Wal-Mart Workers Try the Nonunion Route

(How is this NOT a union? - gd)
After numerous failed attempts to unionize Wal-Mart stores, the nation’s main union for retail workers has decided to try a different approach: it has helped create a new, nonunion group of Wal-Mart employees that intends to press for better pay, benefits and most of all, more respect at work.

The group, Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart for short, says it has quietly signed up thousands of members in recent months, and it is going public this week with a Web site, ourwalmart.org, and a Facebook page. Organizers say they have more than 50 members at some stores, and they hope to soon have tens of thousands of members. Wal-Mart has nearly 1.4 million workers nationwide.

Although the Web site of OUR Walmart depicts the organization as a grass-roots effort by Wal-Mart workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers has provided a sizable sum — the union will not say how much — to help the group get started. The union has also paid hundreds of its members to go door to door to urge Wal-Mart workers to join the group.

In addition, the organizers are receiving help from ASGK Public Strategies, a consulting firm long associated with David Axelrod, President Obama’s top political strategist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/15walmart.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25

1. Management pays labor a fair wage;
2. Management offers fair benefits including medical, disability, dental, sick days, vacation, and pension;
3. Management fairly bargains for terms concerning firing employees and their retirement;
4. Management fairly bargains for dispute resolution e.g., mediation, not arbitration in lieu of labor's right to strike and management's option of locking out workers; and
5. Management at times goes against corporate interests in order to negotiate with employees.

It won't work. See #5.

When it says it isn't, apparently.

I'm for whatever route succeeds in getting workers together to stand up for their rights.