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Economist, August 25, 2005
“GLOBAL companies need global unions,” says Noel Howell,
a spokesman for the Union Network International (UNI), a federation
of 900 trades unions from 150 countries. It is hard to think of a
single global firm that would agree. Certainly not Wal-Mart, the world's
biggest retailer with 1.6m workers, 1.2m of them in America. It says
that unionisation is not “right” for Wal-Mart, at least
in America, and that unions “do not want us to succeed”.
The UNI held a congress in Chicago this week with the supposed need
to unionise Wal-Mart as a main theme. (Four other firms—DHL,
an express delivery company, Walt Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation
and Ikea, a Swedish furniture store—were identified as future
targets.) Wal-Mart is leading a “race to the bottom” in
wages and benefits, the UNI claimed, and other big firms would follow
by choice or necessity. According to a study last year by the University
of California, Berkeley, wages at Wal-Mart were so low that taxpayers
in California alone footed an $86m bill for health benefits and other
assistance claimed by Wal-Mart employees.
Wal-Mart retorts that it offers “good, affordable coverage”
of benefits to staff willing to pay $70.50 per fortnight per family.
Anyway, with Wal-Mart's tax bill of about $5 billion a year, American
taxpayers come out well ahead. Whatever shortcomings Wal-Mart may
have as an employer, it can hardly be accused of paying less than
the market rate, at least in America. Last week it said that over
11,000 people had applied for 400 jobs at a new store in Oakland,
California.
If Wal-Mart worries about unions at all, it may judge that things
are moving in its favour. Last month one leader of the unionise-Wal-Mart
campaign, the United Food and Commercial Workers, walked out of the
AFL-CIO, the umbrella organisation for American organised labour.
It followed in the footsteps of two other big unions, the Service
Employees International Union and the Teamsters.
The AFL-CIO has not been very powerful in recent years relative to
individual unions. Still, a more divided labour movement is probably
going to be a weaker one—which is to say, an even weaker one,
given the relentless decline of American union membership in the past
50 years, from 30% to 12.5% of the workforce. Given similar trends
in most of the world, multinational firms such as Wal-Mart are unlikely
to be quaking in their boots at this new campaign.
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