American workers "union and unrepresented alike" are suffering from the downward pressure on wages and benefits exerted by the giant retail chain Wal-Mart, said the head of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Doug Dority, whose union is attempting to organize Wal-Mart, told the other members of the MTD executive council that the U.S. "is the greatest consumer nation in the world because it was made that way by people in the labor movement. We negotiated a standard of living. We negotiated health insurance. We negotiated pension plans for people. And now companies like Wal-Mart, and particularly Wal-Mart, are trying to take that away."
The UFCW president noted that Wal-Mart "has three times as many employees as any other private operation in this country. They are the biggest retailer in the world." But, at least in the U.S., employment at Wal-Mart apparently isn't a long-term proposition for many. "They have a total employment in this country of over a million people. And every year they turn over about 500,000 people," Dority stated.
No stranger to difficult organizing drives - 40 years ago he organized the Virginia grocery store where he was working as a clerk - Dority explained that Wal-Mart today "is setting a different kind of standard. Years ago, some of the biggest employers used to be leaders. They were usually the leaders because they were organized. You look back at General Motors when they were the leading company in this country. The people at General Motors make good money. And they make good money because of the United Auto Workers. They set a (fair) standard, and other people moved toward that standard."
Now, Wal-Mart's size and influence makes it an essential organizing target. "They're such a trend setter that there's no question they're going to define the wages in the retail food industry," Dority said. "They're going to define the health benefits. They're going to define the pension benefits. They're going to define the whole standard for the food industry and that's our problem."
He added that despite its reputation as a discount operation, Wal-Mart has been quite profitable for its owners. While the average Wal-Mart wage is $7.62 an hour, the UFCW president stated, and only a third of the employees have health insurance (for which they pay anywhere from $113 to $230 out of their paycheck), five of the world's 10 richest people are Wal-Mart heirs.
"What we see in our own negotiations in the food industry," he continued, "is the employers come in and say Wal-Mart is such stiff competition that we have to push our wages down. We have to have cuts in our health and welfare. We can't continue to do this pension thing. We can't continue to pay people overtime. We can't continue to give them premium pay on Sunday. We can't continue to have any restrictions in the contract where people only do work in their particular department or whatever. We can't have any of those things.
"And those things are going to have a severe impact on our members. But Wal-Mart is doing something else because corporate America follows the lead. We're going to have a situation where other employers are saying, Hey, we need to operate the same way Wal-Mart does."
Dority urged union members to shop at union stores. "But if they can't shop at a union store and they have to go into Wal-Mart then we want you to go in as proud union members and wearing your jackets and wearing your hats and wearing your T-shirts that have something about the union. We want union members to go in and talk to people at Wal-Mart about their union - what the benefits of their union are."
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