“People are scared to vote for a union because they’re scared their store will be closed,” said Barbara Gertz, an overnight Walmart stocker in Denver.
.. Gertz said that when workers call in sick, their first day off comes out of their vacation days or personal days, not their paid sick days.
.. The spokesperson added that its bonuses, 401(k) plan, and health plan are considerably better than at most other discounters—its 401(k) plan gives a dollar-for-dollar match for the first six percent of pay and the premium for its most popular health plan is just $21.90 every two weeks. That said, part-time workers, who represent nearly half its work force, don’t qualify for many of these benefits.
.. But the UFCW had a big success in 2004, when it unionized a Walmart in Jonquiere, Quebec—a first in North America. Walmart closed that store shortly afterward, and Canada’s Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the shutdown was an illegal ploy to avoid having a union. Walmart has long argued that it closed the Jonquiere store because it was unprofitable and that the closing had nothing to do with the union
At the time he proposed Act 10, Walker claimed that busting the public employees’ unions was necessary because Wisconsin was facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and that the deficit couldn’t be closed, as he told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday,”“with the current collective bargaining laws in the state.”
.. And while Walker claims to have saved the state $3 billion during his first term as a result of Act 10, he almost surely could have gotten the same givebacks by bargaining for them, as other states, such as Rhode Island, have done.
To put it another way, Walker busted the public employee unions not because he had to but because he could.
.. No, what motivated Walker, clearly, was politics. Unions, which have long been traditional Democratic allies, have been in steep decline — except for public employee unions, which now make up just under half of all union workers. By crippling them, Kettl told me, “Walker is trying to put a stake in the heart of a strong piece of Democratic support that has long been a thorn in the side of the Republicans.”
.. As Kaufman nicely puts it, passing Act 10 was his “audition” for potential big money backers like the Kochs.
Most studies suggest that about one-fifth of the increase in economic inequality in America among men in recent decades is the result of the decline in unions. It may be more: A study in the American Sociological Review, using the broadest methodology, estimates that the decline of unions may account for one-third of the rise of inequality among men.
.. In Germany, the average autoworker earns about $67 per hour in salary and benefits, compared with $34 in the United States. Yet Germany’s car companies in 2010 produced more than twice as many vehicles as American companies did, and they were highly profitable.