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Friday, January 6, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Can Walmart Be Unionized?
Spencer Woodman: Can Walmart Be Unionized?
January 5, 2012
Walmart has a long track record of suppressing efforts to unionize its employees. But over the past year, Walmart workers have tried a new method of organizing in informal groups that are not union-certified but still function as instruments for workers to negotiate with management and assert their rights. In this episode of Nation Conversations, Spencer Woodman sits down with Executive Editor Betsy Reed to explain how this campaign, known as OUR Walmart, has succeeded where others have failed and the implications of such campaigns for the retailer and its employees.
For more on Walmart workers' new unionization campaigns, read Spencer Woodman's article "Labor Takes Aim at Walmart—Again," which appears in the January 23, 2012 issue of The Nation magazine.
Labor Takes Aim at Walmart—Again
January 4, 2012
In October two shabby buses filled with Walmart employees stopped unannounced outside the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. As the employees filed into the building’s expansive parking lot, plainclothes private security personnel sporting sleek sunglasses and Walmart emergency response badges rushed in and swiftly corralled the employees onto a public sidewalk. Members of a new union-backed campaign to organize Walmart, the workers had come from around the country to ask Walmart’s CEO, Mike Duke, for better wages and better treatment.
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The hoped-for meeting was not granted. Within minutes, a dozen Bentonville police officers rushed in to reinforce the security guards in forming a barricade between the employees and their headquarters’ front door. A labor relations representative emerged from the mostly windowless building. She announced that she would meet only with workers who carried Walmart employee discount cards in addition to their company badges and state IDs. Without discount cards, the
protesting employees would be arrested.
“I didn’t come here today to go shopping, so why do I need my discount card?” said Girshriela Green, a young mother who until recently worked at Walmart in Southern California. “I feel totally disrespected. Shame on them for not having the common decency to sit down and talk to their own associates.”
This recent unrest in Arkansas—the second Bentonville action by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)–supported OUR Walmart group in a span of four months—is part of the widest effort yet to organize Walmart, the world’s largest private sector employer and the labor movement’s most intractable foe in the era of declining unionism. Over the past year, a loose coalition of labor groups has redoubled engagement with the retail giant in a series of campaigns using nontraditional organizing strategies—namely, the formation of informal groups of workers that are not union certified but attempt to assert themselves to management all the same. OUR Walmart, the largest initiative, focuses on the company’s retail stores. Another new campaign, Warehouse Workers United (WWU), focuses on logistics workers in Walmart-contracted warehouses in Southern California and is launching a lean effort to coordinate workers internationally along Walmart’s supply chain.
“A year ago, I would not have predicted this strategy of nonunion worker organization,” says Dorian Warren, a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. “I see it in the context of failed past strategies. It’s clear that you cannot run a formal NLRB election at Walmart. This PR strategy of beating Walmart over the head with bad publicity is reaching its limits. And frankly, when the Supreme Court struck down the Dukescase it became clear that the legal strategy was also reaching a dead end.”
Indeed, until recently it appeared that the labor movement was lying prostrate in its engagement with the Arkansas colossus—a company whose anti-unionism, both visionary and vicious, has triumphed at every turn. In 2000 the UFCW won an election at a small meatpacking unit at a Texas Walmart, only to learn that the company would dissolve all in-store meatpacking companywide. Five years later, an entire Quebec Walmart was shuttered just weeks after its employees voted to unionize. The fines the $400 billion company incurs from such boldly illegal retaliations are minimal compared with the potential cost of raising wages.
Such defeats notwithstanding, union leaders have decided that organizing retail in America is not feasible without first dealing with Walmart, a company that, more than any other on earth, sets labor standards across industries that feed its vast global supply chain. The core of Walmart’s low-price wizardry lies in its innovative mechanisms for minimizing labor costs, most often the number-one expense of production in low-end retail.
In recent years, as it has suffered dismal sales reports and turmoil in management, Walmart has doubled down on its strategy of suppressing wages and benefits for its 2.1 million employees. This is evidenced all the way from Bangladeshi garment factories, which maintain working conditions that verge on slavery to meet Walmart’s rock-bottom procurement prices, to sales floors across the Americas, where managers are given increasingly narrow budgets to pay staff, who make an average of around $8 an hour and often have to rely on government-funded food and healthcare programs.
“All along this company’s global supply chain we are seeing millions of workers in disparate work roles but who are facing the same issues: increasing precariousness, exploitation and the inability to democratically organize,” says an international organizer at WWU.
In this intense workforce squeeze, labor groups see an opportunity.
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In just over a year, OUR Walmart has signed up thousands of employees in hundreds of Walmarts in more than thirty states. Though not yet being seriously discussed, unionization remains an open, if distant, option. In launching the campaign, the UFCW sent hundreds of its members door-to-door to encourage Walmart employees to join the group, which requires a $5 monthly dues payment.
Organizers credit the group’s brisk expansion to the ditching of formal union drives, in which organizers must win a prescheduled election at a store. “Walmart is very effective in dealing with a classic union strategy, where there’s an election coming that it can plan around,” says Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN. He helped organize Walmarts from Florida to California in an experiment with nonunion organizing beginning in 2004. “But when there’s no election coming, they don’t know how to deal with these noncertified workers’ associations.”
This nonelection route bypasses official forms of collective bargaining, which mandate that workers and management sit down to agree on compensation and hours. Instead, these worker associations bargain outside pre-established frameworks of negotiation, using any means legal to pressure management into recognizing their interests—an arrangement that closely resembles pre–New Deal unionism. With little institutional arbitration, this model can be seen as a rawer, more organic form of workplace struggle.
National labor law broadly protects nonunion worker activities, including collective actions and even nonunion strikes. “In a nonunion situation, the employers do not have to agree to what these groups demand, but if the employer retaliates, there is a right to file an unfair practice charge and the NLRB would enforce it,” says Lance Compa, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University.
OUR Walmart member Jackie Goebel took advantage of such unofficial channels of bargaining this past summer at her store in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
When she began as a cashier in 1988, Goebel saw Walmart as the small town’s most attractive workplace, one that she associated with the market-inspired humanitarianism of its founder, Sam Walton. More recently, Goebel’s satisfaction with her job has soured. In 2005 her daughter, a young mother who was a cashier at the same store, went to the doctor with troubling symptoms. The doctor diagnosed ovarian cysts and insisted she get a hysterectomy. In the fall of 2006, she approached Goebel and said she had ovarian cancer. “I asked her, ‘Why did you not have the hysterectomy when they first suggested it to you?’” Goebel recalls. “And she looked directly at me and said, ‘I was afraid if I took the time off they’d fire me.’” Goebel’s daughter died in 2007 at 37.
“I don’t hold Walmart culpable for my daughter having cancer,” says Goebel. “But she was living in this horrible fear of losing her job, and had she gone and gotten the surgery when the doctor suggested, it would have bought her years more with her kids.”
While coping with the consequences of Walmart’s well-documented practice of firing employees with medical issues, Goebel also began to notice that her manager was slashing wages while increasingly demanding that the workers perform task volumes she calls “not humanly possible.” Since its launch, the Kenosha OUR Walmart group has not grown impressively. It has eight members. Nonetheless, this past summer the small group confronted management to demand fair treatment and access to their employee files. Goebel had been the subject of unexplained disciplinary action, which she hoped her record would clarify. After she filed a complaint with her state labor department, the store’s management showed Goebel her file. “We still have a lot of work to do, but these little gains have helped considerably,” she says.
Numbers-wise, OUR Walmart has had more success in Southern California, where one member reports that more than half of her store’s 500 workers have joined the group. “Six months ago, under our old store manager, we were not treated with respect,” says Venanzi Luna, a department manager (department managers at Walmart still earn hourly wages and thus legally belong to nonmanagerial ranks). “So many people were unwillingly part time, our hours kept getting cut, and individual associates were expected to do the work of three. It was miserable.”
Over the summer, Luna took her human resources coordinator by surprise when she and twenty other OUR Walmart member employees walked into his office and demanded that the store’s top manager be fired. In short order, Bentonville flew in one of its labor relations specialists to discuss with employees how the workplace could be improved. Within a month, the unpopular store manager was quietly replaced with one more favorable to employees, and scheduling improved markedly. The store bumped several workers from part time to full time. The group, however, has had no success in seeking wage increases.
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Challenges Walmart
Challenges Walmart
By Tom Geiger, UFCW21 -
On Thursday morning, at an action in Bellevue, WA, a group of local organizations announced the launch of a new effort to change the practices of the largest employer in America - Walmart.
On Thursday morning, at an action in Bellevue, WA, a group of local organizations announced the launch of a new effort to change the practices of the largest employer in America - Walmart.
Despite attempts to re-brand itself and posting $16 billion in profits the company told part-time employees that they would no longer qualify for health care coverage.
The local launch is part of a larger nationwide campaign - Making Change at Walmart.
Pairing up with this action and launch is an ad that will appear in the Thursday edition of the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce showcasing the coalition’s message.
Unwanted Gifts? Try eBay Instant Sale
Unwanted Gifts? Try eBay Instant Sale
By Brian O'Connell - 01/04/12 - 12:37 PM EST
NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- If you're stuck with an unwanted Christmas present of the electronic variety but don't have a receipt, you may have more options than you think. Online auction giant eBay(EBAY) has a site dedicated to buying electronic gadgets from consumers directly without a receipt, and will even accept late model devices you may have thought were "unreturnable."
For more information click link at the top of this page.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Say it Ain't So! Bird Mystery Solved
Mystery Bye Bye Blackbird, Solved… USDA Has Admitted To Poisoning Millions Of Animals
It’s absolutely shocking news: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has publicly admitted it is responsible for the mass poisoning of tens of millions of birdsover the last several years. It’s all part of the USDA’s program called “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and we even have the USDA’s spreadsheet where they document how many millions of birds (and other animals) they’ve poisoned to death.
Here I document the number of animals the USDA is actually killing, based on their own reports:www.naturalnews.com/031084_bird_deaths_holocaust.html
There’s even a video that explains the USDA’s involvement in a recent mass bird die-off near the border of Nebraska: naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=191572F79E8B2C64705B4AB182AF54F9
Not all the mysterious bird die-offs that have been witnessed around the globe recently are due to unexplained causes. A recent mass die-off event witnessed in Yankton, South Dakota was traced back to the USDA which admitted to carrying out a mass poisoning of the birds.
After hundreds of starlings were found dead in the Yankton Riverside Park, concerned citizens began to investigate. Before long, a USDA official called the local police and admitted they had poisoned the birds. “They say that they had poisoned the birds about ten miles south of Yankton and they were surprised they came to Yankton like they did and died in our park,” says Yankton Animal Control Officer Lisa Brasel, as reported by KTIV (www.ktiv.com/Global/story.as…).
The USDA then confirmed the story and explained it was all “part of a large killing” in Nebraska. Some of the birds that ate the poison apparently flew all the way to Yankton before succumbing to the poison.
Watch the video yourself, as reported from KTIV:
naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=19157…
naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=19157…
USDA mass-murders birds on a regular basis
So why was the USDA poisoning birds in the first place? A Nebraska farmer was apparently complaining that the starlings were defecating in his feed meal. The answer to this conundrum apparently isn’t tocover your feed meal but rather call the USDA and ask them to poison thousands of birds.
The USDA complied, apparently agreeing this was a brilliant idea. So they put out a poison called DRC-1339 and allowed thousands of birds to feed on that poison.
Carol Bannerman from USDA Wildlife Services ridiculously claimed the bird kill was also to protect “human health.”
“We’re doing it to address, in this case, agricultural damage as well as the potential for human health and safety issues,” she said. That’s just a lie, of course. In what universe do starlings pose a threat to human health and safety?
The USDA Wildlife Services website, by the way, is www.aphis.usda.gov
The USDA even has a name for this mass poisoning program: Bye Bye Blackbird. Through the use of poisons such as DRC-1339, the USDA has killed more than four million birds over the last several years, reports Truthout (www.truth-out.org/bye-bye-bl…).
They even proudly publish an online spreadsheet showing just how many they’ve murdered with poison: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/prog_data/2009_prog_data/PDR_G_FY09/Basic_Tables_PDR_G/Table_G_FY2009_Long_Method_Featured.pdf
Remember, these are mass bird killings that are funded with your tax dollars. It all makes you wonder whether the government is, in fact, responsible for many of the other mysterious animal deaths that have been reported across the country (and around the globe).
It also makes you wonder: If the federal government thinks nothing of murdering 4 million living, breathing birds, then what else might they be capable of doing out of a total lack of respect for wildlife?
And if the USDA poisons birds because certain groups become too populous, what do you suppose is planned for when human population grows too large?
Be sure to check out the video at: naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=19157…
Animals Murdered, Listed as “Intentional” and “Killed / Euthanized” in 2009:
Brown-headed cowbirds: 1,046,109
European Starlings: 1,259,714
Red-winged blackbirds: 965,889
Canadian geese: 24,519
Grackles: 93,210
Pigeons: 96,297
Canadian geese: 24,519
Grackles: 93,210
Pigeons: 96,297
…plus tens of thousands of crows, doves, ducks, falcons, finches, gulls, hawks, herons, owls, ravens, sparrows, swallows, swans, turkeys, vultures and woodpeckers, among other animals.
The chart even shows that the USDA “unintentionally” euthanized one Bald Eagle.
Also murdered in 2009 by the USDA are victims of other species:
27,000 beavers, 1700 bobcats, 81,000 coyotes, 2,000 gray foxes, 336 mountain lions, 1900 woodchucks, 130 porcupines, 12,000 raccoons, 20,000 squirrels, 30,000 wild pigs, 478 wolves.
See the list yourself at: www.naturalnews.com/files/USDA-Bye-Bye-Blackbird.pdf
OR HERE: Table_G_FY2009_Short
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