With a cheery smile, Mary Mavrick strolled the store’s aisles, handing out leaflets to workers while expecting to be nabbed any minute by security guards.
“What’s this? Oh!” a gray-haired Wal-Mart worker said out loud, as she read from the one-page flier from the Wal-Mart Workers Association, a union-backed experiment to win support from the retailer’s workers without traditional union organizing.
The flier read:
“Do you deserve respect from management? Does your family deserve more? Do you deserve more.”
Mavrick was already in the parking lot, her leaflets distributed to surprised Wal-Mart workers by the time the guards told her to leave. She vowed to be back.
Her effort is a tiny part of a widening escalation of moves and countermoves between the behemoth 1.3 million-worker company and its foes, which include environmentalists, community activists and workers’ rights advocates, much of it directed by the Service Employees International Union.
But it’s not the typical union effort. Staffed largely by national political campaign veterans, it’s a highly sophisticated publicity and Internet war aimed at the hearts, minds and wallets of Wal-Mart shoppers and employees.
“Actually, I’m shocked at how much we’ve penetrated into Wal-Mart’s consciousness,” said Andy Stern, SEIU’s president. “We usually don’t get this much attention so quickly.”
Stern says the goal isn’t to launch an immediate effort to organize the retailer’s workers, but to change the company’s behavior. That includes, he says, boosting workers’ salaries, providing better health care and paying more attention to the U.S. communities in which the firm’s 3,151 stores are located.
Wal-Mart officials said they were not worried about those who saw a fiercely anti-Wal-Mart documentary, “Wal-Mart, the High Cost of Low Price.” It was shown last week in 8,000 venues, including at least 1,000 places of worship, said Robert Greenwald, its director and producer, who is not connected to the union drive.
The traditional route of showing the $1.8 million movie in theaters would have attracted people whose minds were already made up, Greenwald said. Instead, he wanted to reach “undecided or neutral” viewers.
The union bought 4,000 copies of the DVD for showings.
Company offers rebuttal
“The people who go there aren’t the people who want to hear our message,” said Wal-Mart spokesman Bob McAdam. Nonetheless, Wal-Mart promptly churned out a detailed written rebuttal of most of the points raised in the documentary.
“The company hasn’t changed, but how we talk about us, has,” said McAdam.
But others point out that Wal-Mart has clearly taken steps to garner public support. They include making Wal-Mart stores more environmentally friendly, supporting a hike in the minimum wage and introducing a less expensive health-care plan.
A Wal-Mart memo that was recently leaked to opponents shows the company’s concern about “growing public scrutiny” and suggested ways to “move the needle on Wal-Mart’s public reputation.”
While Wal-Mart officials say the memo was only a proposal dealing with the growth of benefits costs, foes leaped on its suggestion that the company rely more on workers with fewer years on the job because they receive less in benefits.
So, too, the memo admitted that some critics were “correct” and that the company’s health-care coverage “is expensive for low-income” families. Nearly half of the children of Wal-Mart employees are “either on Medicaid or are uninsured,” the memo said.
How much of a price Wal-Mart has paid for the bad publicity is hard to measure.
“There’s been an impact, but it’s far less than the impact of energy prices and a lagging job market,” said Mark Miller, an analyst with William Blair & Co., Chicago.
Chris Ohlinger of Service Industry Research Systems in suburban Cincinnati said consumers’ trust in the company has “significantly declined” from several years ago. And that can parlay into a 1 percent drop in sales, he added.
Ohlinger doubted that the impact would be long lasting. Most consumers, he said, are concerned more about low prices than anything else.
The difference now is that the battle against Wal-Mart has become much more like a polished political campaign.
Coordinating like-minded allies across the U.S. is Wal-Mart Watch, based in Washington, D.C., and initially funded by SEIU. It has reached out to environmental and religious groups for support.
Wake-Up Wal-Mart is a smaller Washington-based group that was launched by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Frustrated by its failure to gain a footing over a decade among Wal-Mart’s workers, the UFCW now favors virtual campaigning instead of traditional organizing.
“It’s community organizing in a new way,” said Paul Blank, who heads Wake Up Wal-Mart and was national political director of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. “You give people the downloads and let them go out in their neighborhoods and come up with new ways to get your message out.”
Wake Up Wal-Mart recently set up the Wal-Mart Workers Association and invited workers to join online or by telephone for the non-dues paying, non-union association. Blank said thousands of workers have shown an interest.
A loss after a four-month-long strike in 2004 by the food workers union against major grocers in Southern California convinced Stern that his own union needed to mount an offensive against Wal-Mart.
“It just crystallized to me that a company with this kind of size and power is going to either raise standards or lower standards,” Stern recalled.
Group has multiple names
So Stern established Wal-Mart Watch, an umbrella organization. To workers it is known as the Wal-Mart Workers Association and to community groups and others, whom it also tries to reach, it is known as the Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform.
Much of the thinking behind the effort comes from Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN, a nationwide organization of grass-roots activists, and chief organizer for an SEIU local in New Orleans.
“The notion of collective bargaining as it exists today is not feasible with a workforce of this scale or a company of this kind,” he explained.
With nothing else like it within organized labor in the U.S., Rathke calls the Florida drive a step-by-step experiment. “We are very humble about this task. Certainly the results are tentative and embryonic.”
Rick Smith, a one-time auto-parts worker from Toledo and longtime SEIU organizer who heads the Tampa-based effort, says Wal-Mart workers often are baffled by the concept.
There’s no talk of a union election or contract. Monthly dues are $5, which only some of the 300 Wal-Mart workers who have signed up pay regularly. The dues, Rathke says, are more symbolic than anything else.
Though Wal-Mart has thousands of workers in the region from Tampa to Orlando, Smith is not discouraged by the small number of recruits.
“We’ve pretty much proven you can organize the workers,” Smith said as he shepherded showings of the anti-Wal-Mart movie.
Since beginning its work earlier this year, his group has aided Wal-Mart workers, whose hours have been drastically cut by the company, to apply for partial unemployment benefits. It has helped them link up to find baby-sitters and car pools, and learn how to talk up their rights with company managers.
But it hasn’t been easy, as organizers like Mavrick explained. It’s hard reaching workers outside of the stores. It’s hard persuading them to think as a group. And it is hard, they said, getting them to have the self-esteem to feel that they can do better for themselves.
Donna Geierman has no problems in speaking up on behalf of the fledgling association. But Geierman, a 13-year Wal-Mart veteran snarled in a worker’s compensation dispute with the company, says most of her colleagues are too fearful.
“They are living from paycheck to paycheck. And they worry that they can lose their jobs,” she said.
Visiting a group of Wal-Mart workers taking a break outside their store here, the whispered talk between Geierman and a handful of workers was about pressure to work the hours mandated by their bosses.
“If you don’t work their hours, they say `Hit the road,'” a young man told Geierman. But then he stopped, dropped his head and lowered his eyes.
Another worker, not so friendly toward the association, had just taken a seat.
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sfranklin@tribune.com
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Wal-Mart, by the numbers
In the U.S.
1,233
Discount stores
1,914
Supercenters
96
Neighborhood markets
556
Sam’s Clubs
151
Stores in Illinois
Wal-Mart overseas
1,683
Stores
$285.2 billion
Total sales
22.9%
Gross profit
Source: Wal-Mart Inc.
