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Workers Vanguard No. 1021
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5 April 2013
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Wal-Mart: Labor Bureaucracy’s Non-Organizing Drive
In late January, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
informed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that it was disavowing any
intent to unionize Wal-Mart, declaring that the union-sponsored Organization
United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) merely demands that the retail giant
“improve labor rights and standards for its employees.” Wal-Mart had filed a
complaint against the UFCW with the NLRB charging that OUR Walmart protests last
fall violated federal law limiting picketing at companies where a union has not
officially sought recognition. The UFCW leadership has now pledged to cease
picketing for 60 days, to erase demands for unionization from union Web sites
and to e-mail its disavowal to some 4,000 OUR Walmart members nationwide. In
return, the NLRB issued a January 30 memorandum saying that it would hold the
company’s charge in abeyance for six months, waiting to see if “the Union
complies with its commitments.”
With their non-organizing drive at Wal-Mart, the UFCW
tops hope that they can slip by both the company’s anti-union machinery and the
capitalist state’s web of anti-labor laws. But the labor bureaucrats are
deluding Wal-Mart workers with this supposedly wily strategy. It is nothing but
a surrender to a capitalist exploiter known worldwide for its anti-labor
chicanery. As Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon wrote about the 1934 Minneapolis
strikes that helped pave the way for the Teamsters to become a powerful
nationwide union: “Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental
ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to
fight” (The History of American Trotskyism, 1944).
The struggle to unionize Wal-Mart is one of those fundamental
things. As the country’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart has some 1.4 million
workers, employing nearly one of every 100 American workers. It is one of the
world’s largest companies, operating more than 10,000 stores and generating $464
billion in revenue last year, roughly equal to Belgium’s gross domestic product.
The wealth produced by Wal-Mart’s cutthroat exploitation of workers in the U.S.
and abroad is enormous. The offspring of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, who own
roughly half of the company’s shares, are worth about $90 billion. That figure
is equal to the combined net worth of the bottom 41.5 percent of the entire U.S.
population!
On the other hand, Wal-Mart workers (“associates” in company lingo)
on average earn $8.81 an hour, well below the poverty level for a family of
four. Even when they manage to get “full time” work (34 hours per week), it is
not uncommon for them to rely on local food pantries. New hires must beg
managers to get the 30 hours per week they need to qualify for the company’s
costly, substandard health coverage. Wal-Mart’s abuse of its workers is
legendary: forced and unpaid overtime, workers locked in at night to keep them
from stealing, rampant discrimination against the women who make up 70 percent
of its hourly workforce.
The astounding inequality between the obscenely rich Walton family
and their impoverished employees makes Wal-Mart emblematic of the capitalist
system, whose lifeblood is the exploitation of labor. What Karl Marx wrote in
Capital (1867) during the rise of industrial capitalism is true with a
vengeance today, long after the capitalist system began to decay: “Accumulation
of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite
pole.”
Much of Wal-Mart’s success in accumulating profit comes from
keeping unions out of its operations in the U.S. and most everywhere else. As it
expanded into the rest of the U.S. from Arkansas, it brought with it the racist,
anti-union “open shop” of the Southern bourgeoisie. Dishing out folksy
paternalism and phony “profit-sharing” schemes with one hand, Wal-Mart
management cracks the whip fast and furiously at pro-union or “uppity” workers
with the other. When workers at a store in Jonquière, Quebec, voted to join the
UFCW in 2004, the company simply closed the store down—one of many times it has
snuffed out union organizing drives.
Organizing Wal-Mart is critical for the welfare of its army of
low-wage workers and for revitalizing a labor movement that has taken one body
blow after another in the last few decades. Millions of workers want and need
real fighting unions. But any serious union organizing drive will mean going up
against not only the capitalists whose profit margins depend on remaining
union-free but also the courts, cops, labor boards and other forces of the
capitalist state. Waging such battles requires a hard fight against the
privileged trade-union bureaucracy and its sacred strategy of reliance on the
bosses’ government and the Democratic Party. Above all, what labor needs is a
leadership that understands that organizing the unorganized, like all struggles
against exploitation, is a matter of class against class.
Black Friday and Beyond
Right after the UFCW tops launched OUR Walmart two years ago, the
New York Times reported, “Unlike a union, the group will not negotiate
contracts on behalf of workers. But its members could benefit from federal labor
laws that protect workers from retaliation for engaging in collective discussion
and action” (“Wal-Mart Workers Try the Nonunion Route,” 14 June 2011). OUR
Walmart grew rapidly over the next year, with workers signing up on the Internet
and paying the $5 monthly dues online, reflecting real desire for union
organization. While union officials pinned their hopes on paper-thin legal
protections, Wal-Mart bosses prepared to go after OUR Walmart as a stalking
horse for future unionization. The NLRB’s recent threat to clamp down on the
union and OUR Walmart proves that such “protections” are a sham.
Last year’s rallies culminated in the heavily publicized “Black
Friday” events held in front of 1,000 Wal-Mart stores the day after
Thanksgiving. Some among the 500 Wal-Mart workers who participated braved
company reprisals by walking out during their work shifts. The protests were
built to shame Wal-Mart for bad corporate behavior, not to shut the stores down,
and union organizers explicitly avoided calling for unionization.
A slew of fake-socialist outfits hailed the protests as historic,
with the International Socialist Organization going so far as to describe this
non-organizing campaign as “class struggle unionism.” The Party for Socialism
and Liberation gushed that a work stoppage by a tiny sliver of Wal-Mart’s
workforce “set the stage for a dramatic upsurge in the labor movement, and is an
important development in the consciousness of workers, both union and non-union”
(Liberation, 15 October 2012). The centrist Internationalist Group
described protests and small strikes held before Black Friday as having
“challenged the hidebound labor movement” (Internationalist, November
2012). More recently, Labor Notes (February 2013), whose editors orbit
the reformist Solidarity organization, headlined “In Walmart and Fast Food,
Unions Scaling Up a Strike-First Strategy.”
These opportunist outfits not only give cover to the UFCW
bureaucrats but also actively sow confusion about the most basic precepts of
trade unionism. A strike means “one out, all out.” The aim is to shut down an
enterprise and its profit-making activities by mass picketing and other means.
It was just such class-struggle methods that built the unions in this country
and that need to be revived if labor is to get off its knees.
Before Black Friday, Wal-Mart bosses threatened employees to “show
up for work or else” while also advising management hotheads to not crudely go
after workers for exercising their “general legal right to engage in a walkout.”
There would be casualties in any real organizing drive, and unions need to be
prepared to defend victimized workers. But the UFCW and OUR Walmart are not
fighting for union protections. Instead they wait for labor law violations so
they can file complaints with the NLRB. This only breeds illusions in the
purported neutrality of the NLRB, whose purpose is to maintain labor “peace” by
enforcing anti-union laws and entangling workers in protracted legal
proceedings.
Supply Chain Choke Points
The hard truth is that retail workers, atomized in thousands of
separate stores, do not have the social power on their own to put a wrench in
Wal-Mart’s profit machine. But Wal-Mart is not the invulnerable behemoth it is
portrayed to be. Where it is particularly vulnerable is in its dependence on the
steady movement of its wares through the “just-in-time” global cargo chain, with
its key choke points. A huge proportion of Wal-Mart’s commodities flows from
Asian factories through West Coast ports, where they are off-loaded by
longshoremen and then moved by port truckers as well as rail workers to
Wal-Mart’s warehouse distribution centers. A fight to organize those warehouses
and Wal-Mart’s army of 7,400 truck drivers, as well as the workers in its
stores, would crucially depend on solidarity in action by longshoremen and other
unionized workers along the cargo chain. It would also need to be linked to
efforts to organize the port truckers.
Wal-Mart commonly uses subcontractors to hire and manage workers at
its huge modern warehouses. Several of these have been hit by walkouts. In
September, workers backed by the Change to Win-sponsored Warehouse Workers
United (WWU) walked out of a Jurupa Valley, California, warehouse over unsafe
work conditions. That same month, 38 non-union workers at a distribution center
in Elwood, Illinois, walked off the job for three weeks to protest the firing of
several co-workers as well as wage theft and unsafe work conditions.
The Elwood action was organized by the Warehouse Workers Organizing
Committee (WWOC), backed by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers
(UE). While the victimized workers were rehired with back pay, in November the
same subcontractor fired four more. Those firings have not been answered with
walkouts, and the workers are in limbo until an NLRB hearing in May. Like the
UFCW at the stores, neither WWOC nor WWU is calling for unionization of the
warehouses. Nevertheless, Wal-Mart has made some concessions to warehouse
workers, indicating the disproportionate leverage they hold at the distribution
choke points.
By hiring layers of subcontractors, Wal-Mart seeks to insulate
itself from labor strife. Militants must find a way to bring the armies of
low-wage “perma-temps” into the unions, including by fighting for union control
of hiring as part of organizing drives. It is also necessary for labor to fight
discrimination against young, old, women, black and immigrant workers, such as
the thousands of Latino port truckers and warehouse workers in California.
In January, L.A. port truckers working for Toll Group won their
first-ever contract after they joined the Teamsters. Their new contract raises
their pay from $12.72 to $19.00 per hour and gives them access to more
affordable health care, the Teamsters pension fund, paid sick leaves and
holidays. This victory ought to be a springboard for renewed organizing of port
truckers. Some 12,000 largely Latino port truckers are vital for the flow of
goods from L.A.-area ports to the massive Inland Empire warehouse complex to the
east. Unlike the Toll Group drivers, almost all of the port truckers are “owner
operators.” Organizing this workforce has suffered from the legalistic strategy
of the Teamsters bureaucracy, which has banked on pressuring the government to
reclassify them as “employees.”
It’s Spelled U-N-I-O-N
Having all but abandoned the strike weapon and even use of the
“s-word” in the years following the crushing of the PATCO air traffic
controllers union in 1981, the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy has helped
oversee a steady, painful decline of the unions from their peak numbers in the
1950s. After throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into Democratic Party
coffers, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win bureaucracies pined for Obama to give the
go-ahead to organize through “card checks” and the Employee Free Choice Act. But
the Obama White House was not about to ease the way to union organizing, and
labor has gone on to suffer yet more defeats. When a wave of “right-to-work”
laws swept into former bastions of union power like Wisconsin and Michigan, the
union tops could not muster a single protest strike, despite the seething anger
of rank-and-file unionists. Selling the notion that strike action is futile and
that labor’s only real weapon is electoral politics, the defeatist labor
bureaucrats have a new slogan: the polling booth is the new picket line.
Nowadays, in place of union organizing, the labor officialdom
conjures up workers “associations,” advocacy groups, community outfits and
single-issue campaigns in an attempt to get back some numbers and clout. Many of
these groups exist only to help Democratic Party and other “friend of labor”
capitalist politicians get elected. Some are lash-ups with clergy, small
businesses, environmentalists and consumer groups pushing for good “corporate
behavior” from Wal-Mart and other bloodsuckers. Instead of fighting to
unionize Wal-Mart outlets, the leaderships of both the UFCW and
SEIU service employees union have often campaigned to keep those stores out of
key urban areas. In doing so, they go against the interests of the ghetto and
barrio poor who would benefit from the jobs (and low prices) and could be won to
union organizing drives.
In her book Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade
Fighting for the Labor Movement, Jane McAlevey, a former top-level SEIU
service employees organizer, goes after the union’s new “grassroots movements,”
using quotes from union dispatches:
“In a slight change of tactics, SEIU is now…lavishly funding
community groups, or simply setting up their own fully controllable ‘community
groups’ that give an illusion of independence.... SEIU is spending tens of
millions ‘mobilizing underpaid, underemployed and unemployed workers’ and
‘channeling anger about jobs into action for positive change.’ What’s beyond
bizarre is that the program is aimed at mobilizing poor people rather than
SEIU’s own base. SEIU looks everywhere except to their own membership to gin up
popular revolts.”
A class-struggle union leadership would seek to tap into the anger
among the unemployed and the poor, not as a substitute for mobilizing workers
but as a way to gather behind labor’s cause those cast aside by the racist
rulers. Raising such demands as free, quality health care and jobs for all with
good pay and benefits, union organizing drives would find a huge reservoir of
support at the base of this society.
In 2003, the trade-union tops threw away an opportunity to
spearhead the organizing of Wal-Mart when they sabotaged a bitter,
five-month-long strike by 60,000 UFCW grocery workers in Southern California. At
the time, Wal-Mart was moving into L.A. and unionized grocers like Vons, Ralphs
and Albertsons used its arrival to push the UFCW for deep concessions in health
and other benefits. The strikers fought like hell to win. But in the end the
strike lost because of the bureaucrats’ refusal to shut down the key grocery
distribution centers and to extend the strike when other supermarket contracts
in California, Arizona and several other states had expired or were being
negotiated.
By the mid 2000s, plenty of bureaucrats like SEIU organizer Wade
Rathke had thrown in the towel when it came to Wal-Mart. Rathke’s “A Wal-Mart
Workers Association? An Organizing Plan” (reprinted in the 2006 book
Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism) reads like a
blueprint for OUR Walmart. Concluding that unionizing Wal-Mart is impossible and
that the strike weapon is “bankrupt,” Rathke argues that a company union would
be a step forward and that new workers “associations” could find sufficient
legal protection in New Deal-era labor legislation.
Similar arguments for “non-majority,” “minority” and “open source”
organizing are now sprouting up throughout the American labor movement,
rejecting key lessons from the 1930s fight to forge industrial unions. What
low-wage workers at Wal-Mart and everywhere need are strong, fighting unions and
the power and benefits only unions can secure: good wages, seniority rights,
work rules, safety protections, health care, pensions, vacations, etc. They need
solid contracts and the readiness to strike to defend their gains.
To organize Wal-Mart, whose tentacles reach around the world, would
require a high level of coordinated labor action, nationally and
internationally. U.S. workers must form bonds of mutual assistance with their
class brothers and sisters in Mexico, where Wal-Mart outraged the populace when
it bribed officials to enable the company to build a “supercenter” next to the
ancient pyramids in Teotihuacán. In Bangladesh, after a fire at a Wal-Mart
subcontractor killed 112 garment workers in November, labor organizers produced
documents showing that the retailer resisted safety improvements at the
notoriously fire-prone factories. That kind of industrial murder should ignite
internationally backed organizing drives demanding real gains in safety. But any
such solidarity is undermined by the chauvinist flag-waving of the U.S. union
tops, whose protectionist calls to “save American jobs” come at the expense of
workers elsewhere.
Unionizing Wal-Mart would go a long way toward reversing what has
been a one-sided class war against the working class. Led by a revolutionary
workers party, a revived American proletariat would fight not only to regain
what it has lost in recent decades but to expropriate the tiny class of
capitalist exploiters, from Sam Walton’s spawn to the owners of the banks and
major industries. That will take sweeping away the capitalist state and erecting
in its place a workers state as part of the fight for world socialist
revolution.
