Wal-Mart Politics
My sister-in-law sent me this link. Essentially, Wal-Mart is exhorting its supervisors to tell their staffs of the dangers of a Democratic win in November. She asked for my opinion, so I wrote it up, and because it made some sense to, I thought I'd post a version of it here... You should read the article (or at least skim it) first, for the response to make sense.
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As with any human endeavor, unions can become corrupt and run contrary to the goals that they originally set out to provide. Take a look at either political party for a great example, the Democrats aren't particularly good at helping the poor and middle class and the Republicans aren't particularly good at making government smaller or controlling spending.
Nevertheless, I have rarely seen companies that treat their workers fairly complain about the possibility of unionizing, and in truth if the companies treat their employees fairly, the employees themselves will realize that they don't have a lot to gain by forming a union and paying dues.
On the other hand, there have been all sorts of stories about how Wal*Mart mistreats its employees. Cases of forced unpaid overtime, cases of sex discrimination, cases of trying to keep the number of "full time" employees to a minimum and keeping employees paid work hours under 32, so they don't have to provide benefits. I haven't followed all of these cases, but there have been enough that the old "where there's smoke, there's probably fire" axiom leads me to figure there's probably something to it. I know Wal*Mart has lost at least a couple of those suits.
Wal*Mart has some pretty poor practices, according to the reports I've read, and so they'd be at great risk for unionization, and that WOULD raise their prices somewhat, but...
To claim that their employees wouldn't benefit is ludicrous. If there would be no benefit to the employees, Wal*Mart wouldn't be concerned about it. They're not doing all of this publicity and effort out of concern for the well being of their employees, they're concerned about having to pay a living wage, or provide health insurance, or pay overtime when employees are required to stay overtime.
Yes, unions have sometimes overreached, but I look back to the days before they existed, and the incredible gap in prosperity between the owners of the companies and the people who did all of the work, and I have to say that on the whole they've been a net positive in this nation.
The thing is, with rare exceptions, I do not believe that the CEOs and owners of large companies are really worth hundreds to thousands of times what the lower level workers are. They don't work thousands of times harder, they tend to have wonderful golden parachutes to insulate them from the results of their own bad decisions (while those same decisions result in people who make less and have less of a parachute being handed two weeks pay and a notice of termination).
I don't have a problem with people earning in reasonable relation to A) how hard they work, B) their level of risk (investment, etc), and C) their worth to the company. It's not wrong to me for a product designer to make more than the people on the factory floor, because of the educational investment and relative scarcity of the designer. It's not wrong for the person who started a company and put years of their blood, sweat and personal finances into it to reap huge rewards when it does well. And I have no problem what so ever with merit pay based on harder work, or at least, based on better results (such as commission pay for sales people).
But I simply don't see why a half-assed CEO should make a bonus of $50million for cutting $25million in costs but driving the company into the dirt...
And thus, I have a lot more sympathy for the people at the bottom, not very well educated (on average) and just struggling to earn enough to survive than I do for the corporate fat cats who want to squeeze another two percent onto their bottom line by minimizing what the people at the bottom get.
Put another way, the people at the bottom of the company are working. They're not lazy, they're not sitting at home collecting welfare checks. And they have very little power. Unions give them a little bit of power. If you were trying to get by on minimum wage, if Wal*Mart was the only employment you could qualify for, wouldn't you want just a little bit of power, just a little bit of feeling that someone might actually be standing up for you?
Liam.
posted by Liam at 8/02/2008 11:50:00 PM
5 Comments:
It's all WalMart self-serving and political. As dispicable as it it is, the timing is good, if you're WalMart. I understand there's the impending vote on something called the Employee Free Choice Act. Sure, this effort to control employee election votes could backfire given their abuses of employees, but WalMart must see it as worth the risk. Plus the economy is bad now, jobs are low, workers have good reason to be scared. But then again, the lower-rank worker can at least vote in the upcoming election.
Hmmm. I'd be curious if one could follow the money and it might lead back to certain arms of the Republican Party or Bush Administration.
Ever since watching Friday's Olbermann's piece on this latest WalMart story, I've wondered just what is the Employee Free Choice Act. Can you enlighten us? Here's a YouTube link to the Friday piece on Countdown:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmPwFc-kJ8Y
Sunday, August 03, 2008 11:50:00 AM
The original WSJ article has some more interesting details -- unsurprisingly, the foxnews.com excerpt omits many details that are unflattering to the company. One bit that I found telling:
Through almost all of its 48-year history, Wal-Mart has fought hard to keep unions out of its stores, flying in labor-relations rapid-response teams from its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to any location where union activity was building. The United Food and Commercial Workers was successful in organizing only one group of Wal-Mart workers -- a small number of butchers in East Texas in early 2000. Several weeks later, the company phased out butchers in all of its stores and began stocking prepackaged meat. When a store in Canada voted to unionize several years ago, the company closed the store, saying it had been unprofitable for years.
That's not just "where there's smoke, there's fire." That's more like "Where there's smoke, heat, screams and a huge procession of fire fighting equipment, there's very likely a fire."
Sunday, August 03, 2008 6:05:00 PM
That was interesting. Thanks for the link and the quote, Ross.
Sunday, August 03, 2008 8:53:00 PM
The problems that some unions have caused some American industries are plenty fuel to cause WalMart's fear, but I think that their near endorsement, by injecting fear, isn't politically correct, especially due to the size of WalMart nationwidem and their publicly traded status.
Thursday, August 07, 2008 7:25:00 PM
Yeah, that's the problem with human endeavors, there's usually enough blame to go around on both sides.
I fall on the pro-union side, because I've studied enough history to know what happens if you don't allow them, and if forced to make a choice between having them or not having them, I'd rather have them.
That's not to say they shouldn't be restricted to some extent, but of course the problem then is where is the line. It's all in the tug of war.
It's much like the right to bear arms, the question isn't really (for most people) whether we really have any problems with the government restricting certain arms, it's a matter of where we draw the line. Few of us would argue for or want to see a world in which any private citizen could own their own nuclear bomb. Few of us would also like to see a U.S. where we couldn't own a flint-lock musket. The argument is all over where in that broad space the line falls.
So, too, with unions. Having none at all would mean returning to the days of five or six families in the nation controlling virtually all the wealth and most everyone else being fairly poor. Letting unions run free would eventually turn us into a communist country, where no one works hard because they don't see any effect on their own lives of hard work.
But the answer is somewhere in the middle. I think Wal*Mart pulls the line WAY too far in the direction of stopping unionization, and again, I wouldn't feel nearly that strongly about it if they didn't have a history of somewhat abusive employee relations.
Nobody worries all that much about bed times for the children who behave themselves, its the ones for whom insufficient sleep will cause bad behavior that the rules are most strictly applied to.
Liam.
Thursday, August 07, 2008 8:40:00 PM
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