Friday, November 22, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Union effort targets Wal-Mart

Labor group trying to organize workers, increase awareness

Supporters of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 711 demonstrate Thursday at the Sam's Club on Spring Mountain Road. The union is trying to organize Wal-Mart workers. Photo by Ralph Fountain.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 711 in Las Vegas joined a nationwide campaign Thursday to make Wal-Mart customers aware of what the union considers poor working conditions at the nation's richest retailer.

About a dozen union organizers and former Wal-Mart workers carried signs and handed out leaflets at the company's membership-only Sam's Club on Spring Mountain Road, catching the ears of a few sympathizers.

"You get a little tired of this Enron-itis thing, people reaping benefits of lower-paid people," said LaRance Spain, a Sam's Club customer and Culinary worker at Harrah's.

"This is 2002. You have to be a humanitarian these days. If you've got any spiritual sense, you know greediness is going to be the downfall of America."

Bill Meyer, an assistant director from the UFCW International, said this was not a protest against Wal-Mart, but a "national day of action" with protests planned at about 400 Wal-Mart stores around the country.

Union activity was light in Las Vegas, which was ground zero when the union launched a nationwide Wal-Mart organizing campaign in February 2001.

"Again, it's awareness," he said. "We've been working here for two years. Business Week, the New York Times, PBS and others have done pieces on us. Swedish National Public Radio was here last week do a piece on our program."

Wal-Mart employees work an average of 28 hours a week at $7.50 an hour, the union claims in its campaign, slugged "Wal-Mart's War on Workers."

Workers can get health insurance, but it's so expensive that only 38 percent of the workers participate, Meyer said, and those who do pay up to $190 a month.

Jacquelyn Allen, a former employee at the Wal-Mart on Eastern Avenue in Henderson, said she paid $92 every two weeks for health benefits, making $8.50 an hour. Now she works for Smith's at a higher wage and pays $31 a month for health insurance.

"It's a hard place to work for," she said. "You're underpaid, understaffed. That's why they have a 72 percent turnover rate. I worked there eight months, which is actually a long time for a Wal-Mart associate. You'll find a small percentage are there a year."

Most of the customers looked like they didn't want to be bothered by the demonstrators, pushing their carts past them and ignoring their rhetoric.

"This is the union's event, it's a staged event," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Cynthia Illick said from the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

"People choose to come to work for Wal-Mart. As far as wages and benefits, we study the markets we go into and set a salary that's competitive with the wages in the market. Fortune magazine said we were one of the best companies to work for in 2002."

Meyer of UFCW said Wal-Mart has "saturated the roots of rural and suburban America," and is now moving into urban areas with its giant supercenters that include a full line of grocery products.

"They're bigger than Exxon, Ford and GE," he said. "They do $600 million a day in business, and they're making this money on the backs of their employees."

He said Wal-Mart is involved in a class-action lawsuit in Texas for failure to pay overtime and off-the-clock work that amounts to millions of dollars.

The company recently appealed a decision by an administrative law judge in San Francisco that found Wal-Mart in violation of the National Labor Relations Act, including questioning and threatening Las Vegas employees for their union organizing activities.

"We try to give workers the opportunity to have a fair and free process to have a union in the work place," Meyer said. "Workers petitioned for an election last year and Wal-Mart flew in their people and broke every law they could. They spied on the employees, interrogation of employees, they packed the unit."