IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
Inside the Global Sweatshop: Wal-Mart and the California Supermarket Strike
Posted to the IUF website 05-Feb-2004Share this article.
On March 25, 1911, a fire swept through the upper floors of the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, a clothing manufacturer employing some 500 mainly immigrant workers, most of them women. The fire spread rapidly, claiming the lives of 146 workers. Workers fleeing the fire found the exit doors and fire escapes locked. Many of the victims leapt to their deaths from the ninth floor.
The owners habitually locked the exits, ostensibly to prevent theft. The workers knew the sweatshop doors were locked to keep out union organizers.
In the aftermath of the Triangle Fire, garment workers' unions made strong organizational gains and successfully established legislated minimum safety standards. Today, the proliferation of non-union textile production has strongly eroded these historic gains, placing the jobs, health and safety of many textile workers at risk.
On January 18 this year - nearly a century after the Triangle Fire - the New York Times reported that Wal-Mart Stores Incorporated has a policy of routinely locking in night shift workers at many of its stores. A former Wal-Mart employee reported that workers were locked in at his Colorado store every night - and on weekends there was no one with a key.
A Wal-Mart spokesman told the Times that the lock-ins were to protect employees. A retail industry consultant said "Locking in workers, that's more of a 19th century practice than a 20th century one."
Welcome to the 21st century.
Wal-Mart is not only the largest US retailer, with an expanding international presence. It is the largest employer in the world today, with some 1.3 million employees on the payroll. Global sourcing has made Wal-Mart the world's largest buyer of goods produced in China, where union-busting is state policy. Immigrant workers from the countryside are routinely locked inside their workplaces and dormitories. Chinese workers frequently pay with their lives for the absence of workplace representation and effective health and safety enforcement. Fatal fires are a routine occurrence.
The global sweatshop has come full circle. Behind the hyperbole about the "information age", the "internet economy" and "the global race to the top" lies the coarse reality of brutal exploitation in which millions of workers around the globe labour in conditions familiar to the Triangle workers. In 2004, workers are still struggling for the right to a safe workplace to be recognized as a universal human right.
Like the government of China, Wal-Mart devotes considerable resources to combating unions. Nightshift workers find keys in short supply, but there is no shortage of human resource consultants and company lawyers working to combat union organization. Aggressive cost-cutting, fanatical devotion to union-busting and ruthless global sourcing by Wal-Mart increasingly sets industry standards, in both retail and, through the supply chain, in manufacturing. The pressure is relentlessly downwards.
The North American United Food and Commercial Workers' Union (UFCW) has tenaciously sought to organize Wal-Mart workers. The company has fought back with the full array of corporate resources and the support of the hostile US legal framework for unions. Today the UFCW is engaged on two fronts: fighting for union organization at Wal-Mart stores, and fighting the wider Wal-Mart effect.
Seventy thousand UFCW members have been locked out or are on strike against major Southern California supermarket chains since October of last year. The employers are demanding the imposition of a two-tier pay scale with considerably reduced medical benefits for current employees and radical reductions in benefits for the newly hired. If the companies prevail, it would spell the end of employer-funded benefits for unionized retail employees -. in a country with no national health care system. The ripple effect for all workers will of course be wider.
The union, while flexible in negotiations, has drawn the line on the health care issue. The workers have received considerable public support from the many Americans who know the reality of life without medical insurance. The struggle is widely perceived as a just fight for the future of all workers and the principle of affordable health care.
The employers claim they are under pressure from non-union Wal-Mart, where employees ("associates" to the company) aren't paid enough to participate in the company 's "voluntary" health plan. While the stores are hurting from the impact of the conflict, they have dug in their heels. It is a war of attrition.
The fact is that Safeway and the other stores involved in the conflict remain highly profitable - and have even increased already substantial bonuses to CEO's in recent years. But the relentless spread of Wal-Mart and the Wal-Martization of supply chains does pose a direct threat to fundamental labour rights and standards around the world. It has to be tackled, and there is only one effective antidote: union organization throughout the chain, from field to plate and from manufacturing to retail.
The UFCW is currently holding the line against corporate barbarism. They deserve the support of workers around the world.
Regular updates on the Southern California supermarket strike are available on the UFCW website at www.ufcw.org
Solidarity messages can also be sent to the union through the web site.