Friday Blog Round-Up: Jet Set Edition

“I think it’s going to be a case that the FEC is going to have to take seriously,” said Joseph M. Birkenstock, a Washington attorney specializing in election law. The key to the case will be “exactly what was said” at meetings, he said.

Meanwhile, new details are emerging that show Wal-Mart managers leading the meetings are spreading inaccurate information about the Employee Free Choice Act, according to a digital RECORDING of a Wal-Mart meeting made by a Wal-Mart employee and reviewed by the Journal.

In the hour-and-a-half meeting, held for managers in a Southern state, the leader tells employees that their wages may be reduced to minimum wage for up to three months before a contract is negotiated, that union authorization cards violate workers’ right to privacy by including their Social Security numbers on them and that if a small unit within a store votes to unionize, the entire store will be unionized.

“If you have 10 associates in a photo lab and six sign union authorization cars, now the store is unionized,” the meeting leader told employees. “Six people can make a decision for 350 people,” which is about the average number of workers in a Walmart supercenter.

Labor lawyers say these are INACCURATE interpretations of labor law in general and the Employee Free Choice Act specifically, and that could be a violation of labor law. “The statements are NOT correct representations of what the law would require even under the current law,” said Jeffrey Hirsch, a labor lawyer in Boston. “It WOULD be a violation of the national labor relations act to SAY those things.”

Wal-Mart said that the three comments regarding minimum wage, Social Security numbers and unionizing small units don’t reflect Wal-Mart’s understanding of the law and weren’t included in its training.

According to the recording, the meeting leader, a human-resources manager, began by saying she was going to talk about the company and unions and “a little bit of politics,” specifically the Employee Free Choice Act. The leader said that the bill almost passed last year. “If Democrats get the votes they need and elect a Democratic president, they said it will be the first bill presented and that’s scary,” she said.

Wal-Mart’s Mr. Tovar said the meeting leader’s use of the word scary was “unauthorized."~~~~~~~~~WSJ,August 14,2008,Anne Zinneman............Note: The KEY word here is TAPED meeting.

the main purpose of walmart’s yearly employee survey is to determine the UPI (union potential index) of the store’s mgt. mgr’s with a high UPI will get poor reviews, possibly transferred, but either way very closely watched.
they do tell employees that with a union, all your benefits and wages are wiped out, and you start with nothing, the union and the company bargaining back and forth. they tell you that you stand a chance of losing everything, having lower wages, and worse health care, if that were even possible.

jane doe:

[they do tell employees that with a union, all your benefits and wages are wiped out, and you start with nothing, the union and the company bargaining back and forth. they tell you that you stand a chance of losing everything, having lower wages, and worse health care,]

So, what is wrong with a company telling their employees the truth?  If you don’t believe this is true, check out the California Grocery Strike and the results of the bargaining back and forth.  Unions want you to believe that you always get MORE with union representation, but, that’s not always true, you can LOSE as well, that’s why they call it BARGAINING.  Think about it, if you were to BARGAIN for something, would you be trying to pay MORE or LESS?  Don’t forget, bargaining starts at ‘minimum wage’, plus NOTHING.

The case was filed on March 27, 2008, against Wal-Mart on behalf of the Wal-Mart Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plan under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA. Braden v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., alleges that Wal-Mart and others, as fiduciaries of Wal-Mart’s retirement plan, failed to act solely in the interests of the participants and beneficiaries of the Plan, and failed to exercise the required skill, care, prudence, and diligence in administering the Plan’s assets from January 31, 2002, through the present. WalMart’s response?The company pointed out that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) does not call for plan fiduciaries to consider only price when selecting investment options or select the least expensive options.~~~~WMW~~~~~~~~Where’s the BARGAINING,there,Charles?Check out the WHOLE story-ust enter Braden vs. WalMart in this search engine.

The complaint claims Wal-Mart selected and offered to Plan participants unreasonably expensive retail funds, despite the ready availability of reasonably priced high-quality investment options. As a result, the plan squandered tens of millions of dollars of participants’ retirement savings in order to pay for overpriced mutual funds, which, on top of everything, significantly underperformed their benchmarks. This resulted in larger fees being spent on inferior products.

BTW: I wonder how these employees’ 401k could have been impacted had they been unionized? Would WalMart have had MORE accountabilty in the investment choices-pressure to NOT squander on unnecessarily expensive investment products?