How Wal-Mart Can Be Beaten (And Why the AFL-CIO Failed)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray10102007.html

By DAVID MACARAY

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is not only the largest private-sector employer in the United States (with more than 3,600 stores and 1.2 million employees), it's the largest private-sector employer in both Mexico and Canada as well. It already has 60 stores in what is quaintly referred to as Communist China, with plans for more. As an example of the clout Wal-Mart wields, it was able to persuade Procter & Gamble to invent a whole new version of "Tide" detergent, one that would be more suitable for the manual wash-machines used in China.

Anyone who's seen Wal-Mart's widely circulated promotional video can't help but be struck by the company's numbing arrogance and ambition. The video shows jubilant Chinese workers ("associates") dressed in matching T-shirts, doing group calisthenics while chanting corporate slogans. (That annoying whirring sound in the background is Chairman Mao spinning in his grave.)

It goes without saying that Wal-Mart's entire U.S. operation is non-union. Indeed, the Wal-Mart empire has come to symbolize everything labor unions despise in a non-union enterprise: stinginess, intractability, invincibility. But give Wal-Mart its due credit. Somehow it has managed to convince a million unprotected, under-appreciated, under-paid and under-insured "associates" that labor unions and exploitation go together like vodka and regrets. That's no small feat.

In early 2003, the AFL-CIO launched a massive drive to organize Wal-Mart's U.S. operation. Besides devoting enormous time and money (reportedly, tens of millions of dollars) to the effort, the union unveiled its ambitious plan in a gaudy press release. Because Wal-Mart is to anti-collectivist sentiment what Babe Ruth was to baseball, cracking its enamel-like shell was a chance for Big Labor to show what it could do on center stage.

Instead, as most are aware, the AFL-CIO failed to organize a single store. Not one. With 3,600 ducks on the pond, and the world's most expensive shotgun in their lap, they couldn't hit a single duck. This shrieking failure was so disappointing, so staggering, that the House of Labor, to this day, has not fully recovered from it. In truth, the recent splintering of the AFL-CIO into a rival labor conglomerate called "Change to Win" was a direct consequence of the Wal-Mart debacle.

As for that splintering, a digression: Nothing against SEIU president Andrew Stern and his band of mutineers (they did what they felt had to be done), but doesn't "Change To Win" sound like something spawned at a management retreat? Change to Win. It has the smarmy, unmistakable ring of seminar-speak. Wouldn't something terse and hopeful, like the "New Alliance," or weirdly haunting, like "Ergo Nation," have been better?

FULL article at link.

[cloudbase]

1. The AFL-CIO's SMART campaign in the offshore industry

didn't go very well, either.