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For 15 years or more, the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) has worried that nonunion Wal-Mart Stores Inc. would drag down the wages and benefits of the union's 850,000 supermarket employees. Because the world's largest retailer pays at least 25% less than unionized food chains, the union says, the UFCW has done all it could to slow Wal-Mart's amazing growth. Everything, that is, but try to organize the company's 885,000 U.S. employees and raise their pay.
Now, the UFCW finally is launching a national recruitment drive among Wal-Mart workers. And it's starting the campaign in friendly territory: Las Vegas. For several months, some 20 organizers have been quietly talking union among the 3,000-odd Wal-Mart workers at the 11 Las Vegas-area stores. The union will run local radio spots featuring Wal-Mart employees and send all store employees in the city a video about the union. It's getting help from Las Vegas' powerful casino-workers' union and local religious groups.
After its Las Vegas launch, the union plans to take its signup drive on the road. From Ontario and Western Canada, also labor-friendly areas, to upstate New York, Michigan, and Ohio, organizers will focus on the company's low pay and meager benefits, says Mike Leonard, the UFCW's head of strategic programs and architect of its Wal-Mart effort. "There's a place for unions, but we don't want them at Wal-Mart," says Wal-Mart Corporate Affairs Vice-President Jay Allen.
FINANCIAL CLOUT. The union faces an uphill fight. Already, management has parachuted labor experts into Las Vegas from headquarters to give one-on-one "coaching" sessions to known union backers. The idea is to persuade them to drop their efforts, says Diana Griego, a union supporter who earns $8 an hour after five years with the company. "They have interrogated me and other employees to make us change our minds, but I never will," she says.
Over the years, the company has used similar tactics to counter small organizing drives by other unions. It has blocked several recent UFCW attempts to sign up small groups of meatpackers and auto-parts employees in several Wal-Mart stores. The company lost only one battle, earlier this year, when a dozen meatpackers joined the UFCW in a Jacksonville (Tex.) store.
The company clearly has the capacity to outspend the union many times over. And the UFCW's recruitment abilities are not widely respected among labor organizers, who for years have said privately that the union doesn't train recruiters well to talk to workers. Leonard concedes, in fact, that by waiting so many years to begin a recruitment campaign, his union missed most of Wal-Mart's expansion -- and the chance to talk to newly hired employees.
FULL OF HOLES. Wal-Mart is also likely to fight back by highlighting the union's actions against the company. Since the mid-1980s, the UFCW has spent tremendous energy merely trying to slow Wal-Mart's expansion. It sent experts to China and other low-wage countries to show that the company uses sweatshop labor and that its Buy America sales pitch is full of holes because the company buys extensively overseas.
The UFCW also forged alliances with antisprawl groups that have battled, sometimes successfully, to prevent Wal-Mart from building new stores. Says Wal-Mart spokeswoman Jessica Moser: "When they are out there trying to stop our growth, our associates see right through their lines about how the union wants to help them."
Still, Wal-Mart workers have reason to support a union. The company's pay is often at least 25% less than that of unionized store clerks, the UFCW estimates. "I just now got to $10.33 an hour after six years with the company, and I'm at a department-manager level," says Norine Sorensen, 54, an employee in the photo department of a Las Vegas Wal-Mart who supports the union drive. By contrast, UFCW members at nearby Albertson's and Vons stores make $14.98 an hour. Wal-Mart declined to release average wage figures, but it says in Las Vegas, a recent salary survey shows that Wal-Mart matches or exceeds the starting-level pay of four local unionized supermarkets.
Wal-Mart's push into food directly threatens the high wages of UFCW supermarket employees. It is likely to take the union years to sign up a significant number of the retailer's employees, if it succeeds at all. But with the livelihoods of most of its members at stake, union leaders finally realized that just trying to stop Wal-Mart's growth is a futile strategy.
By Aaron Bernstein in Washington Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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