Labor: Wal-Mart Coercing Workers to Vote Republican August 15, 2008

In a twist of more appalling conduct from Wal-Mart, the chain is apparently rallying workers through “mandatory meetings”, coaxing them to vote Republican this November, for fear that the Democratic candidate would make it easier for them to unionize:

The AFL-CIO and three other labor-rights groups have asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether Wal-Mart Stores Inc. unlawfully pressured employees to vote against Democrats in November because their party would help workers to unionize.

The groups — which include Change to Win, American Rights at Work and WakeUpWalMart.com — say in a complaint processed on Friday with the FEC that “there is reason to believe” Wal-Mart broke federal election rules by advocating against Democratic candidate Barack Obama in meetings with employees…The labor organizations based their complaint on a report earlier this month from The Wall Street Journal. The report said Wal-Mart held mandatory meetings with store managers and department supervisors to warn that if Democrats prevail this fall, they would likely push through a bill that the company says would hurt workers.

Mandatory meetings. What exactly went on at these meetings is the subject of the FEC investigation, and, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Meanwhile, new details are emerging that show Wal-Mart managers leading the meetings are spreading inaccurate information about the Employee Free Choice Act, according to a digital recording of a Wal-Mart meeting made by a Wal-Mart employee and reviewed by the Journal.

In the hour-and-a-half meeting, held for managers in a Southern state, the leader tells employees that their wages may be reduced to minimum wage for up to three months before a contract is negotiated, that union authorization cards violate workers’ right to privacy by including their Social Security numbers on them and that if a small unit within a store votes to unionize, the entire store will be unionized.

“If you have 10 associates in a photo lab and six sign union authorization cars, now the store is unionized,” the meeting leader told employees. “Six people can make a decision for 350 people,” which is about the average number of workers in a Walmart supercenter.

The official text of the complaint is available from JURIST.

While critics of the Employee Free Choice Act say that the bill will, among other things, force employees into more decisions than it will enable, obviously Wal-Mart is going about this the wrong way. Calling Obama’s election prospect “scary” and making emotional appeals to workers — who, obviously, as the result of the issue of partisan voting being called on at a “mandatory meeting”, are going to make the connection: “my job depends on this” — is, perhaps the most underhanded way of going about this.

Another example of the rising cost of low prices.

Hechsher Tzedek III: A Diss From The OC August 14, 2008

Just had to share this snippet from the Jerusalem Post.

Agriprocessors has apparently been vindicated, and has been shown to be a “state-of-the-art” facility — and not the site of all the horrible labor and immigration violations we had been hearing about as of late — and one rabbi wanted that it should be known who had been making the ruckus, and precisely what the conditions were inside the plant:

NONE OF the press reports have been by reporters who have been inside the plant. One JTA reporter who did visit the plant a few days before us filed a report that reaffirmed what we said. Almost all have based their stories on reports from outside sources - the church and the union which is trying to take over the plant and is being sued by Smith Food for racketeering. In Arizona, a grocery chain that has resisted the union is in court accusing it of defamation, extortion and trespass.

Some leftist Jewish organizations interested in immigration issues have joined the bandwagon. A group of non-Orthodox rabbis wants to create a new rabbinical kashrut certification, based on liberal social values instead of Halacha. Claiming to be motivated by ethics, its approach to the issue has been far from ethical - smear campaigns and demonstrations instead of the Jewish way of exploring the issues objectively and seeking solutions. It has created a battle of Jew vs. Jew, creating a show the media relishes.

First of all, it incenses me to no end when things like paying workers on time — things which are mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch! — become “liberal social values” when the hechsher tzedek comes into play.

I think the burden of proof would be on anyone who would say that the Torah doesn’t want workers to be paid on time in a safe environment — when verses and codified laws say the opposite.

Stacking “Race Cards” August 10, 2008

Newsweek’s Anna Quindlen’s article, “The Caucasian Card” finally says so many things which I believe needed to be said in this election.

Using the term “race card” as a pejorative is almost always meant to promulgate the big lie that takes hold everywhere from the workplace to the classroom: that black men and women commonly use race as a bludgeon and an excuse, and that they will always blame failures or disagreements on racism…

The fallacy at the heart of most discussions of affirmative action is twofold: that it replaced a true meritocracy, and that it means promoting the second-rate. The meritocracy theory requires us to believe that for decades no women and no people of color were as qualified as white men, who essentially had every field locked up.

Belief in the ascendancy of the second-rate requires us to demean the qualifications of countless writers, jurists, doctors, academics and other professionals who gained entry and then performed superlatively. Part of the tacit deal for most of them was not that they be as good as their lackluster white male counterparts, but as good as the best of them.

One hears this type of drivvel constantly — that affirmative action is an obstacle to a color-blind utopian meritocracy where rewards are only based on hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and where, in the words of Martin Luther King, “content of character” is paramount.

It is not affirmative action that stops such a world from taking shape — it is prejudice. Period. As Quindlen says, one does not find the squeaky black wheel getting all the grease from the American populace, on the contrary — most minority members have long ago, perhaps in long gone generations, to simply remain silent so as to not rock the boat:

To hear tell, you would believe that the world is chockablock with minority lawyers, teachers, construction workers and police officers who spend all their time complaining about institutional racism, calling others out on offensive jokes and assumed stereotypes. But most of us encounter the opposite, the silence of people who learned a long time ago that to get along it’s imperative to go along.

In part this is because they’re carrying a load on their shoulders. When one of the white guys blows an account, the office line is that he’s a loser. But when a black guy does it, it means that they—that’s the all-purpose “they,” sometimes used interchangeably with “those people”—don’t seem to be able to close the deal.

Same goes for women, which is one reason the Clinton-Obama rivalry got so pitched during the primaries. Our piece of the pie is small, and often there’s only one fork. When someone like Senator McCain says he’s opposed to quotas, it sounds like country-club code for “We liked the pie the old way.”

One must remember that a black child born after 1975 is the first generation of blacks in his family to be born with full rights equivalent to any other American citizen. Not inhuman property, not 3/5ths of a human, not a human without voting rights, not a human who has to enter buildings through the service entrance — a full human American citizen — a legacy shared by not many, if any, ethnic groups extant in America today.

If people make assumptions about you simply on the basis of your appearance all your life, assumptions ranging from criminality to sloth to unearned opportunity, it can make you bitter and hard and cynical.

As Quindlen says, when examined under the same critical lens, nepotism, fraternity social networks, and many other things which have historically benefitted WASP men have also been guilty of “advancing the second-rate” and standing in the way of true meritocracy.

Should affirmative action be broadened to include class? Most definitely. Poor whites are often more disadvantaged than their inner-city minority counterparts, and certainly more so than Obama’s “privileged” daughters. However, anti-white racism also exists, and addressing this can not be honestly seen as a departure from affirmative action’s “emphasis on race and gender.”

Affirmative action must, in light of the omni-directional prejudices that America is plagued with, continue to exist in some form or another. Perhaps “quotas” aren’t the way to go, perhaps flat base-line numbers of worked hours do more to hurt than help. But something must be there to counteract the pervasive prejudices. There must be some type of trump card to make the racist boss hire the hard working black or Latino man who he referred to as “lazy” the day before. There must be something that, in a company with racist or sexist overtones, turns the “chick with the rack” or the “dirty Arab” or the “cracker redneck” into the “director of operations”.

To deny this is to give carte blanche to prejudice to continue eternally and to have jurisdiction over all hiring practices. This is unacceptable for any country which would like to consider itself as existing in the same era as the rest of the world.