Security cameras and HQ squads: Wal-Mart's union-busting tactics

[Joanne98]

Source: The Guardian

Andrew Clark in New York
Tuesday May 1, 2007
The Guardian

The world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, will today stand accused of routinely flouting its workers' human rights through a sophisticated strategy of harassing union organisers, discriminating against long-term staff and indoctrinating employees with misleading propaganda.

In a forensic indictment based on two years' research, the Washington-based pressure group Human Rights Watch will lift the lid on Wal-Mart's aggressive tactic of stamping on the slightest sign that workers are organising representation.

Evidence in Discounting Rights, a report to be published this morning, includes examples of workers forced into unpaid overtime and an alleged strategy of squeezing out long-serving staff who are more costly than low-wage, temporary, younger workers.




Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2069448,00.html

[jeff30997]

1. Gee I hate those scumbags.

A few years ago the employees of the Wall-Fart

near here in Saguenay (Quebec) were the first

peoples to unionize in North America...6 months lather

the bastards closed the store.

[DBoon]

2. Walmart is the Ford Motors of the 21st century

Under Harry Bennett's so-called "Service Department" (AKA Goon Squad):

Battle At Ford Plant

Special to the New York Times

DETROIT, May 26.—An outburst of violence, in which union representatives were beaten, kicked and driven away, marked today the first attempt of the United Automobile Workers of America to organize the employees of the Ford Motor Company.

Richard T. Frankensteen, directing the membership drive in behalf of the auto affiliate of the Committee for Industrial Organization, and Walter Reuther, president of the West Side local of the automobile workers' union, were set upon by a group of employees at No. 4 gate of the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn. With two other men who had accompanied them to oversee the distribution of union handbills, they were knocked down repeatedly, kicked, and finally forced away from the gate, despite efforts of Frankensteen to fight off his assailants.

Subsequent fighting, in which employees routed union representatives who had come to distribute leaflets, resulted in the injury of twelve more persons, seven of them women, the union stated.

http://www.answers.com/topic/ford-men-beat-and-rout-lewis-26-may-1937-newspaper-account