A Lesson in Recent Labor History

The Edelman PR agency out of D.C. handles the Wal-Mart p.r. account.  As part of that effort, they created a fake grassroots organization called Working Families for Wal-Mart.  These are the people who sponsored the recent ill-fated "Wal-Marting Across America" tour by a Wasington Post photographer and his freelance writer girlfriend.  Another part of its effort is a fake blog that does nothing but spout anti-union propaganda.  This is my letter to the author of these posts, Edelman junior executive Brian McNeill, cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal.

Dear Brian:

I don't know if you've been writing all the posts at "Paid Critics" (as your name has only appeared there recently), but this seems likely as I keep seeing the same tired anti-union arguments come up there in different forms over and over again.  

I've been reading your stuff from the moment your fake blog launched, Brian, but I think you outdid yourself yesterday with "UFCW Leader Admits Its About the Dues."  You don't even have to read the article you link to in order to see that United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) President Joe Hansen said no such thing:

"Success would be if Wal-Mart would bring their working standards up to what we consider decent," says Joseph Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, who founded Wake Up Wal-Mart. "We just don’t think they are going to do that without a union."

The purpose of a union, Brian, is to raise wages and improve working conditions.  If Wal-Mart were to behave like many other non-union employers like Starbucks or Whole Foods and provide better wages and working conditions than the norm, the UFCW would go on to other targets.  Hansen is practically telling you that right there.  The reason Hansen cares so much is that Wal-Mart's business practices don't just affect Wal-Mart employees, they affect the conditions of all union members who are employed by Wal-Mart's competitors.  If their competitors are undercut so badly that they go out of business (like the 25 grocery chains that went bankrupt between 1993 and 2003 which cited Wal-Mart as the catalyst), then those union workers will be unemployed.  That's why Wake-Up Wal-Mart exists, not because the United Food and Commercial Workers needs the dues.  If it were really all about the dues, don't you think the union would have picked an easier target so that they could get the money faster?

The funny thing is that that's not why I wanted to write you today.   I always expect deceptive posts to show up on "Paid Critics."  That's why I read your work.  I'm writing you, Brian, because as a history teacher, I can't stand to see someone get their recent history so wrong.  

The key word in the following passage from your post is "alienate:"

Indeed, "Wake-Up Wal-Mart" is just a fancy term for no union members left to alienate, the necessary result of "barely surviv[ing] the crippling grocery strike in California," with "no choice but to [unionize Wal-Mart]...to survive." After losing 70,000 members over a recent five-year-period, union leaders desperately need to get their hands on billions of dollars over the next several years – and Wal-Mart is the only employer large enough to satiate their greed.

The problem the UFCW faces is not that grocery store workers have turned against it, but that employers like Wal-Mart have gamed the system in order to destroy the right to organize as enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act after its primary sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York).  By coincidence, I just got the labor historian David Brody's latest book, Labor Embattled, yesterday via interlibrary loan.  As he explains:

    The National Labor Relations Act, whose stated purpose and original effect was to encourage collective bargaining, has been hijacked by its natural enemies.  The law today serves as a bulwark of the "union-free environment" that describes nine-tenths of our private-sector economy.

And no company has done a better job at hijacking the NLRA than Wal-Mart.  Here's In These Times from last year:

In 2000, when seven of 10 butchers in a store in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the UFCW, Wal-Mart responded by announcing that henceforth it would sell only pre-cut meat in all of its supercenters, fired four of the union supporters and transferred the rest into other divisions. (Three years later, the NLRB ruled the decision illegal. Wal-Mart is now appealing.) And in May this year, when workers at a store in Jonquiere, Quebec, voted to unionize, Wal-Mart simply shut the place down. . . .

The company will simply do whatever it takes to keep workers from organizing. "Staying union free is a full-time commitment," reads one of the company’s training manuals. "[F]rom the Chairperson of the ‘Board’ down to the front-line manager ... [t]he entire management staff should fully comprehend and appreciate exactly what is expected of their individual efforts to meet the union free objective."

Managers are trained to call a special hotline at the first sign of suspicious behavior, including "employees talking in hushed tones to each other." After the call, the company’s notorious labor relations division headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, will swing into gear, often dispatching a company jet to the afflicted store, bearing members of its crack team of union busters. Management will convene mandatory meetings with each associate and screen anti-union videos.

On sceond thought, scratch that bit about Wal-Mart hijacking the NLRA.  They haven't hijacked it – They've run right over it.  From In These Times again:

Since 1999 the UFCW and others have filed more than 300 charges against Wal-Mart with the NLRB, accusing the company of, among other transgressions, firing employees for suspected union activity in violation of the Wagner Act. In a third of these cases, the local NLRB office has issued a formal complaint and attempted to prosecute the company, but it hardly matters to the behemoth because even if the full NLRB rules against Wal-Mart, the resulting penalties are a pittance.

Brian, old buddy (I've been reading your stuff so long I feel like I can call you that), you write like the UFCW operates in a vacuum.  Yet Wal-Mart's willingness to violate the law and keep its employees from exercising their right to choose has done more to define the UFCW's problems in recent years (like the 2003 California grocery strike, inspired by rollbacks demanded by union grocers scared of a slew of newly-announced Wal-Marts) than any other factor, including the hostile organizing environment perpetuated by Republican administrations going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Even though you've shown me time and time again that honesty is not a useful trait for those  attacking your so-called "Paid Critics,"  I prefer to think that you didn't know the background information that I've explained in this letter.  Because if you knew this stuff already, Brian, you're just another paid political hack who's willing to sell their soul for the sake of a good paycheck and the possibility of fleeting power.  And the irony of someone like that attacking others for being "paid critics" would just be too much for me to bear.

Regards,

Jonathan