Walmart: Skirting Around Labour Laws

Excerpted from a slide on how management should speak to employees to discourage union talk.

As reported by ThinkProgress, the above is but one of the 'clever' strategies for ensuring that the world's largest retailer keeps unions out.

As well, here is a sample of advice to management during a slideshow presentation. Entitled “Early Warning Signs” (of the union 'threat'), the bosses should watch for employees “speaking negatively about wages and benefits” and “ceasing conversations when leadership approaches.”

Kind of reminds me of what happened during my teaching days whenever administration walked into the staffroom.

How Much Is The Lowest Price Guarantee Worth?

Despite years of repeated denials, I think there are few who doubt that Walmart is anti-union. Stories abound of the pressure the giant corporation applies anytime someone within the employee ranks tries to start a move toward union certification, including termination of the troublesome individuals and even store closures.

Because of these strongarm tactics, a group entitled Our Walmart is trying a different approach by pressing Walmart to accept a declaration of workers' rights which, in many ways sounds like a contract. Its worker groups hope to gain at least a measure of bargaining power by joining together to press the company for better wages and treatment.

However, even that has proven unacceptable to a Los Angeles store which recently fired five employees involved in organizing the workers to that end.

And of course, Walmart insists, as they always do, that the terminations had nothing to do with those activities.

Perhaps something to keep in mind in our incessant and often frantic consumer search for 'the lowest price in the land." It does come at a very real cost.

H/t Matthew Elliot

UPDATE: Apparently the anti-worker virus has spread north, this time infecting the Weston family, according to The Huffington Post.