Remember how, over the past few years, every time a group of Walmart workers announced they were striking or protesting, Walmart would trot out a spokesperson to scoff at the idea that anyone, least of all Walmart, would ever pay attention to this nonsense? Yeah. About that. Bloomberg’s Susan Berfield reports that:
Internally, however, Walmart considered the group enough of a threat that it hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin, contacted the FBI, staffed up its labor hotline, ranked stores by labor activity, and kept eyes on employees (and activists) prominent in the group. During that time, about 100 workers were actively involved in recruiting for OUR Walmart, but employees (or associates, as they’re called at Walmart) across the company were watched; the briefest conversations were reported to the “home office,” as Walmart calls its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
Executives in the home office were sending around emails asking about individual low-paid hourly workers. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin was monitoring social media. Store managers were calling in important info like this:
2:30 p.m., Store 5880 in Fairfax, Va.: “A customer began talking to a cashier about the strikes at Walmart this week, and the cashier responded that maybe she should go on strike. AM [assistant manager] feels the cashier was joking when she made the comment.”
4:19 p.m., Store 3893 in Zion, Ill.: “Three associates made comments surrounding the ‘strikes’ in other stores to Grocery ZMS [zone merchandising supervisor]. Grocery ZMS shared his opinion but didn’t state our philosophy. He will do so the next time the associates are at work.”
If you’ve ever wondered why more workers don’t unionize, or thought that the fact that more workers don’t unionize is evidence that they don’t want to … well, think about the surveillance network Walmart brought to this fight in which workers weren’t even actively trying to unionize, and the fact that the only reason we know the details of Walmart’s efforts is because of a National Labor Relations Board case over whether the retail giant illegally fired or retaliated against worker activists. That should give you an idea of the massive difficulty of forming a union in today’s America.