By Stephen Franklin Tribune staff reporter Published May 23, 2004
The Battle of Wal-Mart is more than a squabble over proposed stores on Chicago's West and South Sides. It is a front in a sprawling North American struggle between a behemoth company and a union fearful for its future.
From Chicago to Los Angeles to Saskatchewan, the 1.3 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers union is battling the world's biggest company, which has succeeded in preventing unions from organizing its workers.
The most immediate concern is that the presence of the giant retailer will drive down wages and benefits for the core of the union's membership: workers in other grocery stores.
But the union also has larger fears: that the retailer's low-wage ways will encourage other businesses to follow suit, to the detriment of millions of workers, both union and non-union.
That is why, in Chicago, the union's 40,000-member local has been calling up all available manpower to make its case before the City Council's expected decision Wednesday on whether to grant zoning approvals to Wal-Mart for the stores.
"We're in street-to-street fighting. They talk to somebody; we talk to them too. Anyone who will give us an ear, we'll talk to them," said Tim Drea, an official with UFCW Local 881.
The union stirs community opposition by challenging the alleged poor quality of Wal-Mart jobs, questioning the environmental impact of its mammoth stores and accusing it of exerting a "downward" force on the economy.
The UFCW began looking for new ways to pressure Wal-Mart once it realized its organizing efforts were stalled. Despite a costly, decade-long investment in time and manpower, not a single Wal-Mart in North America has been organized.
Organized labor has joined UFCW's battle. But union leaders also have been talking about how they can do more, say officials with the AFL-CIO, labor's umbrella organization.
"It is a very difficult process, but we are not going to give up," said Joe Hansen, a one-time Milwaukee butcher, who now heads the UFCW. He was talking from a Washington meeting called recently by a handful of union leaders and community activists to plan a campaign to deal with Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart officials shrug off the accusations, saying the unions, community groups and lawyers fighting them have their own agendas.
"We understand that we have a target on our back because of the size of our business," said company spokeswoman Sarah Clark at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
Wal-Mart is without a doubt a giant. It has 3,586 stores in the U.S. and another 1,499 around the world. With 1.2 million workers in the U.S. alone (42,000 in Illinois), it is the nation's single biggest employer of senior citizens, individuals with disabilities, Hispanics and African-Americans.
The average Wal-Mart worker earns $9.64 per hour and works 36 hours per week, the company said. This compares to $8.98 an hour for its non-union competitors, according to Wal-Mart figures.
With a 2 percent bonus and another 2 percent put in their 401(k) plan, the average full-time Wal-Mart worker earns $18,750 per year, according to the company. A family of four needs to earn at least $18,725 a year to escape poverty, government statistics show.
Wal-Mart boasts that more than 50 percent of its workers use its health insurance plan, while another 40 percent rely on plans from the government or through their spouses.
Union officials point out that two-thirds of the nation's workers at large companies get their insurance from their own employers.
For family health-care coverage with a $350 deductible, full-time Wal-Mart workers pay $264 monthly as well as one-fifth of the costs of their health-care visits.
Nationally, workers paid an average $201 per month for family health-care coverage last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-care research organization.
Unions point to the higher wages at Costco Wholesale Corp., where 15,000 workers, or about 13 percent of its workforce, are Teamsters.
The salaries for union members at Costco start at $10.50 per hour and go up to $19.80, according to Teamsters officials. The workers are eligible for bonuses of as much as $7,000 per year, more than 90 percent of their health-care costs are company paid and they have 401(k) pension plans.
The same pay and benefits extend to non-union Costco workers, said Costco CEO James D. Sinegal, who acknowledged that his firm may have the industry's highest paid workers. But, he added, it pays to pay workers well.
"How can you afford not to?" he said, explaining that motivated workers are often also highly productive.
The bottom line for the UFCW in salaries and benefits is not the retail industry, however, but in grocery stores, where it represents an overwhelming majority of workers at the major supermarkets.
That is where the UFCW fears Wal-Mart will have the strongest effect, driving down wages amid competitive supermarket chains.
At Chicago-area Dominick's stores, for example, store clerks' pay runs from $6.80 per hour to $13.80 per hour. Its members pay nothing for their health-care--a bone of contention between the union and company.
The real showdown between Wal-Mart and the union began when seven out of 10 butchers in a store in Jacksonville, Texas, voted in February 2000 to join the union. Within a month, Wal-Mart began shifting to pre-packaged meats, wiping out butchers' job nationally.
Such a decision had been in the works before the union vote, company spokeswoman Clark said.
Encouraged by the breakthrough in workers' interest, the union quickly stepped up its organizing.
"Why Wal-Mart? It's because Wal-Mart sets the rate. They sink the standard," said Greg Denier, a UFCW spokesman in Washington.
Target Corp. wasn't much of a concern, he explained, because its grocery sales are limited. And the union didn't go after Kmart Corp. because it was in financial troubles, he added.
At one point the union launched a citywide campaign in Las Vegas to organize all of the Wal-Marts there. It set up a 12-person team and poured in support. Several years later, however, there is no union representation.
The union and company have fought a cat-and-mouse game across the United States: the UFCW charging Wal-Mart with labor law violations and the company rebutting them.
The union also has urged people to take Wal-Mart to court, creating another hectic battleground for the company.
Among dozens of suits against the company, Wal-Mart now faces a class-action suit in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of female workers, who say they were discriminated against in terms of raises and promotions. Another 20 lawsuits alleging wage and hour abuses also are percolating through state courts.
Faced with deep financial problems after a four-and-a-half month grocery strike earlier this year that wiped out the UFCW's strike fund, the union is redirecting its forces in Las Vegas and elsewhere.
Nowadays, the only hopeful prospects the union can point to are two Wal-Mart stores in Saskatchewan, where workers recently applied to join the union. UFCW officials in Canada, where Wal-Mart has about 62,000 workers, are pinning their hopes on winning at least one of the elections.
The union has an uphill battle in winning over consumers, experts say.
"The UFCW isn't going to be able to do it alone. It will really take significant community support," predicted John Budd, a labor expert at the University of Minnesota.
The union's problem, as Budd sees it, is that "most people see themselves more as consumers than workers, and so they look at Wal-Mart as a bargain and don't see that behind the bargain is a low-paid worker without health insurance."
In Chicago, Local 881 hopes that such views will change and that pressure on Wal-Mart will lead it to sign a so-called community benefits agreement that it put together with local community, jobs and religious activists. The 12-point agreement should lead to the kind of jobs that the union seeks, Local 881 officials say.
Yet Local 881 official Drea doubts that Wal-Mart will do so. That is why, he said, the union is urging the City Council to keep Wal-Mart out of Chicago. But if the council disagrees, the union has a strategy.
"The day that store opens," he said, "we'll have organizers at the front doors, saying, `Here is a better way.'"
Posted by UFCW 227 at May 23, 2004 03:48 PM