a Bentonville-based “labor team” had flown into Kingman, where they joined a growing cadre of district and regional managers from Arizona and Nevada. In all more than 20 outside executives flooded the store. Wal-Mart replaced the Tire and Lube department manager with a high-level personnel executive, untutored in changing oil or tires but well-versed in the corporation’s union avoidance program. Loss prevention—the company’s shoplifting police—got busy as well, training a new set of cameras on work areas in the tire and lube shop. “I had so many bosses around me, I couldn’t believe it,” rememberes Larry Adams, a union supporter who worked in the TLE at that time. “They weren’t there to help me. They were there to bug me. It was very intimidating.”

FULL story at link.