Attacking Walmart has been a liberal sport for several years now. The giant retailer is non-union and sells stuff cheaper than mom and pop shops usually can. It also employs about a million people. If you could unionize them, well, that’s a lot of paychecks to skim on behalf of the Democratic Party.
With Big Labor’s man Barack Obama installed as president for another four years, several pro-union groups have arranged a Thanksgiving party for Walmart management.
Walmart employees began walking off the job this week in advance of Black Friday, when three-union backed groups expect thousands of protests nationwide.
In October, a strike at a Walmart in Los Angeles spread to stores in 12 other cities, with local and national leaders holding protests at more than 200 stores for better pay, fairer schedules and more affordable health care. Since that time, workers have since walked off the job in Dallas and Richmond, Calif., and other upcoming strikes and protests are expected at stores in Chicago, Miami, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C.
Every story about the walkoffs comes with the requisite “evil, heartless management versus plucky, downtrodden worker” angle so I’m not going to bother to reprint one here. The walkouts themselves are real; a friend of mine spotted this one on north Texas just two days after Obama’s re-election.
The Walmart they’re protesting is out of the frame, across the street. That’s a small protest, but Walmart should take the threat of unionization and the various interests and groups that are arrayed against it very seriously. Walmart represents many things that the left hates, including the triumph of efficient capitalism and the basic right to work without being forced to join a union. One way or another — card check, micro-unions, immigration reform, or some other means — the Obama government and its National Labor Relations Board are determined to unionize Walmart, or kill it to make an example to other corporations that resist unionization. They will even wreck the right of privacy to force Americans into unions. No joke.
You’ll start seeing groups called OurWalmart, Making Change at Walmart and the Corporate Action Network quoted in stories to paint Walmart in a poor light. These groups are nothing but the usual progressive (i.e. leftist) suspects. The media will tend to treat them as angelic grassroots groups just seeking a better world. In reality, they’re all probably tied to the George Soros network of anti-capitalist, pro-big government, far left network that ultimately wants to destroy the free market that made America great.
Update: Forward, comrades!
This social compact deal is getting worse all the time.
– shirts stretched to tearing over morbidly obese bodies.
I can’t help but wonder which presidential candidate Wal Mart management supported. Apparently there are quite of few big business types that supported Obama that are now regretting it. Or possibly encouraging regulations that will kill small business and limit competition.
Either way, this is one fight that I support Wal Mart.
The significant news is that Black Friday – in some areas – will be featured on the Internet. IOW, the traditional face to face with a clerk will be replaced with electronic buying…more convenient (as far as our family is concerned) than hanging around a crowded store and no local taxes added.
Just another way unions screw themselves through arrogance…in a few years, many less sales clerks…
STBR!
We’re going to see a lot of this kind of thing, I think.
People are going to be angry ad their standard of living falls. But it will fall – our economy cannot take the multiple stains we place on it –
- high taxation (we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world.)
- high regulation
- out of control government spending / debt crisis
- impending debt default and/or out of control money printing.
I could go on…..
Wiemar Germany was heavily unionized and even had the interest arbitration process that is in some versions of “Card Check.” So long as employees wages could be ratchetted up to keep up with the government’s inflating its way out of war debt and reparations, things stayed pretty tranquil. With the Worldwide economic downturn of the late ’20s, there simply wasn’t enough money to keep the spiral going and the social unrest led to open warfare in the streets and the ultimate rise to power of the NSDAP.
Which took control of the unions and used them as instruments of power.
The right answer is to fire any employee that “walks out,” because it isn’t a protected activity. But that was the answer back before the Communist SOB gave the NLRB to the unions, so who knows what an employer’s legal rights are these days.
Back when we still had laws, the factual predicate of a legal strike or “walk out” was a state of impasse in bargaining. Few Walmarts are even organized, so a walk out from one that isn’t organized is a nice little showy exercise of freedom of expression that gets you admired by your fellow malcontents and fired.
Walmart should give all their employees a written order to work their regular schedule on Friday unless specifically excused by a supervisor and failure or refusal to do so will result in dismissal. Then if anybody wants to go outside and sing songs and carry signs, you just fire them for insubordination. But then, that was the right answer back when we had laws.
I actually think WalMart would happily organize all their stores if their competitors were also organized. Then WalMart, Target, and the other big boxes can just march right down the pattern bargaining path that destroyed the US auto industry.
Walmart had a strike in Texas about a dozen years ago as their SuperCenter concept was in full growth mode. The meat cutters union had gotten workers a store in Jacksonville, Tex., to certify them as their bargaining representative. Walmart responded by simply eliminating the in-store meat cutters and contracting out their meat supplies to a third-party company.
Basically, the company decided whatever business they would lose from grocery shoppers who couldn’t get a steak or a pork chop cut to order would be more than offset by not allowing unions to get a foothold into the company. But as the years have gone on Walmart has taken its big store concept more and more into Blue State areas with strong union bases — it may soon face the option of either giving in and recognizing the unions, or pulling back their store operations into less union-friendly areas.
Walmart can get all the incentive in the world to do the latter by looking at today’s stories on the losses being suffered by Sears Holdings, with their unionized Sears and Kmnart stores. That’s not the entire reason why the now merged two companies that used to be Wally World’s main retail rivals have floundered, but dealing with union wage and benefit packages in a troubled economy over the years have kept Kmart and Sears from ever matching Walmart’s low prices. If the company ends up with labor costs like theirs, you can be assured in a few years Walmart will be seeing some other company undercutting their prices, just the way they did to the top retailers from the 1960s and 70s.
Yeah, union walkouts. Worked out so well for Hostess.
How about Walmart reorganing here in the U.S. becoming just a online retailer with pickup centers rather than big box stores. Their sister organization could be say 25 each grocery and dry goods broker distribution centers representing most all of their existing departments and product lines to supply other retailers across the nation using their incredible buying power. That would sure reduce their labor liability and still serve the mass markets. At the same time, it would sure increase the probability of new business in nearly every american community — the kinds of businesses they destroyed over the years.
If they are scheduled and don’t show up, fire them! That is what happens in the real world. And we have seen 18,500 jobs with Hostess go away because of the unions. I have no pity in my heart for union workers.
So much hatred for the working class on this website. I suppose low-wage workers are nothing more then serfs in your eyes.
Actually no. There is no hate for the ‘Working Class’. It’s actually the Liberals who have corned the market on hate. What we DO hate is seeing good companies and good jobs swirling in the bowl due to union greed and thuggery.
I don’t dislike low wage workers -not too long ago I was one. I do dislike the entitlement mentality of those who think being low paid and unskilled conveys some sort of moral superiority.
In my industry 30 years ago the best jobs were union jobs. But guess what? The work rules and general union BS killed that market segment. Now all the action is in my side of the industry. And an ambitious guy can make a top 20% salary and have 4 months off a year within about a year of entering the industry. In a union shop advancement is glacial and based on seniority and how tight you are with the union bosses. Sorry but I want my career based on how well I do my job and my efforts to improve my qualifications NOT my ability to slip the shop steward a couple hundred bucks and brown nose the President of the Local.
Appreciate the link to TheBrennerBrief.com in the “update.” Thanks!
Buy at Wal-Mart.com and make these thugs less relevant.