Walmart is one of the most recognizable companies on Earth. It is known as one of the largest retailers in the world, both in brick-and-mortar retail and online. What is less well-known is their atrocious track record of employer-employee relations. Amidst rumors of anti-union propaganda training videos and stores that attempt to unionize being permanently closed due to “plumbing issues,” There is little surprise that such a massive, profitable company has sought to unethically keep its workers from unionizing by any means necessary. One example that stands out above the rest is an infamous episode in 2000, when the meat cutters from a Walmart in Texas voted to unionize. Workers do not attempt to form unions for no reason, nor does it ever happen in a vacuum. Workers will attempt to unionize at their job when they have needs that their employer is not meeting, and they cannot trust their employer to try to meet those needs in good faith. Organizations such as the AFL-CIO and the IWW exist to give those on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder a voice to counter the megaphone that the executives at the top have. Unions do not seek to cut into a company’s profits just for the fun of it, despite what many wealthy oligarchs would have the masses believe. They simply seek to ensure that their employees have a safe work environment, a full belly, and a roof over their head. Why was it, then, that when meat cutters at a Walmart in Jacksonville, Texas, successfully voted to unionize, top executives at Walmart’s Home Office in Bentonville moved swiftly to eliminate the meat cutter position entirely and do away with fresh-cut meat at all Walmart stores? According to a Washington Post article published at the time, representatives of the Walmart Corporation stated that “its move away from meat-cutting was part of an industry trend toward pre-wrapped meat and was not a reaction to the union election.” (Swoboda, 2000) The company’s spokespeople can deny this all they like, but the timing tells a different story. Many other supermarkets, to this very day, still use fresh-cut meat, and a company such as Walmart could doubtless afford to keep the meat cutter position open and maintain a healthy profit on meat products, union or no. This shows that Walmart was not following any trend but was merely lying through its teeth to try to preserve its image. The fact of the matter is that Walmart had many options at its disposal, all of them more ethically sound than the path it chose. Rather than trample its workers as it always has, it could have recognized the vote and the union and allowed other workers at their stores to unionize, as is required by law. It could have avoided the issue entirely by having meaningful relationships with its employees, rather than paying them starvation wages and pumping them full of anti-union propaganda training videos, as shown by a 2015 article in The Atlantic. (Greenhouse, 2015) Instead of any of these options, Walmart chose the most underhanded, most ethically wrong one possible, short of the violent crime characteristic of, for example, the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) in Guatemala or Coca-Cola in Colombia, according to a lawsuit (Rosen, 2001). Walmart is not a company that is known for acting in its employees’ best interests, and no amount of public relations can change that at this point. Any goodwill this company ever had died with its founder, Sam Walton. In his place, the current executives zealously guard their profits at all costs, up to and including that of the well-being of their workers. If Walmart wanted to be seen as anything other than a patently unethical company, there are many, many actions it would have needed to take many years ago. Because this is not meant to be a tome rivalling the Oxford Dictionary in size, this paper will focus on the specific issue of workers’ rights as depicted through the lens of unionization. There would have been less of a call for unionization if store, regional, and company management had listened to the concerns of the meat cutters and other workers to begin with. Even so, there would have been a union vote somewhere at some Walmart over the past twenty years. In such a situation, instead of violating America’s admittedly toothless labor laws, Walmart not only could but should have recognized the union, kept the meat cutter position intact, and worked with the union in good faith. Instead, Walmart irreversibly tarnished its image by crushing the meat cutters' union and making the weak excuse of “everybody else is doing it, so we should too!”
References
Greenhouse, S. (2015, June 9). How America’s largest employer persuades its workers not to unionize. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/how-walmart-convinces-its-employees-not-to-unionize/395051/
Rosen, N. (2001, July 20). Colombian Union suing Coca-Cola in death squad case. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/colombian-union-suing-coca-cola-in-death-squad-case/
Swoboda, F. (2000, March 3). Wal-Mart ends meat-cutting jobs - the Washington Post. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2000/03/04/wal-mart-ends-meat-cutting-jobs/acdb8f7c-d7c2-4e31-aad7-8f690ba3b35b/