When Wal-Mart Workers Unionize, Plan for the Counter-Attack

Bill Hardgrave, professor at University of Arkansas’ Sam Walton’s School of Business, recently described Wal-Mart’s idea of utopia:

“'Contactless checkout' that’s kind of the utopia, right for the retailer…take the product off the shelf, you put it in the cart, you wheel it through the portal as you go out the door, it sees everything, it charges your credit card, takes it off you debit card, you wheel it out to your car, you take it out…couldn’t be any easier. I mean to me that’s great when we get to the point.”

Hardgrave was referring to a new Wal-Mart brainstorm that shows global corporations are doing much more than simply moving jobs overseas; they are engaged in a wide range of employment strategies that could pose an equal threat to workers.  In response, labor needs to be proactive and plan a counter attack.

Entitled “Radio Technology Finds Widespread Use in Tracking,” the August 17 PBS Newshour story concerned Walmart and other companies’ use of an emerging technology called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that is now “in use tracking and identifying everything from products on the shelves of Wal-Mart to the medical histories of patients.” (Here’s an MP3 of the segement.)  Unlike barcodes that can only identify a class of products, RFID uses radio technology to individually tag each piece of merchandise, identifying them by radio antenna.  Any guesses on how Wal-Mart wants to apply this new technology? They hope to make check-out cashiers a thing of the past.

So now, thanks to Professor Wal-Mart, we know the company’s contingency plan if Wal-Mart workers decide to join a union.

In order to get a few steps ahead of the bosses, part of the labor movement’s strategic planning process needs to be anticipating what companies are likely to do in the face of successful sectoral/geographic organizing campaigns.  We know that Wal-Mart is not going to simply roll over play dead; instead they’ll go on the offensive, developing new ways to [weaken the power of labor] reduce labor costs.    Luckily there are oceans of data available to allow the development of some pretty good scenarios of how companies are likely to respond if unions are able to force real improvements in the wages, benefits and working conditions of their members.

We can identify the questions that corporations will ask as they develop their anti-union strategies, and in many case we can identify the answers as well.  To figure out and defeat the strategies of Wal-Mart and other global corporations, we need to answer questions like:

• What jobs can be automated and what jobs can’t be automated and at what point automation becomes cost effective?
• What will be the response to wide-spread union pressure in other countries? (We know that Wal-Mart recently announced that it was pulling out of Germany in part because of “union issues.”)
• What are the range of employment relationships that companies have instituted to make organizing difficult—not just in the States but throughout the world?
• Which jobs in the service sector can simply be eliminated (baggers, parking lot attendants, etc)?
• What kinds of jobs in hotels, restaurants, retail, and throughout the service sector can be outsourced if it becomes cost effective to do so?
• What are the campaigns for public policy and administrative changes companies will launch if they feel threatened (for instance, the  current attempt to make many nurses supervisors)?
• What is the latest management literature on HR strategies to employ to thwart unions?

Developing possible scenarios for responding to success is essential.  With so much emphasis put on organizing, focusing on the consequences of success—some of which may be problematic—is something unions often prefer to avoid. But it has very often been our failure to consider what management would do if we were successful that has been our down-fall. We had no good plans in place to counter managements counter attack. And for workers, of course, this is the exact question that they want answered before they sign up.

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