NYT: Unions Plan Big Drive for Better Pay at Nonunion Wal-Mart

[DeepModem Mom]

Unions Plan Big Drive for Better Pay at Nonunion Wal-Mart
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: December 11, 2004


The A.F.L.-C.I.O. and more than a half dozen unions are planning an unusual - and unusually expensive - campaign intended to pressure Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, to improve its wages and benefits.

The campaign will be highly unusual because it will not, at least at first, focus on unionizing Wal-Mart workers, but will instead focus on telling Americans that Wal-Mart - with wages averaging between $9 and $10 an hour - is pulling down wages and benefits at companies across the nation.

The unions are talking of spending $25 million a year on the effort, more than has ever been spent before in a union campaign against a single company....

***

Wal-Mart executives say that its wages are competitive with those of other retailers. But critics assert that now that it has become the nation's largest company, Wal-Mart, like General Motors of old, has a responsibility to be a model on wages and benefits....

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"We're also concerned about the 20,000 workers at Wal-Mart stores in China and about the 6 million Chinese workers who produce goods sold at Wal-Marts," (AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney) said....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/11/national/11walmart.html

[originaldemocrat]

1. Democrat leadership must lead the war on "free" trade nonsense

The unions have had power, money, and influence and for the past 30 years yet they have been utterly ineffective in stopping the tidal wave of job losses and massive outsourcing that have gutted American industry and thrown millions and millions of Americans out of work. Depending on those do-nothing phonies is a waste of time. Too many of them went with NAFTA and other job killing betrayals because their industry bribed their way out of it and others have simply dropped their opposition because they got back room deals of their own.

It is the Democrat Party leadership that must fight for this issue and not expect unions to it and I don't mean people like Dick Gephardt who talked a good game but did nothing. Besides, the junk Walmart sells is peanuts compared to the transferral of entire industries to China worth hundreds of billions of dollars and millions upon millions of American jobs. The high value goods and technical professions that pay the high wages lost to China and their subsidiaries should be the focus of concentration, not just the retail end process.

Until Democrats in power have the guts and moral backbone to fight for this issue, nothing will change except our incomes, which will be disappearing. So-called "free trade" must be shown for the knife in the back it is and savagely attacked as such.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Thanks for posting, originaldemocrat -- and welcome to DU!

[AliciaKeyedUp]

7. What do you suggest?

I hear lots of criticism of outsourcing and no viable solutions.

[Child_Of_Isis]

3. Wal-mart paying 9 to 10 dollars an hour?

In my area it's minimum wage.

[shadowknows69]

4. maybe 6 or 7 but I think you start at min

here in upstate NY. Just voted most profitable store of the whole chain last year I think. Unions are nearly non-existent up here but we could use the help.

[Broadslidin]

5. "In the U.S., Poor People Find It Possible to Afford Cheap........."

'Made In China' products for their daily necessities.

Above sentence taken From the Communist China Daily
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-11/29/content_395728.htm

Obviously, The Wal-Mart strategy depends heavily
on the 'former good jobs' raggedy destitute people
who enter a Wal-Mart store.

[DeepModem Mom]

6. What a find of a line, Broadslidin -- fascinating!