The Wal-Mart labor organization, OUR Walmart, is planning a staged protest on the biggest shopping day of the year to demand for more benefits and higher wages.
The protest is a response to what Wal-Mart employees are calling “retaliation” measures that Wal-Mart employs in order to prevent complaining about better pay, fairer schedules and more affordable benefits. According to the workers the ‘retaliation’ measures include cutting hours, changing shifts and moving them around departments.
Wal-Mart, which owns 4,000 stores in the United States and employes 1.3 million people, filed suit with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Friday saying that OUR Walmart had violated the National Labor Relations Act by picketing and protesting in the last six months without filing a formal petition to form a union.
The NLRB issued a statement Tuesday afternoon saying that neither party is going to be particularly pleased with their decision.
“The legal issues—including questions about what constitutes picketing and whether the activity was aimed at gaining recognition for the union—are complex,” NLRB spokeswoman Nancy Cleeland said in the statement. “The Memphis Office expects to complete its investigation tomorrow (Wednesday). Because of the complexity of the case, it will then be sent to the NLRB Division of Advice in Washington, D.C., for further analysis. Under these circumstances, the Office of General Counsel does not expect to make a decision before Thursday on whether or not to seek an injunction to stop the activity.”
In order to win the case, Wal-Mart will have to prove that OUR Walmart is part of an effort on the part of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) to unionize Wal-Mart employees.
“In fact, many of our associates have urged us to do something about the UFCW’s latest round of publicity stunts because they don’t think it’s right that a few associates that are being coerced by the UFCW are being portrayed by the media as representative of what it’s like to work at Walmart,” Wal-Mart national media relations director Kory Lundberg said in a statement.
Only a few thousand Wal-Mart employees are expected to take part in this protest while Wal-Mart said 1 million are scheduled to work on the holiday weekend, so chances are the walk-outs will have little effect on business as usual.
Wal-Mart maintains that they respect the right to the freedom of speech of their employees, but if they are scheduled to work, they had better work.
