No, there’s no real connection between all those three headliners—just a confluence of stories in today’s newspapers.
Steven Greenhouse has been a busy boy. He has two pieces in the New York Times today. His front-page Business section story looks at the debate over wages at Wal-Mart. I think the best nugget of information from this article that everyone should tuck away is this: “If Wal-Mart spent $3.50 an hour more for wages and benefits of its full-time employees, that would cost the company about $6.5 billion a year,” which is less than 3 percent of its sales. Having watched some focus groups last Fall on the subject of Wal-Mart, I’m pretty confident that consumers would be happy to pay the slightly higher prices if they knew those higher prices were a result of Wal-Mart’s workers getting slightly better pay and benefits. And, hold your breathe, maybe Wal-Mart would accept a slightly lower profit, too.
A quick little plug: this Saturday May 7th at 8 p.m. (for all of you with either no date, no babysitter or a VCR), C-SPAN will broadcast the taped debate sponsored by the The Nation and The Economist on the question of whether Wal-Mart is good for America. Yours truly, along with Liza Featherstone (see to the left here in the book list for her wonderful book), held down the side of goodness and light.
A bit more depressing is Greenhouse’s piece inside the main section reporting on a lawsuit filed by UNITE-HERE against the Communications Workers Union because of a dispute over who should organize workers at tribal casinos in California. It’s one of the never-ending jurisdiction fights between unions over who has the right to organize a particular group of workers. I’ve always thought these jurisdiction fights are a real waste of time and money. I’ve never understood why adults can’t just get in a room and work these things out. Normally, the AFL-CIO tries to work these things out via the jurisdictional dispute mechanisms. But, UNITE-HERE has actually sued CWA in federal court alleging breach of contract, arguing that UNITE-HERE was granted exclusive jurisdiction to organize California’s casino industry and that CWA agreed to that.
Seems to me a federal lawsuit is a bit extreme. Having said that, I wonder: what the heck is CWA doing mucking around in the gaming industry? As the union that bills itself as the union for the information age, CWA is getting killed in the burgeoning non-union telecommunications industry and it has virtually no hold in the computer industry. And the quote by CWA spokesperson Jeff Miller reminds me of someone trained in the art of Washington political spin: “We represent workers in many sectors and we’re always eager to help workers organize wherever.” How about your industry, Jeff?
Lastly, The Financial Times has a front-page story quoting the two finalists for the job to head the World Trade Organization warning the U.S. and Europe “against applying emergency curbs on Chinese textile exports warning that such a move would smack of hypocrisy.” Well, this whole so-called “free trade” regime was built on a foundation of hypocrisy so I say, why stop now? But, let’s find the silver lining (hey, I’m a Yankees fan…this season you have to really look for that) in this dispute: it’s finally shining the light on the bankruptcy of a world view that is based on an ideology (so-called “free trade”) that does not exist in the real world and is creating terrible imbalances between rich and poor. Maybe the whole textile quota mess is the start of the unraveling of this faulty world economic system.
