The United Food and Commercial Workers union said Tuesday it was backing Hillary Clinton for president, citing her support for “paid leave, stable schedules and higher wages” for U.S. workers. Conspicuously absent from its announcement was the fact that Clinton is a former Walmart board member, having served on it from 1986 to 1992, only quitting when she moved to the White House.
That’s notable because UFCW is arguably Walmart’s leading critic. It has funded and run the nonprofit activist groups Wake Up Walmart, Making Change at Walmart and Oraganization United for Respect Walmart as part of a broader effort to unionize the company’s estimated 1.3 million employees.
UFCW spokesman Casey Hoag said Clinton’s association with the retail giant was history as far as UFCW members were concerned.
“Our extensive endorsement process found that our members were more concerned about Clinton’s plans for the future than her past — higher wages, paid leave, scheduling reforms, standing up to expand worker protections, and protecting Social Security from attacks to privatize it. She resigned from any position with Walmart involvement 24 years ago,” Hoag told the Washington Examiner.
A representative for Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
UFCW’s most recent anti-Walmart campaign, dubbed “Are you with us?” sought to “highlight the negative impact that the country’s largest employer has on all American retail workers, which includes paying employees poverty-level wages, cutting hours and schedules to force workers into part-time jobs and salaries, and insufficient benefit offers.”
Clinton’s connections to the Arkansas-based company are deep. In a 2004 speech, she said founder Sam Walton called her one day and asked her to serve on the board, making her the first woman to serve on it. At the time, the company was being criticized for its lack of diversity.
Her husband, Bill Clinton, was Arkansas governor at the time and the two families knew each other socially. Clinton also worked at the Rose Law Firm, which represented Walmart. A 1994 New York Times story identified Clinton as the firm’s lead lawyer for the company.
As a board member, Clinton was paid $18,000 annually plus $1,500 for each meeting she attended, according to a 2006 Associated Press report. By 1993, the Clintons owned an estimated $100,000 in Walmart stock, which was put into a blind trust after the 1992 election. They flew on the Walmart corporate jet 14 times during 1990 and 1991.
By all accounts, Clinton used her position as board member to advocate for hiring more women and addressing environmental issues but didn’t push the company on other workforce-related issues, such as its staunch opposition to unionization. In 2008, ABC news unearthed a video of Clinton at a 1990 stockholders meeting declaring, “I’m always proud of Walmart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else.”
She has not always been so vocal, though. Her six years on the board rated only a single mention in her 2003 memoir Living History.
During a January 2008 Democratic primary debate, President Obama attacked his then-rival by citing her Walmart connections. “While I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Walmart,” he said.
Bill Clinton defended her telling ABC there wasn’t much she could have done at the time because they “lived in a state that had a very weak labor movement … she knew there was no way to change that, not with it headquartered in Arkansas.”
Clinton has largely sought to distance herself from the company since then, returning a $5,000 donation from Walmart’s political action committee in 2008, saying that the company’s “policies do not reflect the best way of doing business and the values that I think are important in America.” Her campaign did not return another in $20,000 in contributions from Walmart executives and lobbyists, though.
She continues to accept their support. Federal Election Commissions filings show that Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, gave the maximum allowed under federal law, $25,000, to the super PAC Ready for Hillary during the 2013-2014 cycle.
