wall mutts arise ?

 once more on baggin'
  
          the big cahuna 


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Leveraging Labor’s Revival: A Proposal to Organize Wal-
Mart

By Wade Rathke

As the debate concerning labor’s future rages on,
prodded by Andy Stern, International President of the
Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and
answered by one union after another, President Sweeney
has agreed on the need for debate and the need to form
committees to discuss the various proposals generated.
Workers in general and union members in specific can
hardly find cause for inspiration or action in these
multi-point programs. This is true, except in one very
important area: the proposal for a full-scale campaign
against Wal-Mart.

In the case of Wal-Mart, Stern has argued that one
clear "purpose" for the AFL-CIO is in leading campaigns
which transcend the interests of any single union and
find common cause for all unions and indeed all working
people. He has publicly argued in the debates around
restructuring the federation that as much as $25
million should be set aside for the Wal-Mart campaign,
virtually earmarking all of the HSBC/Household credit
card money that goes to the federation. Sweeney has
shrewdly stated publicly that perhaps even $25 million
is not enough to fight Wal-Mart - indicating that it
might take even more! Disappointingly, very few other
unions have taken up the battle cry over Wal-Mart,
perhaps because they believe that this is all just an
argument between one or two people and a half dozen
unions, rather than a fight for the future for American
workers.

I would argue that a campaign on all fronts against
Wal-Mart is the single organizing effort that offers
the most hope for working families. Furthermore,
driving an organizing program around Wal-Mart and its
workers could potentially change the tide for labor and
create organizational capacities that would give us
fighting and winning forces for our future.

Wal-Mart and its wannabes are the GM’s, Fords,
Chryslers and US Steels of our time. The great
organizing drives of the 1930s were mounted around an
understanding that there was a new industrial force
reorganizing all of mass work. Wal-Mart and its clones
have similarly restructured the nature of mass
enterprise in service industries today, and therefore
are transforming the fundamental business model that
drives both domestic and international commerce.

The size, scale, strength, and location of the company
are a direct challenge to almost any usual or common
organizing strategy. One cannot go store by store with
NLRB-style direct certification elections. There are
just too, too many stores to believe that one could
conceivably get a handle on the company in this way.
Furthermore, the United Food & Commercial Workers
(UFCW) has already tried this model aggressively and
thrown the kitchen sink at the company without much
success. One cannot also underestimate the weakness of
the current law and the robber baron ruthlessness of
the company and its culture. The often repeated true
story of the UFCW winning an election in a butchery
department in the Dallas area and Wal-Mart switching
every store in the American empire to processed meat
speaks volumes of the futility of this approach

A market-oriented strategy effective in direct
recognition successes in other industries is also
unlikely to be effective in organizing Wal-Mart.
Arguably the southern California market had UFCW’s best
contracts and highest unionization rates, yet the
threat of Wal-Mart’s entry was sufficient to
destabilize the bargaining relationships preemptively,
rather than forcing Wal-Mart to move up to the market
rates and benefits in order to enter the area. The
power and efficiency of the Wal-Mart business model
acts as a pervasive threat regardless of unionization.
Recently, as Wal-Mart replaced Albertson’s as the
number one grocery seller in the Dallas-Fort Worth
market, Albertson’s countered by publicly announcing
that it was unilaterally moving the bulk of its 20,000
workers in that area to part-time status with no
benefits.

To state the obvious - there is no easy way to organize
Wal-Mart workers. Furthermore, there is a pervasive
culture that militates against organization, along with
a generation of union avoidance work that permeates all
parts of the personnel system. It is not cowardice, but
good judgment that brings us to the basic conclusion
that to organize these workers one must build a
different kind of formation than we have seen
previously. The mission cannot be to create simple
"bread and butter" unionization for Wal-Mart workers;
instead, as both Stern and Sweeney have argued, the
grand vision has to be achieving change and a voice for
all workers.

Get the idea of collective bargaining out of your mind.
Collective bargaining requires two parties committed to
at least a minimal level of good faith in practice and
a concession of a countervailing level of power between
management and labor. Currently, such programs are
unimaginable at Wal-Mart and therefore at best a
distraction. The mismatched imbalance of power is too
extreme to imagine winning an agreement now. We need to
put pressure on wages and benefits, and envision an
organization that exerts constant pressure in a way
that is unnatural under a bargaining regime. The first
priority for workers at Wal-Mart has to be building a
powerful organization on the job and in public vis a
vis their employer.

Efforts to engage the community in conjunction with
other allies on the requirements for new Wal-Mart store
sites, including community benefits, have become
increasingly successful. There are now examples like
living wages (won in Chicago), store access (won
recently in Hartford), environmental protections and
disclosures (conceded in Tarpon Springs, Florida). The
missing agreement has been a formation that includes
Wal-Mart workers asserting their own interests and
objectives in the community. Similar fights with a
worker face and voice would empower a worker
association.

For workers to create an association at the workplace
they will need a strong alliance of support in the
community acting in concert with them and protecting
their efforts to create space for organization and
struggle. Such an alliance should be constructed on the
broadest possible framework in order to unite all other
organizations and interests who have an issue that
engages the company and its practice. Community
organizations like ACORN, and other civic organizations
have raised concern about store traffic, location,
safety, sprawl, and its impact on the community.
Immigrant and civil rights groups have raised issues
around discriminatory employment practices. Women’s and
labor groups have raised issues about sex
discrimination in pay and promotions. Environmental
groups have concerns that range from sprawl to green
practices. Consumer groups have raised issues
concerning toxic cosmetics, shoddy foreign goods,
questionable financial services, and an array of
similar issues. From such a burgeoning array of groups
a very broad alliance could be constructed linking the
interests inside the company with the public force of
its activity.

Besides bringing together community organizations and
institutions into such an alliance, there should also
be an effort to recruit individual support for workers
and their families who are organizing the association.
This can be done in numerous ways (via canvass,
internet, door to door, etcetera), but it is essential
that there be a direct, independent, and large base of
public support for the alliance and the association to
offset the tactics that will be predictably taken by
the company.

Critical to both of these efforts would be a
stakeholder not usually seen in classic labor
organizing: former employees. Wal-Mart, and companies
that are following its business model, churn through
the workforce. Wal-Mart claims that its turnover is now
down to about 40 percent, but with 1.2 million workers
that is still a huge number of workers - more than
500,000 - to spit out on an annual basis. These workers
have experience with the company, have gained some
perspective from their distance from the culture and
the paycheck, and in many cases have issues about
rights abridged and are even potential beneficiaries of
efforts to reform the company’s practices. They have a
common cause and their voice is an important one to add
in reforming the company, therefore a place should be
made for them in this new type of organizational
formation. The inability of most unions to allow useful
and vital participation from workers who are
unemployed, laid off, or fired is a critical weakness
of the political structure of such institutions. We
should not allow such barriers to exist in this new
formation, because we need the help of such former
workers for their own sake and in order to support both
community and existing worker activity.

Stern’s call for a campaign against Wal-Mart, and
Sweeney’s rejoinder to bring it on, but perhaps in an
even larger way, is potentially the best news American
workers have heard in several decades. At the least, a
serious and well-resourced campaign focusing on Wal-
Mart, even if it does nothing more than force the
company to establish a fairer business model, will make
a difference to Wal-Mart workers and their allies. It
would also send the message to unorganized workers
throughout the United States that labor cares - and
will act - in behalf of the unorganized and oppressed.
At the most, the Wal-Mart battle cry could create new
momentum for mass organization among the literally tens
of millions of unorganized service workers in firms
both gargantuan and tiny, who are united in denying
workers basic wages, benefits, and rights and are able
to do so because workers lack voice and organization on
the necessary scale.