LITTLE ROCK — For years, Wal-Mart has fended off repeated efforts by unions and their supporters to organize its workers. Now, a union is escalating its efforts, although several university professors said they see little chance it will succeed.
Wal-Mart has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board - its first in a decade - seeking to prevent a group known as OUR Walmart from holding protests at hundreds of stores in advance of Black Friday, the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving.
Labor experts caution that the complaint, filed Thursday, could be meant as a warning shot to discourage workers from participating, since the labor relations board often takes months to make a ruling, but it nonetheless reflects how seriously Bentonville-based Wal-Mart has come to view a group that it had once dismissed as a nuisance.
Federal labor officials said Monday that they will decide quickly whether to support the request by Wal-Mart.
“We are working as fast as we can.” said Nancy Cleeland, a spokesman at the National Labor Relations Board, which is setting a goal of 72 hours since the filing to assess whether the complaint has merit. She noted that, by statute, the agency must make a charge of illegal picketing a priority before all other cases. She said the agency has to decide two main issues: whether workers are picketing and, if so, whether the picketing was with the intent of unionizing workers.
If the labor board decides Wal-Mart’s complaint has merit, the matter then goes to district court, Cleeland said.
William Gould IV, a Stanford University law professor and chairman of the labor relations board under President Bill Clinton, said the protests were more about employment conditions and retaliation against employees than a unionization drive.
“I don’t see this translating into a great deal of success in terms of unionizing Wal-Mart or in terms of being particularly effective in improving conditions,” Gould said. “But I must say if they’ve gone to the labor relations board on this, that must show that Wal-Mart is really concerned.”
The Black Friday protests are unlikely to have much effect on shoppers, said Zev Eigen, an associate professor at Northwestern University School of Law who specializes in labor relations.
“Shoppers in the parking lot will say ‘Oh, that’s terrible - OK, where do I get my discounted electronics,’” said Eigen, who is based in Chicago. “That’s one of the big challenges for the labor movement. We’ll sign online petitions, but we won’t vote with our wallets.”
Since October, OUR Walmart has staged smaller strikes at individual stores, though none of those disrupted Wal-Mart’s operations, the company said. OUR Walmart, financed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said 88 workers went on strike at 28 stores in 12 states last month.
Those numbers are small, considering Wal-Mart employs about 1.4 million people in the United States and has about 3,971 U.S. stores, including Sam’s Club locations.
Wal-Mart had initially brushed off the actions as inconsequential public-relations efforts. But it now is taking them more seriously, sending a memorandum advising managers how to deal legally with protesters and warning some union-friendly groups that they might face arrest if they trespass during the protests.
“You are going to see unprecedented activity from now and going into Black Friday,” said Dan Schlademan, a principal organizer of the events and director of Making Change at Walmart, another group that’s an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
The union has made Wal-Mart a target because the company has helped put many unionized supermarkets out of business and helped push down wages at many competitors. Wal-Mart, moreover, has vigorously resisted unionization drives, closing a store in Canada after workers there voted to unionize and arranging to have outside suppliers provide prepackaged meat after the butchers at a store in Texas voted to unionize in 2000.
The union has been spending heavily on this push, paying more than $50,000 for hotel rooms near Wal-Mart’s headquarters last year when it sent employees and representatives to company events, according to a filing with the Labor Department.
In this week’s planned events, OUR Walmart, which stands for Organization United for Respect at Walmart, is enlisting a broad range of allies, arranging fliers and letters that community, church and civil rights groups can use to publicize the Black Friday protest.
Many of the retailer’s workers who have supported the union assert Wal-Mart pays poverty-level wages, assigns too few hours a week and retaliates against protesting employees.
“I will be protesting because there has been retaliation from the company - they have fired people, they have reduced people’s hours for speaking out,” said Greg Fletcher, an electronics-department employee at a Wal-Mart in Duarte, Calif.
David Tovar, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said the company prohibits retaliation and respects the rights of associates to express their views. But, he added, “if people repeatedly have unexcused absences, if they purposefully disrupt the store, or create an unsafe working condition for our customers and associates, those issues will be addressed” in accordance with Wal-Mart’s employment policy.
In the filing with the labor board, the company said that the continuing protests were illegal because under the National Labor Relations Act, a union seeking recognition could picket for a maximum of 30 days. After that, it must either stop picketing or take a formal unionization vote. The company says the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has exceeded the 30-day limit.
Information for this article was contributed by Renee Dudley of Bloomberg News and by The Associated Press.
Business, Pages 23 on 11/20/2012