Wal-Mart's Great Fight North

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11576

by Liza Featherstone

Global Research, January 2, 2009
Thebigmoney.com

For years, Wal-Mart's North American stores have been entirely free of unions. That's changed very quickly over the past weeks. On Dec. 17, more than 150 Wal-Mart workers in Hull, Quebec, became members of the United Food and Commercial Workers <1> when a provincial labor board awarded them the right to do so. On Dec. 8, in a similar decision, a labor board certified a union in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, after a four-year battle between the union and the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer.

These are certainly dramatic developments, but unions—even in relatively pro-union Canada—have a very tough time when up against giants like Wal-Mart. Compared with U.S. labor law, Canadian labor law is far friendlier to workers seeking to join unions. While the United States requires a Byzantine and contentious election process, Canada requires an employer to recognize a union after enough workers sign cards or take a quick vote. Canada also places far more restrictions on employers' anti-union campaigning.

Yet in recent years, when Canadian labor has tried to take on famously anti-union U.S.-based multinationals like Wal-Mart <2> and McDonald's, the unions have nearly always lost in the end. Why is that? And what does the record bode for U.S. labor, which has staked nearly all its hard-earned political capital on a piece of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would legally put the U.S. on a footing similar to Canada's?

Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of Santa Barbara who is working on a book about Wal-Mart and has extensively studied both U.S. and Canadian unions, is not terribly optimistic about the newly organized Wal-Marts. "Wal-Mart is going to stonewall," he told The Big Money, "and they have the option to close the store." Indeed, the last time Wal-Mart workers in Canada voted to join a union—in Jonquiere, Quebec, in 2005—the company did exactly that <3>.

Canadian efforts to unionize low-wage U.S. giants have been consistently thwarted. The Canadian Auto Workers, which has organized several fast-food chains in British Columbia, unionized a McDonald's <4> store in 1998. But less than a year later, the company succeeded in decertifying the union <5>. It fired an unpopular manager (thus removing one reason for organizing), threw parties for the mostly teenage work force, and wore the employees down through myriad legal challenges. In St. Hubert, Quebec, the previous year, McDonald's closed a restaurant after a large majority of its workers voted to join the Teamsters.

Less than a handful of anti-union U.S. companies have been significantly unionized in Canada. Workers at some Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in British Columbia are represented by the Canadian Auto Workers, but Roger Crowther, a former CAW organizer, told TBM this only happened because KFC acquired White Spot, a Canadian company that was already unionized, and under provincial law those employees could be grandfathered into a union. Crowther's local did make significant inroads at Starbucks <6> in the late 1990s. At one point the union represented 12 shops in British Columbia, but all of these have since been decertified.

In the land of socialized medicine where unions represent 18 percent of the private work force—twice the unionization rate in the U.S.—why can't labor beat these U.S. Goliaths?

FULL story at link. Thi is why America needs the Employees Free Choice Act.

This is a way, for our community, in Québec, to stay "solidaire".

If you do I would like to read it.