Canada On The Frontlines Of A Mission To Organize The Retail Giant

"I have always believed strongly that we don't need unions at Wal-Mart....[Unions] have put management on one side of the fence, employees on the other, and themselves in the middle as almost a separate business, one that depends on division between the other two camps. And divisiveness, by breaking down direct communication, makes it harder to take care of customers, to be competitive, and to gain market share."

-- Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story

Wal-Mart store #5834 looks innocuous enough, situated on Highway 16 on the outskirts of Terrace, B.C. It opened only seven months ago, on January 28. By now, the northern outlet should have been silently absorbed into Wal-Mart's global empire of thousands of stores and US$244 billion in annual sales. Instead, it is the site of a portentous battle between the world's largest retailer and North America's largest private-sector union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

In October, the B.C. Labour Relations Board will decide if the UFCW has garnered enough support at the Terrace store to warrant certification of a union. If the answer is yes, the Terrace store will become the first unionized Wal-Mart in B.C.--and only the second in all of North America.

Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's legendary founder, boasted in his 1992 autobiography that "we've never lost a union organizing election." As Labour Day is celebrated this year, much of the North American labour movement has coalesced around a vision that no doubt would have unsettled even the indomitable Walton: to unionize Wal-Mart's 1.2 million American workers and 60,000 workers (or "associates", as the company refers to them) in Canada. In a campaign reminiscent of the demands that led to the creation of Canada's Labour Day in 1894--better working conditions and the right of workers to organize--various unions across North America have quietly declared an all-out war on Wal-Mart.

"This is a very aggressive national and international campaign," Wal-Mart Canada spokesperson Andrew Pelletier told the Straight in a phone interview from Mississauga, Ontario. "They're targeting us everywhere....we're being targeted more than any other corporation."

Wal-Mart and its foes agree on one thing: Canada, where provincial labour laws are generally more worker-friendly than in the U.S., is on the frontlines of labour's continental mission. "It's a priority to organize Wal-Mart," explained Andy Neufeld, spokesperson for UFCW Local 1518's head office in Burnaby. "Since the fall of 2003, our local has certainly put more of a concerted effort into organizing Wal-Mart."

Local 1518, which represents 26,000 workers in B.C.'s retail, commercial, industrial, and health-care sectors, organized the union drive at Wal-Mart's Terrace store. Last month, UFCW Canada made labour history--in what the union's national director, Michael Fraser, called "a great victory...for Wal-Mart workers everywhere"--when it received certification for the only union at a Wal-Mart anywhere in North America, in Jonquière, Quebec.

(The UFCW also has applications pending for certification at Wal-Mart stores in Weyburn and North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and Brossard, Quebec. In August it lost a certification vote at a Wal-Mart in Thompson, Manitoba.)

Pelletier said the UFCW, with 1.4 million members across Canada and the U.S., has focused on organizing Canadian Wal-Marts because "labour laws in certain jurisdictions in Canada are skewed against employers". In the U.S., Neufeld said, widespread "right-to-work" legislation undermines collective bargaining by allowing employees to opt out of unions.

At issue are laws in some provinces that allow workers to unionize without a vote if a simple majority sign union cards (as happened in Jonquière), a provision designed to avoid potential intimidation of workers by management before a vote.

Pelletier said Wal-Mart will respect the outcome of the process, even though the company is "very disturbed at the way we became unionized". "We question whether the true wishes of the employees were heard or not," Pelletier said, referring to the union's certification after a majority of Wal-Mart employees signed union cards.

All previous attempts to organize Wal-Marts in Canada and the U.S. had met with failure. In 2002, after Wal-Mart meat cutters at a Jacksonville, Texas, store voted to unionize their 10-person department, Wal-Mart effectively eliminated their jobs. The company moved the butchers to other departments and began offering prepackaged meats.

IN 1978, WHEN Wal-Mart workers at a Searcy, Arkansas, distribution centre flirted with the idea of joining the Teamsters Union, Sam Walton brought in union-busting attorney John Tate. The centre's employees came to work one morning to find a "90-foot-long bulletin board running along one wall, covered with newspaper clippings describing every Teamsters strike, every violent incident, and every allegation of criminal activity, going back forty years or more, that Tate's researchers had been able to dig up," Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Ortega wrote in his book In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart is Devouring America. Not surprisingly, the workers quickly changed their minds about the merits of unionization.

Notably, when Wal-Mart bought Canada's ailing Woolco chain of 144 stores in 1994, it chose not to buy the 10 Woolco stores that were unionized, as well as an additional 12 nonunionized stores.

One of the unionized stores Wal-Mart rejected was in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Five years later, Wal-Mart built a bigger store in the southern Saskatchewan city of 35,000. The UFCW recently applied for automatic certification at the store, claiming that Wal-Mart's refusal to purchase Moose Jaw's unionized Woolco amounts to union-busting, a claim Pelletier said is unfounded.

South of the border, there is increasing talk of the "Wal-Martization" of the U.S. economy: lower prices for consumers, with corporate profits fuelled by lower wages and fewer benefits for employees. As other corporations widely emulate Wal-Mart's business model, the labour movement has decided that tackling Wal-Mart is the key to improving wages and working conditions across North America.

"It's not just, 'Let's whack Wal-Mart,' " said T. J. Michels, media spokesperson for the Service Employees International Union, which represents 1.6 million workers in Canada, the U.S., and Puerto Rico. "But let's whack the business model that drives workers' wages down. Wal-Mart is not just a UFCW problem; Wal-Mart is a labour problem."

With that in mind, the international union is helping to fill the anti­Wal-Mart war chest. At its June convention, it voted to set aside $1 million for an as-yet-unnamed Wal-Mart campaign in Canada and the U.S. The idea, Michels explained, is to use the fund as "seed money" to assist community, environmental, and other groups that have concerns about Wal-Mart. The campaign is so new that it is "still in the planning stages" and doesn't yet have a name, she said; supporters garnered convention votes for the initiative with the slogan "Wal-Mart: No Bargain."

The Canadian Labour Congress, too, has begun to play a more visible role in the Wal-Mart fracas. When Wal-Mart earlier this year challenged a UFCW application to certify workers in Weyburn, claiming that the province's trade-union act violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, CLC president Ken Georgetti dashed off an e-mail to Wal-Mart chairman S. Robson Walton, Sam Walton's son. He also sent copies of the e-mail to Wal-Mart company directors.

Georgetti invited Walton and the board of directors to read the charter and familiarize themselves with the rights and freedoms it grants to Canadians, "including the people who work at Wal-Mart". The e-mail included Internet links to the text of the charter and a fact sheet prepared by the federal Department of Justice.

Pelletier said the Saskatchewan Trade Union Act forbids Wal-Mart to discuss union-related matters with employees during a union drive, a provision Wal-Mart wants struck down.

Pelletier insisted that Wal-Mart, in spite of its track record, isn't anti-union. Rather, he said, the company is "pro­workplace democracy and pro-associate". The reason there are no unionized Wal-Marts, with the recent exception of the Jonquière store, is that employees "haven't chosen to be represented by a union", Pelletier said.

The UFCW and the rest of the labour movement argue otherwise, although they are having a tough time proving it. In a decision that could have serious consequences for Saskatchewan's trade-union movement, Justice George Baynton of the Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench ruled in July that Wal-Mart's desire to communicate with employees during a union drive has "considerable merit". Baynton also ruled against the UFCW's request that Wal-Mart furnish to the union copies of company documents, one reportedly called "Wal-Mart: A Manager's Toolbox to Remaining Union-Free."

A handbook Wal-Mart distributes to managers in the U.S. would appear to back the labour movement's claim that staving off unionization remains an official company policy. The handbook, according to various U.S. media reports, tells managers that "staying union-free is a full-time commitment".