Wal-Mart’s Worker Intimidation Exposed

WORKER INTIMIDATION HAS FRIENDS AT WALMART…

This item from the Los Angeles Business Journal by Anthony Effinger-

“Jon Lehman, a former store manager who is with the union now, said Wal-Mart has a 60-by-60 foot room at its headquarters in which two dozen people with headsets monitor calls and e-mails from stores to see whether anyone is talking about union organizing.”

===================

Over the past 10 years, the NLRB or its administrative law judges have determined in at least 11 cases that Wal-Mart or individual Wal-Mart stores were engaging in unfair labor practices to prevent unionization, according to the agency’s website.

An excerpt from one of the decisions against Wal-Mart gives a sense of the extent of the violations:
The Respondent, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., its officers, agents, successors, and assigns, shall:
1. Cease and desist from

(c) Engaging in surveillance of the union activities of employees.

<http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13796>

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Fired Wal-Mart worker claims surveillance ops: report
Wed Apr 4, 2007 12:44am ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker fired last month for intercepting a reporter’s phone calls says he was part of a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation that included snooping not only on employees, but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., The Wall Street Journal reported.

As part of the surveillance, the retailer last year had a long-haired employee infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company’s annual meeting, according to Bruce Gabbard, the fired security worker, the Journal said.

The company also deployed cutting-edge monitoring systems made by a supplier to the Defense Department that allowed it to capture and record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network, the Journal said.

“...a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation… but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.....”

===============

WalMart- We do psychological profiling on our hires. We screen them out for conscience and anything not in line with low wage no benefits bastardization of the human landscape.

WORKER INTIMIDATION HAS FRIENDS AT WALMART…

This item from the Los Angeles Business Journal by Anthony Effinger-

“Jon Lehman, a former store manager who is with the union now, said Wal-Mart has a 60-by-60 foot room at its headquarters in which two dozen people with headsets monitor calls and e-mails from stores to see whether anyone is talking about union organizing.”

===================

Over the past 10 years, the NLRB or its administrative law judges have determined in at least 11 cases that Wal-Mart or individual Wal-Mart stores were engaging in unfair labor practices to prevent unionization, according to the agency’s website.

An excerpt from one of the decisions against Wal-Mart gives a sense of the extent of the violations:
The Respondent, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., its officers, agents, successors, and assigns, shall:
1. Cease and desist from

(c) Engaging in surveillance of the union activities of employees.

<http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13796>

==================

Fired Wal-Mart worker claims surveillance ops: report
Wed Apr 4, 2007 12:44am ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker fired last month for intercepting a reporter’s phone calls says he was part of a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation that included snooping not only on employees, but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., The Wall Street Journal reported.

As part of the surveillance, the retailer last year had a long-haired employee infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company’s annual meeting, according to Bruce Gabbard, the fired security worker, the Journal said.

The company also deployed cutting-edge monitoring systems made by a supplier to the Defense Department that allowed it to capture and record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network, the Journal said.

“...a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation… but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.....”

===============

WalMart- We do psychological profiling on our hires. We screen them out for conscience and anything not in line with low wage no benefits bastardization of the human landscape.

No matter what Wal-Mart tells it’s employees, it still can’t follow them into the voting booth!!

Why is it that churches, can tell their people about how to vote and that is okay, but if Wal-Mart does it, they are intimidating people!!  Also, it seems the unions can suggest who to vote for and it is okay as well and it isn’t intimidation!!  Only, when Wal-Mart does it, is it considered intimidation!!

This is totally wrong for a company to do campaigning on their premises or elsewhere indicating to their employees who to vote for.  This is intimidation.  It is also unconstitutional.  Everyone has a right to vote for whom ever they wish, with out fear from anyone, any company, or our government.  It is bad enough that Wal-Mart employees do not get a fair living wage.  It is even more outrageous when you consider the huge profits that Wal-Mart has generated at the expense of their employees.  Employees who can’t even afford health care and other benefits as a worker for this company.  These huge profits just point out to the greed of the corporate level management.

@RDS

Churches, unions, and businesses are all very different situations - and furthermore, it’s not just the message, but the tactics. Any organization has the First Amendment right to try to persuade people to vote in one way or another. No organization has the right to intimidate people as part of that persuasion. If a union were to tell its members “Vote for X or you get kicked out” that would likely be illegal. (I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t definitively say what would happen.)

However, as the Murdoch Street Journal article states, many Wal-Mart employees felt that they were being told that they could lose their jobs if the Democratic party gets large wins in November. That’s a veiled threat.

Wal-Mart has the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression, but they should be careful not to cross the line into threats and intimidation. Their track record indicates that they have a bad habit of willfully crossing that line.

RDS:
Churches are charitable organizations and are prohibited from supporting candidates or specific pieces of legislation. If they do they risk losing their tax exemption from the IRS.

Now and then there may be a few preachers who cross the line or stay within it with a wink, but that’s not the same as Walmart forcing employees to listen to a propaganda pitch.

It is illegal for Walmart to do this to hourly workers, but they can do it to salaried employees who are loosely considered “management”. Are they breaking the law with regard to this? Do they care, if they are?

People may be upset about Walmart’s behavior in this case, but that’s only because it has gotten so much publicity - firms do this kind of anti-union indoctrination all the time.

RDS:
Churches are charitable organizations and are prohibited from supporting candidates or specific pieces of legislation. If they do they risk losing their tax exemption from the IRS.

Now and then there may be a few preachers who cross the line or stay within it with a wink, but that’s not the same as Walmart forcing employees to listen to a propaganda pitch.

It is illegal for Walmart to do this to hourly workers, but they can do it to salaried employees who are loosely considered “management”. Are they breaking the law with regard to this? Do they care, if they are?

People may be upset about Walmart’s behavior in this case, but that’s only because it has gotten so much publicity - firms do this kind of anti-union indoctrination all the time.

Why is it that churches, can tell their people about how to vote and that is okay, but if Wal-Mart does it, they are intimidating people!!

Is anyone surprised that RDS can’t differentiate between a church and Wal-Mart?

I’m not saying John McCain is out of touch, but he thinks our USB Ports need better security.

rdf: Most firms aren’t the SIZE of WalMart,and I dare say, don’t have the egregious track record of inhumanity and contempt for its workforce that W/M has shown repeatedly, as evidenced in the number of class action suits and millions of $$$in judgments WalMart has had to pay for these actions-NOT to mention EPA fines for repeated pattern and practice of environmental regulations -Air and Water violations,some of which are the biggest ever assessed against a company.

ddrb,

It is strange that you recognize SIZE, when comapring others to Wal-Mart, but, then disregard SIZE when comparing others to Wal-Mart in cases of lawsuits, etc.!!  It just stands to reason, that the ‘larger’ a company is, the more chance it has to be sued, etc.!!  Example:  Mom & Pop store has 5 employees and all 5 sue for discrimination, that is 100%, while Wal-Mart has 1.5 million employees and 300,000 sue through class action, that is only 20%, therefore, size determines number of events!!  So, you can see, that SIZE can make things LOOK worse than they are!!  You also have to remember, that suits against Wal-Mart, include both present employees and FORMER employees, so the number would be way more than 1.5 million), how many employees has Wal-Mart had, since they opened their doors?

from the L. A. Times
1. 40% of all workers in L. A.  County ( L. A.  County has 10.2 million people)are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal aliens working without a green card.
2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.
3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.
4. Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal , whose births were paid for by taxpayers.
5. Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally
6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.
7. The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border.
8. Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal.
9. 21 radio stations in L. A. are Spanish speaking.
10. In L. A. County 5.1 million people speak English, 3.9 million speak Spanish.
(There are 10.2 million people in L. A.  County .. )

(All 10 of the above are from the Los Angeles Times)

Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops, but 29% are on welfare. Over 70% of the United States ‘ annual population growth

(and over 90% of California , Florida , and New York ) results from immigration.  29% of inmates in federal prisons are illegal aliens.

What a bunch of fools for letting this continue

RDS, your excuses here for defending the Church of WalMart have been endless inane drivel as the typical WalMart ass kissing internet lackey that you are. Apparently you do not believe that WalMart should behave itself legally irrespective of revenue size or employee numbers. Or is it that they simply are not capable of doing so with their ‘love of money’ psychopath attitude against employees?

SDV,

“Apparently you do not believe that WalMart should behave itself legally irrespective of revenue size or employee numbers.”

And, you fail to realize that with SIZE, the number of problems can be increased, no matter how much you try to keep them in line!!  Why do you think that LARGE cities have more crime than smaller cities?  Do you think it is because the city wants to have more crime?  Do you think that the city doesn’t try to control crime?  Or, do you think the city promotes MORE crime, to get more money, because the city officials have a “‘love of money’ psychopath attitude against taxpayers?  Anytime you gather hundreds or thousands of people into one place, you are going to have problems!!  Just wait until COSTCO gets as big as Wal-Mart and you will see that they will have the same amount of problems, once they have millions of people trying to get their hands on the company’s profits!!

Wal-Mart’s defenders argue that the chain saves lower-income workers billions through its low prices. This is undeniably true, but it’s not a virtue unique to Wal-Mart. The entire sector of discount retailers--from Target to Costco to Best Buy to Home Depot--does much the same thing. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart’s critics tend to focus on the company’s low wages and paltry benefits, or its effect on small towns, or its reliance on outsourcing.  So why pick on Wal-Mart?

The answer is that Wal-Mart really is different. In terms of annual revenue, Wal-Mart is nearly four times the size of The Home Depot, the country’s second largest retailer, and almost twice the size of Target, Costco, and Sears (which includes Kmart) combined. That means the company exerts pressure on the entire sector to imitate its methods--including its treatment of workers. That would be less worrisome if Wal-Mart’s record didn’t stand out within the sector. But there are strong indications that, when it comes to how it treats its employees, Wal-Mart really is worse than the rest. The company finds itself in trouble because, since the death of Sam Walton 14 years ago, something ugly has happened to the way it does business.

Work off the clock

In a comparison of Wal-Mart with its peers, the obvious place to start would be wages and benefits. But neither Wal-Mart, Target, nor Costco make public their median wage, which many economists argue is the most accurate measure of how a company pays its employees. A 2005 study by Arindrajit Dube and Steve Wertheim of the University of California’s Berkeley Labor Center, however, sheds some light. Using figures for Wal-Mart released through a sex-discrimination lawsuit, and relying for the rest of the large retail sector on numbers from the March 2005 “Current Population Survey,” the study finds that Wal-Mart pays its hourly workers an average hourly wage of $9.68, while other large retailers average $11.08. (The study adjusts for the fact that Wal-Mart stores tend to be in lower-income areas.) As for health benefits, Dube and Wertheim found that Wal-Mart offers its hourly workers benefits worth 73 cents per hour, while other large retailers offer $1.

The study suggests that Wal-Mart is significantly less generous than other large retailers. Only by focusing exclusively on other discount retailers like Costco and Target can we meaningfully compare Wal-Mart’s wages and benefits to those of its competitors, but we simply lack the hard data on most other outlets to do this.

But there are myriad other ways that employers can cut costs at the expense of workers. And it’s in these areas that we can gather more satisfactory information to compare Wal-Mart to its competitors. The simplest way to save money is to avoid paying people for all the hours that they’ve worked--a practice called off-the-clock work. Of course, Wal-Mart can’t explicitly force employees to work off-the-clock. But it can set payroll targets that are nearly impossible to achieve without doing just that. As one manager explained to The New York Times in 2002, “You got to hit the payroll budget they set for you, but if you’re over, they discipline you.” Plausible deniability, then, becomes essential. Workers get assigned more work than they can possibly complete on their shifts--while being warned that overtime is out of the question. No intelligent employee would fail to get the message: Finish the job by whatever means necessary. “We worked off the clock pretty much every shift,” one employee told the Times. “The manager said if our jobs were not finished, we had to clock out and finish our jobs so no overtime would show up.”

Wal-Mart insists that these cases are unrepresentative of the company as a whole, and that any enterprise of their size is bound to have a few rogue managers. But the verdicts so far suggest a widespread problem. In 2000, Wal-Mart paid $50 million to settle an off-the-clock suit involving 69,000 Wal-Mart employees in Colorado. Two years later, a federal jury ordered Wal-Mart to pay back wages to 83 workers in Oregon for off-the-clock work. Some 40 similar class actions are pending, and in 2002, The New York Times reported on a “wide-ranging legal battle between Wal-Mart and employees or former employees in 28 states” over off-the-clock work. Last December, a California jury awarded $172 million to thousands of Wal-Mart employees who had been illegally denied lunch breaks.

Free-market advocates who defend the company argue that squeezing workers is an unavoidable reality of the discount retail business. But a look at the annual reports of Wal-Mart and its competitors points up a glaring difference between the companies. Target’s and Costco’s annual reports for 2004-2005 include no cases of off-the-clock work. Wal-Mart’s lists 44:

Wage and Hour “Off the Clock” Class Actions: Adcox v. WM, US Dist. Ct. ("USDC"), Southern Dist. of TX, 11/9/04; Armijo v. WM, 1st Judicial Dist. Ct., Rio Arriba County, NM, 9/18/00; Bailey v. WM, Marion County Superior Ct. IN, 8/17/00; Barnett v. WM, Superior Ct. of WA, King County, 9/10/01; Basco v. WM, USDC, Eastern Dist. of LA, 9/5/00; Braun v. WM, 1st Judicial Dist. Ct. Dakota County MN, 9/12/01; Braun v. WM, Ct. of Common Pleas, Philadelphia County, PA, 3/20/02; Brown v. WM, 14th Judicial Circuit Ct., Rock Island, IL, 6/20/01; Carr v. WM, Superior Ct. of Fulton County, GA, 8/14/01; Culver v. WM, USDC, Dist. of CO, 12/10/1996; Carter v. WM, Ct. of Common Pleas, Colleton County, SC, 7/31/02; Gamble v. WM, Supreme Ct. of the State of NY, County of Albany, 12/7/01; Gross v. WM, Circuit Ct., Laurel County, KY, 9/29/04; Hale v. WM, Circuit Ct., Jackson County, MO, 8/15/01; Hall v. WM, 8th Judicial Dist. Ct., Clark County, NV, 9/9/99; Harrison v. WM, Superior Ct. of Forsyth County, NC, 11/29/00; Holcomb v. WM, State Ct. of Chatham County, GA, 3/28/00; Hummel v. WM, Common Pleas Ct. of Philadelphia County, PA, 8/30/04; Iliadis v. WM, Superior Ct. of NJ, Middlesex County, 5/30/02; Kuhlmann (In Re: Wal-Mart Employee Litigation) v. WM, Circuit Ct., Milwaukee County, WI, 8/30/01; Lerma v. WM, Dist. Ct., Cleveland County, OK, 8/31/01; Lopez v. WM, 23rd Judicial Dist. Ct. of Brazoria County, TX, 6/23/00; Mendoza v. WM, Superior Ct. of CA, Ventura County, 3/2/04; Michell v. WM, USDC, Eastern Dist. of TX, Marshall Div., 9/13/02; Montgomery v. WM, USDC, Southern Dist. of MS, 12/30/02; Mussman v. WM, IA Dist. Ct., Clinton County, 6/5/01; Nagy v. WM, Circuit Ct. of Boyd County, KY, 8/29/01; Newland v. WM, Superior Ct. of CA, Alameda County, CA, 01/14/05; Osuna v. WM, Superior Ct. of AZ, Pima County, 11/30/01; Pickett v. WM, Circuit Court, Shelby County, TN, 10/22/03; Pittman v. WM, Circuit Ct. for Prince George’s County, MD, 7/31/02; Robinson v. WM, Circuit Ct., Holmes County, MS, 12/30/02; Sago v. WM, Circuit Ct., Holmes County, MS, 12/31/02; Romero v. WM, Superior Ct. of CA, Monterey County, 03/25/04; Salvas v. WM, Superior Ct., Middlesex County, MA, 8/21/01; Sarda v. WM, Circuit Ct., Washington County, FL, 9/21/01; Savaglio v. WM, Superior Ct. of CA, Alameda County, 2/6/01; Scott v. WM, Circuit Ct. of Saginaw County, MI, 9/26/01; Smith v. WM, Circuit Ct., Holmes County, MS, 12/31/02; Thiebes v. WM, USDC, Dist. of OR, 6/30/98; Willey v. WM, Dist. Ct. of Wyandotte County, KS, 9/21/01; Williams v. WM, Superior Ct. of CA, Alameda County, 3/23/04; Wilson v. WM, Common Pleas Ct. of Butler County, OH, 10/27/03; Winters v. WM, Circuit Ct., Holmes County, MS, 5/28/02. ~~~~~~~~~Everyday Low Vices