Public Employee Press

The World of Work
Behind Wal-Mart’s low prices

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

As the biggest retailer in the country, Wal-Mart is used to getting its way. But that’s not happening in New York City — at least not so far.

When the anti-union company sought to open a store in a proposed mall in Rego Park, Queens, it ran into stiff opposition from a coalition of labor, community and small business groups.

Protracted war
The uproar grew until Feb. 24, when the real estate developer rescinded its offer to Wal-Mart to set up a store in its mall.

“The message to Wal-Mart is simple,” said Brian M. McLaughlin, president of the New York City Central Labor Council. “New York is one tough customer, and if you want to do business with us, you’d better clean up your act.”

But McLaughlin called the Rego Park victory “the beginning of a very long battle.” Indeed, Wal-Mart reportedly plans to open a store on Staten Island, the city’s most conservative borough, where it expects to have a better chance of imposing its corporate policy of everyday low wages on the Big Apple.

Poverty wages
With its poor wages, lousy benefits and record of labor abuses, Wal-Mart would appear to be a ripe target for organizing:

• Its average wage of $9.68 an hour isn’t enough to keep a family of four out of poverty.
• The company faces the largest class-action lawsuit for discrimination against women ever filed.
• Half of its 1.5 million employees go without health insurance.
• Wal-Mart has violated child labor laws, skirted Workers Comp rules, concealed workplace accidents, failed to report health hazards and committed scores of unfair labor practices. Its labor law violations include illegally firing employees for trying to organize a union, unlawful workplace surveillance and threatening workers.

But despite Wal-Mart’s abysmal labor record, unions so far have been unable to successfully organize any of its 3,600 stores in the United States. Already struggling to reverse the continuing decline of its membership toward one in 10 private sector workers, organized labor faces a hard-nosed adversary that alone accounts for 2.3 percent of all the goods and services produced in the United States.

Union busting
The only unions Wal-Mart has recognized are government-controlled outfits in China, where it purchases billions of dollars of products each year from 3,000 factories. But the firm usually goes nuclear when labor threatens to get a foothold in its retail empire:

• When a small group of Wal-Mart butchers in Jacksonville, Texas, voted in favor of a union, the company said it would shut down meat cutting
  operations in 180 nearby stores.
• It stopped a union at one store in February by hiring new anti-union workers after employees petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a representation election.
• Earlier this year in Quebec, Canada, when workers in the United Food and Commercial Workers were fighting for their first contract, Wal-Mart closed the store.
  The Wal-Mart corporate model also threatens the overall quality of life in the United States.
• Wal-Mart’s reliance on overseas sweatshops for its products contributes to the downward pressure on wages and the slow death of U.S. manufacturing.
• Small retailers are driven out of business when Wal-Mart opens up in their communities.
• Employing low-wage workers who often lack health insurance, Wal-Mart stores strain public services and local budgets.

Fight for our living standards
“Wal-Mart today represents as great a challenge to the labor movement as the auto industry was in the 1930s,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts. “The struggle to organize Wal-Mart and to reject its low-wage corporate model is a fight to protect and improve the standard of living of working people.”