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UK Wal-Mart Union Members Reject Company Inducements to Renounce Collective Bargaining Rights

Posted to the IUF website 07-Apr-2005

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Cost cutting is the Wal-Mart company creed, but the world's largest retailer spares no expense when it comes to busting unions. Wal-Mart is notorious for firing pro-union workers and closing stores whose workers vote for union representation. In a new variant on a familiar theme, Wal-Mart's UK subsidiary ASDA recently offered 700 members of the UK GMB at a distribution center in the country's northeast an extra one million pound pay package, including a 10 percent increase in basic pay and a doubling of overtime rates. The offer, however, was conditional on renouncing the right to collective wage bargaining. Workers at the site rejected the offer, and the union is now exploring the possibility of legal action against the company for violating employment laws which forbid inducing workers to renounce their collective bargaining rights.

Wal-Mart claims its employees have no need of union representation, because it has no workers on the payroll, only associates.