The fear factor: How Wal-Mart keeps out unions

The Wal-Mart mythology, as told by the capitalist media, is that this mega-giant corporation—bigger than Exxon, bigger than General Motors, bigger than the Bank of America—owes its success to the great service it provides its customers through cheap prices.

But behind the veil of benign public service, the company is a ruthless and tight-fisted employer that sets the workweek a few hours shy of 28 hours so it doesn’t have to pay benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees. A majority of its workers with children live below the poverty line.

How the company gets away with this is the subject of a recently released, 210-page exposé by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which documents Wal-Mart’s “relentless exploitation of weak U.S. labor laws” in order to “bust unions and deny workers their most basic rights.”

The report, “Discounting Rights,” is based on interviews with scores of current and former Wal-Mart employees and managers. It states that “Wal-Mart workers have virtually no chance to organize because they’re up against unfair U.S. labor laws and a company that will do just about anything to keep unions out.”

Wal-Mart employs 1.3 million workers in the U.S. Not one is represented by a union.

When Wal-Mart managers suspect organizing in their stores, they are required to call the company’s 24/7 “union hotline.” A company hit squad of lawyers and union-busters is quickly dispatched from corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to the “trouble spot.” Workers are pressured to attend group meetings, where they are inundated with a relentless propaganda campaign.

The report cites a typical case: “’Bridgid Carpenter’ (a pseudonym), a Greeley, Colo., Wal-Mart worker, expressed her frustration with one of the one-sided ‘Labor Relations Team’ meetings and anti-union videos shown at her store, where Wal-Mart defeated organizing efforts in 2005 using tactics that largely comport with U.S. law.

“The videos dramatize the anti-union message by showing an example of a picket line that turns violent, characterizing unions as antiquated organizations, and portraying union organizers as harassing and bothersome people.

“’Anyone who saw the video would know it was anti-union,’ said Carpenter, ‘but they called it an educational video, which it wasn’t. It made me pretty upset. ... They depicted the organizing committee as people who’ll be on your butt forever ‘til you sign the card, and that’s not how we are. We’re not going to make you do something you don’t want to do. Home office kept saying this is an educational class. It should not just give one side of the union. They should give pro and con, not just con. It’s not fair.’”

Wal-Mart’s anti-union campaigns create a constant climate of fear at their stores, according to the HRW report. “We found that, after being subject to the full battery

of Wal-Mart’s tactics, many workers fear that if they express or even listen to pro-union views when union drives are underway, they may face retaliation, even firing.

“Largely denied the internationally recognized right to receive messages contrary to Wal-Mart’s relentless, well-honed, negative characterization of unions, many workers also fear dire consequences if they vote for union representation. In this climate, workers are deprived of the right to make a free and informed choice of whether to form a union.

“According to Angela Steinbrecher, a worker and member of the organizing committee at Wal-Mart’s Greeley, Colorado, store, ‘There is a lot of fear among the associates. ... [They] fear they will lose their jobs. It’s not said. No one comes out and says if you vote union, you’re going to be fired, but that’s the fear everyone has.’”

The company has interrogated workers about their and their co-workers’ union sympathies through direct and often hostile questioning and sent managers to eavesdrop on discussions among employees in a proposed bargaining unit. According to former workers and managers from Wal-Mart’s Kingman, Ariz., store, Wal-Mart has also monitored union activity by focusing security cameras on areas where union organizing is most active.

The fear and intimidation campaign is unrelenting.

In February 2000, a group of meat cutters at the Jacksonville, Texas, Wal-Mart Supercenter signed union cards, the first successful union organizing drive at a U.S. Wal-Mart store. Wal-Mart responded by illegally refusing to negotiate with the union. Within two weeks, the company announced it was closing the meat cutting departments in 180 stores in six states. The action had the effect of dispersing the workers throughout the store and destroying the union.

The Human Rights report emphasizes that these actions are illegal under existing U.S. and international law, and Wal-Mart is able to get away with it because penalties under U.S. laws are so minimal that they have little effect. Even when Wal-Mart is found guilty of illegal conduct, it receives only a slap on the wrist from the courts.

Over 150 years ago, Karl Marx wrote that “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

The quote is from “Capital,” Marx’s exhaustive analysis of the workings of the capitalist system. Marx showed that capitalist profit comes from surplus value, the value produced by workers’ labor over and beyond what is paid out in wages. It’s not high or low prices or the circulation of money that generates profits; it’s the exploitation of the workers. The staggering $11.3 billion in profits which Wal-Mart raked in just last year—an amount bigger than the gross national products of half the nations on the planet!—all ultimately comes from the workers.

The pro-capitalist group Human Rights Watch reports on Wal-Mart’s conduct as though it is the exception, but the truth is that corporations like Wal-Mart are typical of how this economic system works. Across the board, from the auto industry to banking to retail chains, they are doing everything in their power to bust unions and drive down wages and benefits. That’s why union membership has dropped so low in this country. But it is also the reason why workers’ fight back is both necessary and inevitable.