Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs: a union at Wal-Mart?

a union at Wal-Mart?

Date: January 01, 2004 | 8 Dhu-l-Qidah 1424 Hijriah

Subjects: labor

United Food and Commercial Workers Canada reports that workers at a Wal-Mart store in Quebec are seeking certification for their union:

UFCW Local 503 is proud to announce that the workers at the Wal-Mart store in Jonquiere have chosen their organization to represent them. This decision shows a desire for improvement of their working conditions to ensure a better future. The union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 503, affiliated with the Quebec Federation of Labour, has in fact filed an application for certification with the Quebec Labour Relations Commission (QLRC) on December 21, 2003 to represent the employees at this Wal-Mart store located at 2420 Rene-Levesque Blvd. in Jonquiere, approximately 200 km north of Quebec City. They are the first employees of this multinational to request a union in Quebec.

"We are very proud of the determination of the Wal-Mart workers in Jonquiere and are happy that they have chosen UFCW Local 503 to represent them," says Marie-Josee Lemieux, president of UFCW Local 503. "We thank the employees of Wal-Mart who worked courageously to convince their co-workers to get a union so they could have the respect and working conditions they deserve"...

...Certification by the QLRC would make the Jonquiere store the only unionized Wal-Mart store in North America.

The UFCW and other unions have been struggling for some time to organize Wal-Mart. So far, Wal-Mart has successfully fought the unions to a stalemate (see also here).

Because its workers aren't unionized, WalMart has 20% lower labor costs than many of its competitors (especially rival supermarkets). Cheap labor is thus one of the keys to its success, and it's fighting tooth-and-nail to keep that advantage (this pro-business columnist says that if Wal-Mart is unionized, "Wal-Mart as we know it will die"). More about Wal-Mart's business practices here; you may already be familiar with much of this¹.

For the Jonquiere workers, the fight has just begun. Others have gotten this far only to watch Wal-Mart snatch victory out of their grasp. We'll see who wins this time, Wal-Mart or its workers.

Update 2/10/05: Looks like Wal-Mart got the last laugh after all - they closed the store.

¹ In an interesting turn of events, I wrote on October 23 about coporations that exploit immigrant workers. Later that day, Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul followed up on my OSP post to make some comments about Wal-Mart. The very same day (but after both I and Jeanne posted), Wal-Mart was the target of a massive sting operation for employing hundreds of undocumented workers - exactly the kind of behavior I had been talking about in my post. As Nathan Newman noted, the feds should have arrested Wal-Mart executives rather than the workers.

~ Posted by Al-Muhajabah, a member of the reality-based community, at 04:18 PM

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a union at Wal-Mart?

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