Thursday, June 23, 2011 6:52:07 AM
Wal-Mart's Authoritarian Culture
Mark Pernice
By NELSON LICHTENSTEIN
Published: June 21, 2011
Santa Barbara, Calif.
MONDAY’S Supreme Court decision to block a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart was a huge setback for as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the world’s largest retailer. But the decision has consequences that range far beyond sex discrimination or the viability of class-action suits.
The underlying issue, which the Supreme Court has now ratified, is Wal-Mart’s authoritarian style, by which executives pressure store-level management to squeeze more and more from millions of clerks, stockers and lower-tier managers.
Indeed, the sex discrimination at Wal-Mart that drove the recent suit is the product not merely of managerial bias and prejudice, but also of a corporate culture and business model that sustains it, rooted in the company’s very beginnings.
In the 1950s and ’60s, northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart got its start, was poor, white and rural, in the midst of a wave of agricultural mechanization that generated a huge surplus of unskilled workers. To these men and women, the burgeoning chain of discount stores founded by Sam Walton was a godsend. The men might find dignity managing a store instead of a hardscrabble farm, while their wives and daughters could earn pin money clerking for Mr. Sam, as he was known. “The enthusiasm of Wal-Mart associates toward their jobs is one of the company’s greatest assets,” declared the firm’s 1973 annual report.
A patriarchal ethos was written into the Wal-Mart DNA. “Welcome Assistant Managers and Wives” read a banner at a 1975 meeting for executive trainees. And that corporate culture — “the single most important element in the continued, remarkable success of Wal-Mart,” asserted Don Soderquist, the company’s chief operating officer in the 1990s — was sustained not only by the hypercentralized managerial control that flowed from the Bentonville, Ark., home office but by the evangelical Protestantism that Mr. Soderquist and other executives encouraged.
Wal-Mart attorneys have argued, and the Supreme Court agreed this week, that even if sex discrimination was once part of the company’s culture, it is now ancient history: if any store managers are guilty of bias when it comes to promoting women, they are at odds with corporate policy. Wal-Mart is no longer an Ozark company; it is a cosmopolitan, multinational operation.
But that avoids the more essential point, namely that Wal-Mart views low labor costs and a high degree of workplace flexibility as a signal competitive advantage. It is a militantly anti-union company that has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to current and former employees for violations of state wage and hour laws.
In other words, the patriarchy of old has been reconfigured into a more systematically authoritarian structure, one that deploys a communitarian ethos to sustain a high degree of corporate loyalty even as wages and working conditions are put under continual downward pressure — especially in recent years, as Wal-Mart’s same-store sales have declined. Workers of both sexes pay the price, but women, who constitute more than 70 percent of hourly employees, pay more.
There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.
Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.
For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.
The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.
There used to be a remedy for this sort of managerial authoritarianism: it was called a union, which bargained over not only wages and pensions but also the kind of qualitative issues, including promotion and transfer policies, that have proved so vexing for non-unionized employees at Wal-Mart and other big retailers.
For a time it seemed as if the class-action lawsuit might be a partial substitute. By drastically limiting how a class-action suit can be brought, the Supreme Court leaves millions of service-sector workers with few avenues to escape the grinding work life and limited opportunities that so many now face.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.”
*
Related
Wal-Mart Case Is a Blow for Big Cases and Their Lawyers (June 21, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/business/21class.html
Editorial: Wal-Mart Wins. Workers Lose. (June 21, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/opinion/21tue1.html
*
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/opinion/22Lichtenstein.html
===
Plan to Ease Way for Unions
Labor Board Proposes Speeding Up Organizing Votes; Employers, GOP Cry Foul
By MELANIE TROTTMAN And KRIS MAHER
JUNE 22, 2011
The National Labor Relations Board Tuesday proposed the most sweeping changes to the federal rules governing union organizing elections since 1947, giving a boost to unions that have long called for the agency to give employers less time to fight representation votes.
The NLRB's proposals would likely compress the time between a formal call for a vote by workers on whether to join a union, and the election itself. It is the latest in a series of actions by the board and other agencies controlled by Obama administration appointees that respond to labor leaders' calls for more union friendly federal labor policies.
The rules governing organizing are the focus of a power struggle between unions and employers after decades of declining union membership. Only 6.9% of private sector workers belonged to unions in 2010, and just 11.9% of all U.S. workers, according to the Labor Department. In 1983, unions represented 20.1% of all workers.
"This is another not so cleverly disguised effort to restrict the ability of employers to express their views during an election campaign," said Randy Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's senior vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits.
Some companies say cutting the lead time before an election would make it harder for them to build a case for opposing a union, because union campaigns often begin months earlier without an employer's knowledge.
Unions praised the proposal, although Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, called the board's step a "modest" one that doesn't address "many of the fundamental problems with our labor laws."
Unions failed during the years when Democrats had control of Congress to win passage of a remake of union organizing rules known as the Employee Free Choice Act. Since Democrats lost control of the House in 2010, union leaders have stepped up pressure on the Obama administration to use its rule-making powers to achieve some of the same goals as the EFCA.
The NLRB said its proposed changes aim to curb unnecessary litigation; streamline procedures before and after elections; and enable the use of electronic communications, such as requiring employers to give union organizers access to electronic files containing workers' addresses and email addresses when available.
Even with more favorable rules, unions could face challenges winning contested elections at a time when even union officials say many workers are more concerned about their own job security. Unions have tried and failed for years to organize workers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and the U.S. operations of big foreign-owned auto makers, among others.
On Friday, the United Food and Commercial Workers union lost an election 85-137 at a Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y. The union immediately accused the company of illegally intimidating workers.
"The team members rejected the union," said Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder. "We are pleased that we are going to be able to work directly with our team members and continue to make Target as great a place as it can be."
"Target believes that we have followed all of the laws and regulations of the National Labor Relations Act," Ms. Snyder added. She said the company "doesn't have anything to share at this point" about the changes proposed by the NLRB.
A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company didn't have a reaction "at this time" to the proposed NLRB rules changes.
The International Association of Machinists and the Association of Flight Attendants lost elections last year involving 50,000 Delta Air Lines Inc. workers. Since then, the National Mediation Board, which oversees elections in the airline industry, opened investigations into allegations that the company unfairly pressured workers to vote against the unions. The NLRB rule changes wouldn't affect the airline industry, whose labor relations are governed by the mediation board.
NLRB Chairman Wilma Liebman, in a statement Tuesday, predicted the proposals would be controversial, and business groups and Republican lawmakers quickly proved her right.
Rep. John Kline (R., Minn.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, urged the board to scrap what he called a reckless and job-destroying agenda.
Brett McMahon, vice president for business development at Miller & Long, a privately held, nonunionized construction company in Bethesda, Md., said the NLRB's proposal "provides a totally unfair advantage to labor and it deprives employees of a full set of information." Mr. McMahon, whose company employs about 1,100 people, said the NLRB proposal, combined with a Labor Department proposal Monday to require employers to disclose more information about labor consultants they hire, is "a two-fold attack" on employers.
Republican lawmakers were already attacking the NLRB for its decision in April to accuse aircraft giant Boeing Co. of illegally building a 787 Dreamliner production line at a new nonunion plant in South Carolina, a state where unions are weak, instead of in Washington state where union employees are already building such planes.
Unions reacted positively to the NLRB's proposal. "At a time when corporations have lawyers and lobbyists speaking for them on Capitol Hill, it's a good thing when a federal agency wants to allow working people to have a say," said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union.
The NLRB's Democratic majority has the votes to adopt the rules. Ms. Liebman said the board would approach the process with "open minds" and has invited public comment. There will be a public meeting on July 18th and 19th about the proposal.
Union organizing efforts often take years. In 2008, the UFCW won an election to organize 5,000 workers at a Smithfield Foods Inc.'s hog-slaughtering plant in Tar Heel, N.C., after a campaign that consumed 15 years. The union lost a 1997 vote, spurring seven years of litigation. In 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the company had threatened workers and ordered it to reinstate four union supporters the court found were illegally fired.
The cost of organizing efforts has led unions to seek fewer votes. Last year, unions won 1,036, or 66%, of 1,571 elections conducted by the NLRB, according to the agency. In 1990, unions called for 3,536 elections and won 1,773, or 50%.
The NLRB said it couldn't calculate how much shorter the time could be between when a union files a petition for an election and the election itself. The median time is now 38 days.
Michael Lotito, a partner in San Francisco at law firm Jackson Lewis LLP who advises employers, said the lead time could be shaved to between 19 and 23 days under the proposal.
The power struggle between employers and unions promises to be a factor in the 2012 elections. Unions were significant contributors to President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign and played a crucial role in drumming up votes for him and congressional Democrats.
In the 2010 election cycle, labor unions overall contributed $73.4 million to federal candidates, parties and outside groups, down from $74.55 million in the 2008 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' calculations of the 20 biggest union contributors at the time. In both cycles, at least 90% of the unions' party-related contributions were to Democrats. Unions also spend money on political efforts not directly tied to a candidate.
Unions are heading into the 2012 election cycle facing moves in several states to curtail collective-bargaining rights. Labor leaders have turned to the Obama administration for help, and warned that union members would withhold campaign contributions for Democrats who don't support the union cause.
*
The Union Agenda
Unions were counting on advancing their priorities after the election of President Obama. A scorecard on their progress:
Passage of Employee Free Choice Act to ease union organizing.
Failed in Senate.
Getting former union lawyer Craig Becker on the NLRB.
Accomplished through recess appointment.
Making it easier for airline and railroad workers to unionize.
Approved by the National Mediation Board.
Enabling airport screeners to unionize and collectively bargain.
Authorized by Transportation Security Administration.
*
Write to Melanie Trottman at melanie.trottman@wsj.com and Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com
Copyright ©2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070104576399822234404508.html [with comments]
Mark Pernice
By NELSON LICHTENSTEIN
Published: June 21, 2011
Santa Barbara, Calif.
MONDAY’S Supreme Court decision to block a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart was a huge setback for as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the world’s largest retailer. But the decision has consequences that range far beyond sex discrimination or the viability of class-action suits.
The underlying issue, which the Supreme Court has now ratified, is Wal-Mart’s authoritarian style, by which executives pressure store-level management to squeeze more and more from millions of clerks, stockers and lower-tier managers.
Indeed, the sex discrimination at Wal-Mart that drove the recent suit is the product not merely of managerial bias and prejudice, but also of a corporate culture and business model that sustains it, rooted in the company’s very beginnings.
In the 1950s and ’60s, northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart got its start, was poor, white and rural, in the midst of a wave of agricultural mechanization that generated a huge surplus of unskilled workers. To these men and women, the burgeoning chain of discount stores founded by Sam Walton was a godsend. The men might find dignity managing a store instead of a hardscrabble farm, while their wives and daughters could earn pin money clerking for Mr. Sam, as he was known. “The enthusiasm of Wal-Mart associates toward their jobs is one of the company’s greatest assets,” declared the firm’s 1973 annual report.
A patriarchal ethos was written into the Wal-Mart DNA. “Welcome Assistant Managers and Wives” read a banner at a 1975 meeting for executive trainees. And that corporate culture — “the single most important element in the continued, remarkable success of Wal-Mart,” asserted Don Soderquist, the company’s chief operating officer in the 1990s — was sustained not only by the hypercentralized managerial control that flowed from the Bentonville, Ark., home office but by the evangelical Protestantism that Mr. Soderquist and other executives encouraged.
Wal-Mart attorneys have argued, and the Supreme Court agreed this week, that even if sex discrimination was once part of the company’s culture, it is now ancient history: if any store managers are guilty of bias when it comes to promoting women, they are at odds with corporate policy. Wal-Mart is no longer an Ozark company; it is a cosmopolitan, multinational operation.
But that avoids the more essential point, namely that Wal-Mart views low labor costs and a high degree of workplace flexibility as a signal competitive advantage. It is a militantly anti-union company that has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to current and former employees for violations of state wage and hour laws.
In other words, the patriarchy of old has been reconfigured into a more systematically authoritarian structure, one that deploys a communitarian ethos to sustain a high degree of corporate loyalty even as wages and working conditions are put under continual downward pressure — especially in recent years, as Wal-Mart’s same-store sales have declined. Workers of both sexes pay the price, but women, who constitute more than 70 percent of hourly employees, pay more.
There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.
Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.
For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.
The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.
There used to be a remedy for this sort of managerial authoritarianism: it was called a union, which bargained over not only wages and pensions but also the kind of qualitative issues, including promotion and transfer policies, that have proved so vexing for non-unionized employees at Wal-Mart and other big retailers.
For a time it seemed as if the class-action lawsuit might be a partial substitute. By drastically limiting how a class-action suit can be brought, the Supreme Court leaves millions of service-sector workers with few avenues to escape the grinding work life and limited opportunities that so many now face.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.”
*
Related
Wal-Mart Case Is a Blow for Big Cases and Their Lawyers (June 21, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/business/21class.html
Editorial: Wal-Mart Wins. Workers Lose. (June 21, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/opinion/21tue1.html
*
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/opinion/22Lichtenstein.html
===
Plan to Ease Way for Unions
Labor Board Proposes Speeding Up Organizing Votes; Employers, GOP Cry Foul
By MELANIE TROTTMAN And KRIS MAHER
JUNE 22, 2011
The National Labor Relations Board Tuesday proposed the most sweeping changes to the federal rules governing union organizing elections since 1947, giving a boost to unions that have long called for the agency to give employers less time to fight representation votes.
The NLRB's proposals would likely compress the time between a formal call for a vote by workers on whether to join a union, and the election itself. It is the latest in a series of actions by the board and other agencies controlled by Obama administration appointees that respond to labor leaders' calls for more union friendly federal labor policies.
The rules governing organizing are the focus of a power struggle between unions and employers after decades of declining union membership. Only 6.9% of private sector workers belonged to unions in 2010, and just 11.9% of all U.S. workers, according to the Labor Department. In 1983, unions represented 20.1% of all workers.
"This is another not so cleverly disguised effort to restrict the ability of employers to express their views during an election campaign," said Randy Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's senior vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits.
Some companies say cutting the lead time before an election would make it harder for them to build a case for opposing a union, because union campaigns often begin months earlier without an employer's knowledge.
Unions praised the proposal, although Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, called the board's step a "modest" one that doesn't address "many of the fundamental problems with our labor laws."
Unions failed during the years when Democrats had control of Congress to win passage of a remake of union organizing rules known as the Employee Free Choice Act. Since Democrats lost control of the House in 2010, union leaders have stepped up pressure on the Obama administration to use its rule-making powers to achieve some of the same goals as the EFCA.
The NLRB said its proposed changes aim to curb unnecessary litigation; streamline procedures before and after elections; and enable the use of electronic communications, such as requiring employers to give union organizers access to electronic files containing workers' addresses and email addresses when available.
Even with more favorable rules, unions could face challenges winning contested elections at a time when even union officials say many workers are more concerned about their own job security. Unions have tried and failed for years to organize workers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and the U.S. operations of big foreign-owned auto makers, among others.
On Friday, the United Food and Commercial Workers union lost an election 85-137 at a Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y. The union immediately accused the company of illegally intimidating workers.
"The team members rejected the union," said Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder. "We are pleased that we are going to be able to work directly with our team members and continue to make Target as great a place as it can be."
"Target believes that we have followed all of the laws and regulations of the National Labor Relations Act," Ms. Snyder added. She said the company "doesn't have anything to share at this point" about the changes proposed by the NLRB.
A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company didn't have a reaction "at this time" to the proposed NLRB rules changes.
The International Association of Machinists and the Association of Flight Attendants lost elections last year involving 50,000 Delta Air Lines Inc. workers. Since then, the National Mediation Board, which oversees elections in the airline industry, opened investigations into allegations that the company unfairly pressured workers to vote against the unions. The NLRB rule changes wouldn't affect the airline industry, whose labor relations are governed by the mediation board.
NLRB Chairman Wilma Liebman, in a statement Tuesday, predicted the proposals would be controversial, and business groups and Republican lawmakers quickly proved her right.
Rep. John Kline (R., Minn.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, urged the board to scrap what he called a reckless and job-destroying agenda.
Brett McMahon, vice president for business development at Miller & Long, a privately held, nonunionized construction company in Bethesda, Md., said the NLRB's proposal "provides a totally unfair advantage to labor and it deprives employees of a full set of information." Mr. McMahon, whose company employs about 1,100 people, said the NLRB proposal, combined with a Labor Department proposal Monday to require employers to disclose more information about labor consultants they hire, is "a two-fold attack" on employers.
Republican lawmakers were already attacking the NLRB for its decision in April to accuse aircraft giant Boeing Co. of illegally building a 787 Dreamliner production line at a new nonunion plant in South Carolina, a state where unions are weak, instead of in Washington state where union employees are already building such planes.
Unions reacted positively to the NLRB's proposal. "At a time when corporations have lawyers and lobbyists speaking for them on Capitol Hill, it's a good thing when a federal agency wants to allow working people to have a say," said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union.
The NLRB's Democratic majority has the votes to adopt the rules. Ms. Liebman said the board would approach the process with "open minds" and has invited public comment. There will be a public meeting on July 18th and 19th about the proposal.
Union organizing efforts often take years. In 2008, the UFCW won an election to organize 5,000 workers at a Smithfield Foods Inc.'s hog-slaughtering plant in Tar Heel, N.C., after a campaign that consumed 15 years. The union lost a 1997 vote, spurring seven years of litigation. In 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the company had threatened workers and ordered it to reinstate four union supporters the court found were illegally fired.
The cost of organizing efforts has led unions to seek fewer votes. Last year, unions won 1,036, or 66%, of 1,571 elections conducted by the NLRB, according to the agency. In 1990, unions called for 3,536 elections and won 1,773, or 50%.
The NLRB said it couldn't calculate how much shorter the time could be between when a union files a petition for an election and the election itself. The median time is now 38 days.
Michael Lotito, a partner in San Francisco at law firm Jackson Lewis LLP who advises employers, said the lead time could be shaved to between 19 and 23 days under the proposal.
The power struggle between employers and unions promises to be a factor in the 2012 elections. Unions were significant contributors to President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign and played a crucial role in drumming up votes for him and congressional Democrats.
In the 2010 election cycle, labor unions overall contributed $73.4 million to federal candidates, parties and outside groups, down from $74.55 million in the 2008 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' calculations of the 20 biggest union contributors at the time. In both cycles, at least 90% of the unions' party-related contributions were to Democrats. Unions also spend money on political efforts not directly tied to a candidate.
Unions are heading into the 2012 election cycle facing moves in several states to curtail collective-bargaining rights. Labor leaders have turned to the Obama administration for help, and warned that union members would withhold campaign contributions for Democrats who don't support the union cause.
*
The Union Agenda
Unions were counting on advancing their priorities after the election of President Obama. A scorecard on their progress:
Passage of Employee Free Choice Act to ease union organizing.
Failed in Senate.
Getting former union lawyer Craig Becker on the NLRB.
Accomplished through recess appointment.
Making it easier for airline and railroad workers to unionize.
Approved by the National Mediation Board.
Enabling airport screeners to unionize and collectively bargain.
Authorized by Transportation Security Administration.
*
Write to Melanie Trottman at melanie.trottman@wsj.com and Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com
Copyright ©2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070104576399822234404508.html [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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