boycott walmart

[VinBucFan]

"I'd be fine with a government run healthcare system. I'm against not in principle...................."

I've heard R's say this before but they don't  seem to acknowledge the failure of past R administrations to implement a plan to address the issue. Perhaps if they had been a bit more proactive on the matter then perhaps a more palatable plan could have been implemented. It's hard to sympathize w/ a R that agrees in principle but failed to deliver when they held sway.

What's interesting about this is that "Obamacare" is sed Republican plan to address the issue. It's the same plan in principle to the one Bob Dole trotted out to counter "Hillarycare" in the '90's.

hahahahaa .. . . .. .

[JavaRay]

If the US didn't have to spend so much on military, they could afford countrywide health care and companies like Wal Mart wouldn't have to worry about cutting employee hours to avoid having to pay them full time health care benefits.   US Military costs cripple this country.   Hell, the US pays more in pensions to retired military than any other country pays for their entire military.

[Durango 95]

"I'd be fine with a government run healthcare system. I'm against not in principle...................."

I've heard R's say this before but they don't  seem to acknowledge the failure of past R administrations to implement a plan to address the issue. Perhaps if they had been a bit more proactive on the matter then perhaps a more palatable plan could have been implemented. It's hard to sympathize w/ a R that agrees in principle but failed to deliver when they held sway.

What's interesting about this is that "Obamacare" is sed Republican plan to address the issue. It's the same plan in principle to the one Bob Dole trotted out to counter "Hillarycare" in the '90's.

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

[VinBucFan]

"I'd be fine with a government run healthcare system. I'm against not in principle...................."

I've heard R's say this before but they don't  seem to acknowledge the failure of past R administrations to implement a plan to address the issue. Perhaps if they had been a bit more proactive on the matter then perhaps a more palatable plan could have been implemented. It's hard to sympathize w/ a R that agrees in principle but failed to deliver when they held sway.

What's interesting about this is that "Obamacare" is sed Republican plan to address the issue. It's the same plan in principle to the one Bob Dole trotted out to counter "Hillarycare" in the '90's.

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin about "in principle"  This is a good time for me to step out.  Be back in 7 pages . . Go ahead CBW . .  hit it . .

[Durango 95]

"I'd be fine with a government run healthcare system. I'm against not in principle...................."

I've heard R's say this before but they don't  seem to acknowledge the failure of past R administrations to implement a plan to address the issue. Perhaps if they had been a bit more proactive on the matter then perhaps a more palatable plan could have been implemented. It's hard to sympathize w/ a R that agrees in principle but failed to deliver when they held sway.

What's interesting about this is that "Obamacare" is sed Republican plan to address the issue. It's the same plan in principle to the one Bob Dole trotted out to counter "Hillarycare" in the '90's.

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin....

Unlikely, as I generally disregard what you post.

[VinBucFan]

"I'd be fine with a government run healthcare system. I'm against not in principle...................."

I've heard R's say this before but they don't  seem to acknowledge the failure of past R administrations to implement a plan to address the issue. Perhaps if they had been a bit more proactive on the matter then perhaps a more palatable plan could have been implemented. It's hard to sympathize w/ a R that agrees in principle but failed to deliver when they held sway.

What's interesting about this is that "Obamacare" is sed Republican plan to address the issue. It's the same plan in principle to the one Bob Dole trotted out to counter "Hillarycare" in the '90's.

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin....

Unlikely, as I generally disregard what you post.

"generally"   

[CBWx2]

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

Solid point.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin about "in principle"  This is a good time for me to step out.  Be back in 7 pages . . Go ahead CBW . .  hit it . .

No need, Vinny Peanuts. Compare them yourself...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Checking-In-With/Durenberger-1993-gop-bill-q-and-a.aspx

[VinBucFan]

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

Solid point.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin about "in principle"  This is a good time for me to step out.  Be back in 7 pages . . Go ahead CBW . .  hit it . .

No need, Vinny Peanuts. Compare them yourself...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Checking-In-With/Durenberger-1993-gop-bill-q-and-a.aspx

and so the "in principle" spin begins . .  .

[CBWx2]

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

Solid point.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin about "in principle"  This is a good time for me to step out.  Be back in 7 pages . . Go ahead CBW . .  hit it . .

No need, Vinny Peanuts. Compare them yourself...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Checking-In-With/Durenberger-1993-gop-bill-q-and-a.aspx

and so the "in principle" spin begins . .  .

Surrender noted.

[VinBucFan]

Yet nothing was implemented during the intervening 8 years of R reign.

Solid point.

My guess is that you are going to start reading a lot of spin about "in principle"  This is a good time for me to step out.  Be back in 7 pages . . Go ahead CBW . .  hit it . .

No need, Vinny Peanuts. Compare them yourself...

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Checking-In-With/Durenberger-1993-gop-bill-q-and-a.aspx

and so the "in principle" spin begins . .  .

Surrender noted.

page 1 . .  he's off . .

[wreck ship]

Walmart Asks a Judge to Block Historic Strikes
Josh Eidelson on November 19, 2012 - 2:29 PM ET
Weeks into a wave of historic strikes, and days before a planned Black Friday showdown, Walmart has filed a National Labor Relations Board charge alleging that the pickets are illegal and asking for a judge to shut them down. Walmart is no stranger to the NLRB: labor groups have filed numerous charges there accusing the retail giant of punishing or threatening activist workers, including dozens over the past few months. But this charge is the first one filed by the company in a decade. It will pose a decision for a judge and, even sooner, for the Labor Board’s Obama-appointed acting general counsel, who’s been a lightning rod for past Republican attacks.

The National Labor Relations Board, created by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, is tasked with enforcing and interpreting private sector labor law. Walmart’s charge, filed Thursday night and reported by Reuters Friday evening, sets two processes in motion. The first, which could take months, is the full investigation and resolution of the allegation, beginning with fact-finding by board agents based in Walmart’s backyard (NLRB Region 26, which covers Arkansas and three other states). The second, which could advance as soon as this week, is the decision whether to grant an injunction restricting strikes against Walmart while the investigation proceeds. Experts say NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon would have final say over whether the board seeks the injunction; if it does, a district court judge will decide whether to grant it.

Reached over e-mail, Walmart Director of National Media Relations Kory Lundberg said that the company filed the charge in part because “many of our associates have urged us to do something about the UFCW’s latest round of publicity stunts…” In an e-mailed statement, Dallas OUR Walmart member Colby Harris called Walmart’s charge “baseless,” and said, “Walmart is doing everything in its power to attempt to silence our voice.”

While the NLRB is most often criticized by conservatives, its swiftest and strongest remedies are devoted to restricting unions. Federal law requires the NLRB to prioritize employers’ allegations of illegal picketing over other charges, and to request an injunction to stop the picketing if it finds “reasonable cause” to believe such allegations are correct, and expects to issue a complaint (the equivalent of an indictment). So injunctions restricting picketing are often granted within a few days of workers’ going on strike (in contrast, workers who allege they were fired for their union activism often wait for months, injunction-less, to find out whether they’ll get their jobs back). Experts say that, if Walmart has strong enough evidence, an injunction could potentially be issued in time to block Black Friday pickets. But that’s a very big “if.”

Walmart’s charge alleges that the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) union is responsible for illegal “representational” picketing – that is, strikes designed to win union recognition from Walmart. Labor law generally forbids unions from engaging in representational pickets for more than thirty days (the US Supreme Court does not apply the same First Amendment protections to labor picketing as it does to “God Hates Fags” pickets at funerals).

Based on Walmart’s charge, and a cover letter sent to the UFCW, the NLRB faces two main questions. First, has OUR Walmart, the group organizing the Walmart store strikes, been acting as an affiliate or agent of the UFCW? And second, are these in fact representational strikes, as Walmart alleges, rather than strikes protesting “Unfair Labor Practices,” as OUR Walmart claims? On both questions, Walmart says yes; OUR Walmart and the UFCW say no.

On the first question, Marshall Babson, a former NLRB member appointed by President Reagan, predicted that the board would consider factors including whether UFCW was providing OUR Walmart with “monetary support” or “logistical support,” whether there’s been “coordination of efforts,” whether the UFCW has provided “a written set of instructions to picketers, anything like that,” and whether the union offered any “ratification or condonation” of the pickets after the fact. Among other significant ties, The New York Times’s Steven Greenhouse and Stephanie Clifford reported that the UFCW listed OUR Walmart as a “subsidiary organization” on a 2011 filing; the UFCW told the Times that the organization has since “grown and gained independence.”

If Walmart is able to convince the NLRB that OUR Walmart was acting as an agent of UFCW, it would still have to prove that the strikes are illegal. US labor law distinguishes among different kinds of strikes, including “Unfair Labor Practice” strikes, which are motivated by violations of labor law, and “recognitional” strikes, which are designed to pressure a company to recognize a union. ULP strikes have the greatest protection, including a ban on management permanently replacing strikers; recognitional strikes face the greatest restriction, including the thirty-day limit (A secondary issue is how the thirty-day rule applies so far to these strikes, which have been staged at a series of different stores across the country for a day or two at a time).

In statements and media interviews, OUR Walmart members and UFCW officials have consistently named ending retaliation, not winning unionization, as the motivation for their strikes. Asked what evidence Walmart has that the strikes are in fact recognitional, Walmart's Lundberg e-mailed: “The letter to the UFCW spells out the legal aspects of the ongoing ‘recognitional picketing’ that has clearly been happening for more than 30 days and is against the law.” But that letter does not offer any examples of evidence that the workers are engaged in a recognitional strike.

Wilma Liebman, a former Obama-appointed NLRB Chair, said that the NLRB could consider factors including language on signs or leaflets, statements by picketers, communications between organizers and management and internal union memos. Even if some workers are on record saying that they want to unionize, said Liebman, that wouldn’t be enough to show that winning union recognition was the purpose of the strikes.

To prove that the strike is recognitional, said Babson, “There really has to be a demand for recognition from the employer. It’s that simple.” According to Babson, who’s now a management-side labor law attorney for the firm Seyfarth Shaw, “The way many employers deal with this, and this is something you learn in management labor lawyer school 101, is you send somebody out there to the picket line,” ask who’s in charge, and “you say, ‘What do we have to do to get you to go away?’ If they say recognize the union, then that’s it, that’s the end of the inquiry.” But “If they said, ‘We want you to treat us better, we want you to pay wages and benefits that are more comparable with the area standards,’ that’s not recognitional picketing, unless there’s some other evidence.”

Babson also noted that if workers are “vindicated” at the NLRB in their allegations of Unfair Labor Practices, “then that would undercut the basis for arguing that any of that activity” was recognitional.

So will a court shut down the pickets? Babson said simply that Walmart had made “very important and significant allegations, and like everything else, they’ll turn on the quantum and quality of evidence that will be presented.” Others experts were more dubious about Walmart’s chances. “I would be very, very surprised if the board finds any substance” to Walmart’s charge, said John Logan, the director of labor and employment studies for San Francisco State University.

“Do I believe that the UFCW is organizing these actions? Yes,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell’s director of labor education and research. “But are they in violation of the National Labor Relations Act? No. As written, these are not recognitional strikes…. the UFCW is not doing anything illegal.”

Bronfenbrenner called Acting General Counsel Solomon “a very independent person,” and predicted that he would reject Walmart’s allegation of illegal recognitional strikes. If that happens, she said, Republicans may launch an attack on the NLRB similar to the one they mounted over its investigation of the politically connected aerospace giant Boeing last year.

[wreck ship]

Employees of the super company are planning a walkout on one of the biggest shopping days of the year, and that's only the beginning.

In the last few months, an unprecedented wave of labor unrest has shaken the retail giant Wal-Mart and its far-reaching supply chain. While the number of employees taking part in walkouts has been limited to the low hundreds, workers and labor activists are mounting pressure and threatening to stage a company-wide strike on Black Friday—the busiest shopping day of the year.

The Black Friday walkout is being organized by the Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Walmart), a group of Wal-Mart employees formed last year that works closely with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, or UFCW. OUR Walmart, which organized walkouts in October, is pushing for better working conditions, benefits, and an end to alleged retaliation by management.

The Black Friday strike would add yet another chapter to a wave of worker protests across Wal-Mart’s supply chain. It all began in June when a group of immigrant guest workers at a Wal-Mart seafood supplier in Louisiana walked off their jobs. In September, workers at company warehouses in California and Illinois went on strike. The workers in Illinois eventually won back pay. California workers weren’t so lucky—they started striking again last Wednesday. Shortly after those warehouse strikes began, retail workers backed by OUR Walmart started walking out of stores in 12 states.

Wal-Mart is painting the striking employees as a minority that’s unrepresentative of its workforce. “The opinions expressed by this group don’t represent the views of the vast majority of the more than 1.3 million Wal-Mart associates in the U.S,” says Wal-Mart spokesperson Dan Fogleman. “Throughout all of these union-staged events, all of our stores were staffed up and open for business as usual. Likewise, we will be taking care of our customers on Black Friday and are looking forward to helping shoppers get a great start to the holiday shopping season with some great merchandise and our unbeatable prices.”   

Part of why the recent actions are so remarkable is that Wal-Mart is one of the most notoriously anti-union companies in the country. Based in right-to-work Arkansas, the retailer has maintained an almost entirely union-free workforce for most of its existence, even once resorting to shutting down a store in Quebec shortly after a successful union drive there. The company has never before dealt with coordinated labor protest on this scale. “In the past, Wal-Mart would fire people, would threaten people … and that would be enough to stop people in their tracks,” said Dan Schlademan, director of Making Change at Walmart, another organization backed by the UFCW which works closely with OUR Walmart. “The difference now is workers are using Wal-Mart’s own tactics to challenge the company and not backing down. Really, for the first time in Wal-Mart’s history, the tools that are used to keep people silent and under control are now being used against them. That’s significant.”

Indeed, OUR Walmart has framed its strikes and the upcoming Black Friday action as an “unfair labor practice strike”—that is, as a response to the company’s alleged retaliation against employees. Workers have already filed a handful of unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board—the independent federal agency that governs labor relations in the private sector. While Wal-Mart employees aren’t unionized, they’re still covered under the National Labor Relations Act, which protects the right of nonunion workers to go on an unfair labor practice strike without being permanently replaced.

Venanzi Luna, a deli manager at the Wal-Mart in Pico Rivera, California, said she’s witnessed management retaliate against her co-workers. At Luna’s store, where she and some of her co-workers went on strike in October, workers have filed two unfair labor practice charges. “If an associate speaks out, they retaliate by taking their hours, not giving them full-time hours, they write them up, they can ‘coach' them,’” Luna says. “It’s the little things that that they do, whatever they can file, anything for them to retaliate against associates that are either part of OUR Walmart or speak out against [Wal-Mart]. They’ve gotten to the point where they’ve fired associates because of it.”

When asked to address those allegations, Fogleman said that the company has “strict policies prohibiting retaliation.” He adds: “If someone feels they have been retaliated against, we want to know about it, so we can look into it and take the appropriate actions to resolve the situation,” Fogleman says.

OUR Walmart isn’t trying to push for union representation for Wal-Mart workers. The campaign is organizing behind a broad set of demands by building a network of allies and trying to pressure the company. “The fundamental difference is this isn’t a collective-bargaining organization, it’s a rights-based organization. At this point, there’s not a battle for a collective-bargaining agreement, there’s a battle to change the company,” Schlademan said of OUR Walmart. “All the other things that are the heart and soul of the labor movement and of workers’ organizing are there, which is collective action, workers pulling their resources together so they have a bigger voice, and utilizing the public to educate and build power to change the company.” As the organization builds toward a Black Friday strike, OUR Walmart is partnering with the nonprofits Engage Network and Corporate Action Network to spread the message to Wal-Mart workers and potential allies nationwide. Organizers have set up a website where the general public can access a list of picket lines and “sponsor” strikers by making a donation.

Given the size of the company, it seems unlikely that the strikes will affect Wal-Mart’s profits on one of its biggest days of the year. But whatever the participation rate proves to be on Black Friday, Schlademan said that OUR Walmart is in it for the long haul. “It’s gotta start somewhere. … Workers are having enough. You look at the sit-down strike, you look at the civil-rights movement, you look at the women’s rights movement, you look at anything, you look at Occupy, right? It started off with a few people sleeping in a park, and it grew,” Schlademan said. “So this is a process—people are building a movement inside of Wal-Mart, and they’re building a movement outside of Wal-Mart. What was in October was the beginning. What’s gonna happen on Black Friday will be a continuation of that ... and this will just continue to build.”

[wreck ship]

Fox's Fawning Pro-Walmart Segment "Brought To You By Walmart"

Fox News ran a segment sponsored by Walmart that defended that company from workers who are planning a Black Friday strike.
In an interview with a Walmart spokesperson about the planned strike, Fox News' Stuart Varney did not mention the concerns of the company's workers, instead praising the company for "taking on" unions, asking if they planned to fire striking workers, and plugging the company's charitable efforts following Hurricane Sandy. Following the segment, Fox News ran a banner ad explaining that "this program is brought to you by Walmart," followed by an advertisement for the company's Black Friday promotion.

[VinBucFan]

Fox's Fawning Pro-Walmart Segment "Brought To You By Walmart"

Fox News ran a segment sponsored by Walmart that defended that company from workers who are planning a Black Friday strike.
In an interview with a Walmart spokesperson about the planned strike, Fox News' Stuart Varney did not mention the concerns of the company's workers, instead praising the company for "taking on" unions, asking if they planned to fire striking workers, and plugging the company's charitable efforts following Hurricane Sandy. Following the segment, Fox News ran a banner ad explaining that "this program is brought to you by Walmart," followed by an advertisement for the company's Black Friday promotion.

Ooh a 2 for 1 Special.  Evil Fox News and evil Walmart in one post. well done.

[wreck ship]

Fox's Fawning Pro-Walmart Segment "Brought To You By Walmart"

Fox News ran a segment sponsored by Walmart that defended that company from workers who are planning a Black Friday strike.
In an interview with a Walmart spokesperson about the planned strike, Fox News' Stuart Varney did not mention the concerns of the company's workers, instead praising the company for "taking on" unions, asking if they planned to fire striking workers, and plugging the company's charitable efforts following Hurricane Sandy. Following the segment, Fox News ran a banner ad explaining that "this program is brought to you by Walmart," followed by an advertisement for the company's Black Friday promotion.

Ooh a 2 for 1 Special.  Evil Fox News and evil Walmart in one post. well done.

like only walmart can deliver