Now it is official. Wal-Mart has indeed harassed and intimidated workers. The Quebec Labour Relations Board ordered the Bentonville-based retail giant to stop intimidating and harassing employees, who have been organising their colleagues in a Wal-Mart store in Ste-Foy.
Uni-affiliated UFCW, as well as UNI Commerce, have of course always known that harassment and intimidation form part of Wal-Mart's union busting tactics. The handbook for managers, teaching them union-busting, is also ample proof of this.
But now it is a public ruling of a government authority that tells the company to put an end to its illegal behaviour against its own workers. The company must now post the Labour Relations Board decision in its Ste-Foy store, in a prominent way, for at least 30 days.
Perhaps ironically, the decision by the Quebec authorities is published subsequently with harassed and intimidated Wal-Mart Tire and Lube workers in Colorado having given up their attempt to join UFCW. They were clearly afraid that they would become victims of the Wal-Mart way of handli9ng labour relations, that is to see their workplace close down if they join a union and ask for a collective agreement.
"We've just gotten a breath of fresh air in the campaign to unionize Wal-Mart people," said Marie-Josée Lemieux, president of the UFCW Jonquière local in Quebec in today's Globe and Mail. According to the newspaper, the company had threatened the workers with bad performance evaluations and disciplinary measures. It is easy to understand what management was hinting at.
One year ago, there was a similar labour board decision singling out Wal-Mart for intimidating its workers in a store in Brossard, near Montreal.
The Globe and Mail report on a survey where 75 per cent of Canadians believed that the recently announced closing of the St Hyacinthe store was due to the unionisation of its workers. Wal-Mart has tried to excuse it with poor profitability, but once again the public was much smarter than the Bentonville managers thought.
Almost half of those surveyed said that they will cut down their shopping at Wal-Mart, or stop shopping completely, the Globe and Mail reports.
- We hope that Wal-Mart will one day realize that people have the right to join a union, said Louis Bolduc of UFCW, Canada to the CBC News.
Posted by UFCW 227 at February 28, 2005 06:13 PM