Wal*Mart Uber Alles By: Mark W Adams

The prospect of the Demon-crats taking over Washington has WalMart execs in a tizzy. The Murdoch Street Journal reports "thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized."

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

"The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said.

THIS WILL NOT STAND! We simply cannot allow WalMart employees to unionize, making all the cheap crap they import from China more expensive just so the peasants working there can have the same rights to collectively bargain for better working conditions, more affordable health care and competitive wages -- just like all the unionized WalMart workers in (wait for it) China. [/snark]

How much of a raise did some unionized Wal-Mart China workers collectively bargain for this year? 8% over last years wages and another 8% in 2009 over the already increased 2008 wages.

According to a Xinhua News article,
the trade union for Wal-Mart workers in Jinjiang, Fujian also
successfully negotiated issues of hours worked, general rest and
vacation time, insurance, and worker safety. Full time staff will
enjoy rights to vacation days, marital leave, maternity leave, and
parental leave.

How’s that compare to Wal-Mart’s U.S. workers? I seem to recall reading something about Wal-Mart wanting more part time labor and wage caps. And as another cost saving measure didn’t Wal-Mart violate labor laws over 2 million times in just six years - in Minnesota alone!?

This isn't just a case of China putting on it's best face for the Olympics, like they did today in bowing to pressure and agreeing to live by their agreement with the IOC when it comes to internet access for international journalists -- so the guys from the BBC can now access their own website. This is a concerted effort by China to improve it's society, and unions are considered an integral part of their advancement into the 21st century.

It is just another step in China’s efforts to move away from being a
destination for foreign companies seeking super low paid workers. Just
as with so much else in China, we are seeing foreign companies getting
out in front in terms of going along with what China wants to do with
its economy. Domestic companies are and will continue to follow in
terms of having to deal with unionized and higher paid employees…
anybody who still thinks China will do anything for foreign investment
is living in the past. Times have changed and China is getting more and
more selective in terms of the foreign (and even domestic) companies it
wants.

This is not window dressing, and Walmart executives knew going in that China would insist the company deal fairly with unions before they started investing in China -- where the company now has 90 supercenters, three Sam’s Clubs and holds a 35% share of the Taiwanese Trust-Mart brand. But interestingly enough, the union movement among Chinese WalMart employees was not an edict from Beijing, but a grass-roots movement that has been struggling for recognition for ten years before their first store went union in 2006 (pdf).

Ten Years. It took ten years of fighting, and two more years of negotiations before the first real collectively bargained agreement between WalMart and some of it's Chinese employees could be signed. And that's in Communist freaking China? The worker's paradise? And here in the Land of the Free, they're afraid of a centrist Democratic Party, barely tolerant of progressive causes?

Ugh!

Union membership in the US has been cut from 25% to 7% since the Reagan years, and the legacy of Reaganomics is continuing to devastate this nation as our Department of Labor has been morphed into the Department of Union-Busting. Meanwhile, union friendly China is indisputably moving in the right direction for it's economy and the standard of living of it's citizens.

Human rights? After Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, legalizing torture and creating a surveillance state, Americans are hardly in a position to get snooty about China's history of rights violations -- and they're kicking our ass economically, even with unions at their WalMart stores.