The title “Bully of Bentonville” is not my creation (I prefer Beast, as readers know) but the title of a new book by Business Week writer Anthony Bianco (who I knew back in the day when I toiled at the magazine in the 1980s). The magazine carries an excerpt in its current issue (subscripton required) that focused on Wal-Mart’s attack against workers in Canada who tried to form a union.
I won’t reprint the entire excerpt here (catch the February 13th issue on the newstand) but here’s just a little snippet:
The UFCW fell one signature short of the required number for automatic certification and decided to take its chances by petitioning for a secret vote in April, 2004. The move backfired, as the union was voted down 53% to 47%. A group of managers gathered just outside the front door to celebrate for the TV cameras and taunt union supporters as they left the store. Many workers who had voted against the union were so appalled by this spectacle that they switched sides.
After the required three-month cooling-off period expired, Lavoie and her allies started over and collected a surfeit of signatures so quickly that this second campaign succeeded before management even realized that it was afoot. The Jonquière store was automatically certified as a UFCW shop in August, 2004, giving a big boost to the union’s organizing campaigns in two dozen other Wal-Mart stores across Canada.
Two months later, just as the UFCW and Wal-Mart representatives were preparing to begin mandatory contract negotiations, Wal-Mart Canada issued an ominous press release from its headquarters near Toronto. “The Jonquière store is not meeting its business plan,” it declared, “and the company is concerned about the economic viability of the store.” Nine days of negotiation between the UFCW and Wal-Mart produced nothing but acrimony. “When we got to working hours and schedule, it was never, never, and never,” recalls André Dumas, now the acting president of UFCW Local 503 in Quebec City. Honoring union demands would have meant adding 30 workers to the payroll, counters Wal-Mart’s Pelletier. “We felt the union wanted to fundamentally change the store’s business model.”
Lavoie and Desbiens were playing bingo on Feb. 9 when a TV reporter called seeking comment on Wal-Mart’s announcement that it was closing in Jonquière. They were stunned. It had never occurred to them that Wal-Mart would go so far as to shut down a store that seemed to be busy all the time. Lavoie began frantically calling friends currently on duty but learned nothing useful. “They were all crying,” she says.
Wal-Mart’s draconian response to the Jonquière unionists scandalized Quebec. Three of the company’s other 46 stores in the province were temporarily closed by bomb threats. A TV broadcaster likened Wal-Mart to Nazi Germany and then apologized. Jean Tremblay, the feisty, populist mayor of Saguenay, gave media interviews by the dozen denouncing the company as a freebooting scofflaw. “Because you are big and rich and strong, you can close a store to make your workers in other stores afraid? No!” Tremblay said. “If you want to do business in Quebec — or in Russia or in China — you have to follow the law. And you have to respect the culture.”
From his office in Ontario, company spokesman Pelletier insisted that the reasons Wal-Mart gave up on Jonquière had nothing to do with stifling unionism. The store “has struggled from the beginning,” he said. “The situation has continued to deteriorate since the union.” In Bentonville, H. Lee Scott Jr., Wal-Mart’s CEO, seconded Pelletier in a Washington Post interview. “You can’t take a store that is struggling anyway and add a bunch of people and a bunch of work rules,” Scott declared.
To which the people of Canada responded nearly as one: “Liars.” A national survey by Pollara Inc., Canada’s largest polling organization, found that only 9% of Canadians believed that Wal-Mart closed the store in Jonquière because it was struggling financially. In the opinion of 9 of 10 Canadians, it was all about the union. Some 31% of those queried said that they would either do less shopping at its stores or stop going to them altogether — a figure that rose to 44% among Quebecers. In another survey taken six months after the Jonquière pullout, Quebecers ranked Wal-Mart 11th out of 12 retail chains when it comes to meeting their needs and expectations.
Another item on the Beast from today’s Financial Times asks the question whether Wal-Mart’s recent pledge to become more “green” is real or just public relations. From the outset of the campaign to get the company to start behaving responsibly, a key question was always what would be considered a true change? If Wal-Mart improved its environmental record but continued to be viciously anti-union, what would that mean for the coalition working to bring the Beast to heel?
The story quotes Mindy Lubber of Ceres, a coalition of investors: “They are a large company that has a huge supply chain…if they change their practices they could set a standard for the industry, as well as for their own company.” But, a colleague of mine, Michael Marx, an environmentalist, makes a good point in the piece: “Environmentalists are cautious about applauding Wal-Mart’s commitment because we believe that the company is trying to isolate the labour movement.”
The truth is Wal-Mart will never be a company changed until it fundamentally alters its business model: low-wages for its workers here, product supplied from low-wage companies like China and all for the glory of the lowest price in the market. If you change any component of its model, it won’t be Wal-Mart.
