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WalMart Workers Taking Action
Against the Corporate Giant
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Oct 16, 2012
By Steve Edwards and Joshua H. Koritz
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Many workers
and activists have been excited by the recent reports of walkouts and strikes
against Walmart. For years unions have tried to organize workers in this
notoriously antiunion corporation. Walmart employs over 1.4 million people in
the U.S. and many earn so little that they have to rely on food stamps and other
government assistance. Activists want to know if the strikes at warehouses in
California and Illinois and walkouts at retails stores in multiple states mark a
turning point, or merely a ramping-up of the UFCW's public relations campaigns
against the $400 billion retail giant?
The warehouse strikes were launched by two separate campaigns, the one in
Illinois led by Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) with organizing staff from
UE - the independent, Left-wing union that successfully occupied Republic
Windows in December 2008 - and the California Warehouse Workers United which is
sponsored by the SEIU and UFCW.
In these warehouse strikes, "permanent temps" employed through employment
agencies (rather than WalMart "associates" who are subjected to an intensively
anti-union regime, complete with token company shares and an imposed rah-rah
culture) were fighting back on behalf of workers who were fired for filing
wage-theft claims. Having stepped to the front of the struggle the warehouse
workers then marched to take their message to company HQ in Benton, Arkansas and
to the retail stores, dozens of which have now seen walkouts. The Elwood,
Illinois campaign was a smash success, with all employees returned to work after
21 days with back pay for the period they were on strike. This is a sharp
victory which needs to be publicized far and wide.
The warehouse organizing campaigns are of vital importance. In both cases
these well-planned actions are aimed at organizing massive inland container
ports - the Californian "Inland Empire"in the San Bernadino Valley and the giant
warehouse complexes in and around Chicago which by some estimates is the world's
biggest inland container port, built with public funds to take advantage of the
existing confluence of road, rail and water transportation in the center of the
continent - and handling almost a trillion dollars of goods every year. http://www.warehouseworker.org/industry.html
Ongoing Campaign
The United Food and Commercial Workers union or UFCW has been trying to
organize WalMart stores since at least 1999. The only successful NLRB campaign
in the US, in which meat cutters at a store in Texas voted to join the union,
was met by WalMart closing all meat cutting operations at its US stores. A
handful of election wins in Canada, where labor laws are less anti-union than in
the US, have been confronted with store closures and also in several cases,
decertification elections after the union failed to win a first contract.
All of the big-box stores in the U.S. are anti-union. Target, Home Depot,
Menards, Walmart and Costco (Costco, whose CEO was greeted as a savior at the
Democratic Party convention!) try to brainwash employees with anti-union videos
as a condition of employment and require managers to report anyone who they
suspect of pro-union sympathies. This can reach such ludicrous extremes as
supervisors being told to try to prevent employees from socializing off the job
or even from learning each others' last names or friending each other on social
media.
WalMart was targeted by the UFCW and other unions because it's by far the
biggest and fastest-growing, with more than 1.4 million workers in the US and
profits so fabulous that the Walton family owns assets worth more than 42% of
the rest of the inhabitants of the USA. WalMart has the most aggressive
cost-cutting practices, subjecting workers to dangerous and discriminatory
working conditions and pay and benefits so low that Human Resource staff
routinely send workers to apply for public benefits - a taxpayer-funded subsidy
for low pay and unaffordable medical benefits. (WalMart supported the passage of
the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare).
The UFCW began its campaign when it saw that grocery chains like Safeway and
Albertsons with whom it has existing contracts were threatened by competition
from WalMart. Those companies' response to this competition was to demand
concessions from their employees and this led to the initial organizing drives.
When organizing was stymied by WalMart's highly sophisticated anti-union
methods, the UFCW resorted to a series of campaigns that aim to enlist small
businesses, environmentalists and organizations of women and people of color to
paint WalMart as a bad corporate citizen and try to keep it out of urban
markets.
The problem with this approach has always been that it relies on people who
don't work at WalMart to do the job. It is in effect a popular front, in which
the feelings and agendas of small businesses and middle-class pressure groups,
as well as the union's existing relationships with other employers, were given
more consideration than the needs of the employees themselves. Following
internal struggles within the UFCW, in which more militant tactics were given a
boost by successes in the meat-packing field as well as elsewhere in the retail
supply chain, the "OUR Walmart" group, an association rather than a union, which
any employee can join for $5 a month, was launched as a counter to this problem
and as a way for retail associates to gain a voice and some ownership over
future campaigns.
OUR WalMart
The OUR Walmart campaign differs from
previous unionizing efforts in that it is not immediately trying to organize
workers into UFCW. OUR Walmart “works to ensure that every Associate, regardless
of his or her title, age, race, or sex, is respected at Walmart. We join
together to offer strength and support in addressing the challenges that arise
in our stores and our company everyday.”
More organizing drives should take on this model or some of the ideas from
this model. Unions in their essence are organizations of workers banded together
for mutual respect and power against the boss. A union is only as strong as the
workers are united in their resolve to fight the bosses. No union can guarantee
any raises or improvements in working conditions to workers, it can only promise
that workers, by forming a union, will have the tools necessary to fight for
what they need.
Union organizers and supporters must return to making these class-based
arguments for building unions. Union bureaucrats have buried these ideas as a
threat to their status quo of negotiations and lobbying to form unions. This
gives to workers the impression that they are little more than a “dues unit,” an
idea reinforced in some unions that then discourage any shop floor organizing in
favor of call centers to handle grievances and organizing. If union organizing
drives operate only on the basis of promises of “vote for the union and you’ll
get higher wages and benefits – oh and dues will be minimal” then working people
will be forced to choose between the employer they don’t really trust, but who
promises continued employment, versus the union which they don’t know and which
they justly fear may be unable to effectively protect them from employer
retaliation.
OUR Walmart is also building international links. The Swiss-based
organization UNI (http://www.uniglobalunion.org) held a
three day conference in Los Angeles on October 3rd to prepare to launch a
Walmart Global Union Alliance. All of this has enormous implications for the
future of union organizing.
To quote Sarah Frances, an OUR Walmart organizer who was interviewed for this
article:
"This coordination in organizing along the supply chain is
especially notable, not only because it's against the world's largest
(under)employer, but because it doesn't even bother to conform to the archaic
NLRB rules. NLRB rules are for unions pre-globalization, in this day and age
where we have a GLOBAL 1% that is exploiting us as a GLOBAL working class, we
absolutely need to think on that GLOBAL scale. We have to cut out all the "who's
in the bargaining unit? who's not?" and "Buy American" and just ask ourselves
plain and simple, "who all needs to fold their arms to influence production?".
This campaign answers that question by reaching out to the entire supply chain-
from retail store employees across the US, to warehouse employees at the major
ports in CA and IL, and textile employees in Bangladesh".
Momentum is now building for actions at WalMart stores on "Black Friday", the
day after Thanksgiving. WalMart is a huge foe of organized labor. The boycotts
and publicity campaigns of the past thirteen years have not organized one single
store. It is vitally important that the labor and pro-labor community supports
their efforts to organize with their coworkers. All of organized labor should be
prepared to help shut down WalMart with mass picketing at both retail stores and
warehouses on November 23.
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