huffingtonpost: Wal-Mart is a Poster Child For What is Wrong with Labor Laws

[Omaha Steve]

Wal-Mart is a Poster Child For What is Wrong with Labor Laws

05.16.2007

Human Rights Watch researchers don't normally spend their days listening to forty-something Americans talk about their former bosses, but that's what I was doing in March 2005, investigating how Wal-Mart violates its workers' right to form and join trade unions. So, on a warm spring day in Kingman, Arizona, I listened as a former Wal-Mart worker casually explained how the company had required him to take surveillance cameras supposedly set up to catch shoplifters and shift them to spy on union supporters and union activity at his store as part of a larger plan to squash a union drive.

Over the past two years, I traveled all over the country talking to Wal-Mart workers past and present and scoured hundreds of pages of documents from legal cases against the company for a report, published May 1, Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart's Violation of US Workers' Right to Freedom of Association. And I learned that Wal-Mart is a poster child for what is wrong with the US labor law system.

Wal-Mart is by no means the only US company to violate workers' rights, and it's rare that HRW focuses on a single company. (The only other example was a report on Enron before its collapse.) But Wal-Mart is the world's largest company, an industry leader. So, its treatment of its workers really matters.

The United States is legally obligated to uphold workers' right to organize (a fundamental human right) by the same international treaties) that guarantee rights like freedom of religion and ban practices like torture. But in practice, it falls far short of international standards, and Wal-Mart takes full advantage. Not only does the company deny its US workers' their right to form and join unions, but in many cases, it can do so without ever violating weak US labor laws.

Wal-Mart's anti-union playbook -- the "Manager's Toolbox" -- is sophisticated and disturbingly effective. Following this bible for thwarting unions, at the first sign of workers trying to organize, store managers call the Union Hotline at company headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. Wal-Mart usually responds quickly by sending out its Labor Relations Team to crush the union drive. Team members hold anti-union meetings with workers at which they recount a parade of horribles that go hand in hand with union formation, such as the possibility of lower wages, benefit loss, and sky-high dues.

They show anti-union videos depicting unions as outdated and their representatives as aggressive, harassing, and unsavory. Some of the videos, like the training video excerpted on our website, would be almost comical if they didn't have the pernicious effect of chilling workers' attempts to organize.

FULL story at link.