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Wal-Mart's Continued Assault on the Rights of Workers

by David Doorey October 17, 2008
written by David Doorey October 17, 2008

Wal-Mart’s continued campaign of punishing workers who exercise their fundamental and constitutional right to join a union has raised its ugly head yet again.  This time, Wal-Mart has announced it is closing the garage shop where 9 employees in Quebec joined a union and were awarded a collective agreement settlement that included a raise from $9.25 per hour to $15.94 per hour over a couple of years.  We discussed how that collective agreement came about  in an earlier entry.  Wal-Mart says it is offering the workers jobs at other stores, but those jobs will be at the much lower, non-union rate.  And the message of Wal-Mart remains very clear to those, and all other employees:  join a union, and we will close the store, so in fact you have no effective right to collective bargaining here.  
Wal-Mart claimed that if it had to comply with the collective agreement, prices would need to be raised by 30%.  This is nonsense, of course, since Wal-Mart earns profits in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.   It could easily absorb a wage increase for 9 employees at one store without passing on that expense to consumers.   Expect a new unfair labour practice complaint to be filed by the UFCW challenging whether it is illegal to close a part of a store to avoid complying with the collective agreement.   That case would raise some similar arguments to those already on their way to Supreme Court relating to the last time Wal-Mart closed a store and fired all of  its unionized employees in Quebec.

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David Doorey

Professor Doorey is an Associate Professor of Work Law and Industrial Relations at York University. He is Academic Director of Osgoode Hall Law School’s executive LLM Program in Labour and Employment Law and a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. Professor Doorey is a graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School (LL.B., Ph.D), London School of Economics (LLM Labour Law), and the University of Toronto (B.A., M.I.R.).

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Clear #Charter violation. Yet the exclusions persist.

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