Movimiento Obrero

Derribando a Goliath: Wal-Mart en Québec se sindicaliza

Autor: Yosef M

Fecha: 31/8/2004

Traductor: Celeste Murillo, especial para PI

Fuente: Especial para PI

Bringing Goliath Down: Quebec Wal-Mart Workers Unionize

In a major breakthrough, workers at the Wal-Mart regional superstore in Jonquiere, Quebec, 125 miles (200 km) north of Quebec City, won official recognition for their union, UFCW Local 503, on August 4. These Quebec workers are currently the only employees unionizing a Wal-Mart store anywhere north of the Rio Bravo (the U.S.-Mexican border). (An earlier union victory in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, was
subsequently reversed by a decertification vote.) It is difficult to exaggerate the accomplishment of the Jonquiere workers in choosing to build a union at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, described as a "$259 billion retail behemoth," as well as a "defining feature of the American landscape," (1) is the biggest private employer in the U.S., with 1.2 million employees making an average wage of around $8/hour; it topped the Fortune 500 ranking of the largest U.S. companies in 2004, for the third year in a row.
Wal-Mart has made "union prevention" a "full-time commitment" for its executives and managers.

As reported by researcher Lisa Featherstone, Wal-Mart cultivates a viciously anti-union, anti-worker corporate culture. It takes extreme measures to prevent any union organizing in its stores. It rejects applications from anyone who has joined a union in the past or has ever participated in any kind of public demonstration, as well as anyone with higher education. Applicants who survive this discriminatory scrutiny are forced to promise in writing that they will not support a union organizing drive while they work for Wal-Mart. At the first sign of workers'organizing a union, Wal-Mart sends in union busters, their "labor relations team," who travel on a private jet ("Air Walton"), to stop the union drive. If all else fails, Wal-Mart simply "reorganizes"
anyone who votes to unionize, as 10 meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas found out in February, 2000, when their jobs were eliminated after they had voted a union in.

The measures that Wal-Mart takes against unions and workers who wish to unionize are clearly against non-discrimination and labor law in the U.S. However, they are not violations of criminal law, which means that no union busting manager or executive has ever gone to jail for crushing a union organizing drive at a Wal-Mart store. It
is a trivial matter, part of overhead expenses, for a company of Wal-Mart's size, power and wealth, to pay government fines for violating workers' right to organize or for firing union supporters.

Wal-Mart began in the "right-to work" anti-union southern United States, but rapidly expanded into the unionized northern U.S., reaching Maine and Canada. In much of rural North America, young workers have three options, working on a farm, pumping gas or going to work for Wal-Mart. The area around Jonquiere is an economically
depressed region of Quebec. "The local ALCAN aluminum smelter closed in February, even after the workers had seized it and run it successfully for over a month. The Atibi paper mill has shut down. Logging is in decline" (2) As it happens, Jonquiere is located in a part of Quebec that has been a center of trade unionism for nearly a century.

The leadership of the new union local at Wal-Mart clearly understands that union negotiations with management will almost certainly lead to a strike against Wal-Mart, and that strike will be an historic first for North American labor. Since competing with
Wal-Mart influences other employers to drive down wages and take away workers' benefits, like health care, the implications of any strike against Wal-Mart will reach far beyond Quebec. A strike against Wal-Mart would impact workers' rights and living standards throughout the U.S. and Canada.

[1] Lisa Featherstone, "Will Labor Take the Wal-Mart Challenge?"
The Nation, June 28, 2004
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040628&s=featherstone

[2] G. Dunkel, "Quebec Workers Win Union at Wal-Mart,"
Workers World, August 19, 2004
http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/walmart0819.php