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Rejected by the Unites
States Senate: Wal-Mart tried a ploy to stop unions from informing its workers By a resounding 59-40 margin, the U.S. Senate rejected Thursday an outrageous attempt by Wal-Mart to re-write nearly 70 years of federal labor law and allow the company to deny its workers information about Unions. Using fund-raising for the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks and the current mail scare involving anthrax as a ploy, the "Senator from Wal-Mart", Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, introduced an amendment to the appropriations bill for the National Labor Relations Board. Called a "rider", it would have prohibited the NLRB from finding a company had illegally discriminated against a Union when it allows other non- profit organizations to solicit on company property. Current law already allows companies to permit small amounts of fund-raising by outside groups without fear that will be used as evidence of discrimination. Rather than seek to change this law through substantive hearings and debate, Wal-Mart chose a "rider" to shut off funding to enforce a law that allowed its employees to receive Union information. Shareholder-judge tried earlier In 1999, Wal-Mart got an Arkansas county judge, who owned $700,000 in company stock, to issue a restraining order barring Union representatives from their stores nationwide for the "crime" of passing out Union information to super-center meat department workers. That order was dissolved by another judge after the first judge belatedly removed himself for the "appearance" of a conflict of interest. While a NLRB investigation at the time concluded that Union evidence from over 100 stores was not sufficient, Wal-Mart knew it had dodged a bullet only because it had stonewalled requests for store charitable-solicitation logs, thus denying the NLRB evidence of frequent fund-raising activities by non-profit groups inside and outside its stores. Shameful use of terror victims What was especially shameful about Wal-Mart's attempted power grab this time, however, was that Bentonville was using the victims of terrorism to justify discrimination against its employees receiving information about Unions. But hundreds of the victims of the Pentagon, Trade Towers and airplane disasters were Union members -- firefighter, police officers, emergency workers, restaurant workers, janitors, construction workers and others. The postal workers who contracted anthrax are Union members. The construction workers who flocked to Ground Zero in the rescue efforts are Union members. Only one Democrat, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, supported the Wal-Mart amendment, while nine Republicans and one Independent joined the rest of the Senate's Democrats in a bipartisan effort to deny Wal-Mart ever more power over its employees. Floor leader for Wal-Mart's opponents was Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada), in whose state Wal-Mart and Sam's Club workers are battling a massive corporate assault on their right to organize a Union. The Republicans who opposed the Wal-Mart amendment were: Campbell (CO), Stevens (AK), Fitzgerald (IL), Snowe (ME), Collins (ME), Voinivich (OH), Smith (OR), Specter (PA, and Chafee (RI). They were joined by Jim Jeffords (I-VT).
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