Posted on 11/28/2013 8:14:18 AM PST by upchuck
National Labor Relations Board lawyers okayed a major union's practice of paying people to protest against Walmart in a legal memorandum earlier this month. The federal labor law enforcement agency said the practice of paying workers $50 apiece to join protests “did not constitute unlawful … coercion of employees.”
In a Nov. 15 memorandum from the NLRB's general counsel office regarding the so-called “Black Friday” protests staged by United Food and Commercial Workers against the nonunion retailer last year, the NLRB lawyers determined that the UFCW's offer of $50 gift cards to anyone who showed up to protest “was a non-excessive strike benefit.”
The lawyers said there was “no evidence to indicate that the gift card was meant to buy support for OUR Walmart” since the card was available not just to the retailer’s employees but to anyone who showed up at the unions’ protests.
OUR Walmart, which presents itself as a group of disaffected Walmart workers, is identified as a subsidiary of UFCW in the memorandum. Along with another UFCW-backed group, Making Change at Walmart, UFCW has been orchestrating a series of public relations attacks against the retailer.
It is not clear how widespread the practice of offering the $50 gift cards was, although the memorandum says the card was advertised on the main OUR Walmart website.
Peter Schaumber, a former NLRB chairman who now works with pro-business groups, agreed the practice would not be illegal, "but really, what it says is that those people are out there protesting because they are getting paid."
UFCW’s members mostly work for Walmart’s rivals. The union has tried for years to organize Walmart’s 1.3 million-member U.S. workforce with no success.
The groups are planning another wave of anti-Walmart strikes this week, highlighting the low pay of some employees. They claim they will have events at as many as 1,500 store locations across the country.
What the protests seem to be largely lacking, though, are actual Walmart employees. At events across the country last year, local media struggled to find anyone on the picket lines who also worked at the store. Some events had none at all.
A second NLRB advice memorandum released on Nov. 15 highlighted this problem for the protesters. It found that Walmart management’s forcing picketers to leave at two different Nov. 22, 2012, protests in Texas was not illegal because one group of protesters had only one Walmart employee. The other protest had none at all. Only when the protests involve employees does the law allow them on company property.
It is not the retail jobs that the unions want. They want the warehouse jobs and trucking jobs. WalMart runs its own warehouses and trucking lines.
WalMart hires the unhireables and gives them a chance at self sufficiency, self respect and the unions thugs don’t like that.
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