Workers at Wal-Mart staged a brazen walkout in Florida!

Wal-Mart is one of the world’s most successful companies, banking on lower prices, vast superstores with groceries and all other items, and long hours of operation. They are in stark contrast to IKEA in Sweden who are recently reconsidering how to get more workers. Sweden’s laws tend to protect workers and give them huge benefits. This causes IKEA to create “self-service” exit points, where shoppers themselves pay for and baggage their items. Contrast that with Wal-Mart which employs hundreds of thousands of employees. They even have employees who just stand around and ensure you don’t try to exit the store with stuff you didn’t pay for.

Well, Wal-Mart’s success comes at a cost. Their employees are not unionized like at other businesses. This saves Wal-Mart a ton of money, but as evidenced in this situation in Florida, shows that Wal-Mart is pushing the boundary on saving money into the realm of abusing its employees. Take a look at the situation.

Now, as Wal-Mart rolls out a new round of workplace restrictions, employees at a Wal-Mart Super Center in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., are taking matters into their own hands. On Oct. 16, workers on the morning shift walked out in protest against the new policies and rallied outside the store, shouting “We want justice” and criticizing the company’s recent policies as “inhuman.” Workers said the number of participants was about 200, or nearly all of the people on the shift.

Wal-Mart added some more restrictions to its employees. What kind of restrictions?

Among them were moves to cut the hours of full-time employees from 40 hours a week to 32 hours, along with a corresponding cut in wages, and to compel workers to be available for shifts around the clock.

A full-time worker, in the eyes of Wal-Mart is now a 32 hour-a-week worker. Normally I’d be fine with that. Heck, more time with the family, but the problem is that wage also gets cut down, and they compel employees to be available for all shifts around the clock, regardless of family situations.

the shifts would be decided not by managers, but by a computer at company headquarters. Employees could find themselves working 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. one week and noon to 9 p.m. the next.

In another effort to cut costs, the way schedules would be worked out would be by a computer, and not a manager (who could gauge employees’s situations to structure their working hours respectively). What does a computer know about a family’s schedule?

In addition to scheduling changes and reduction in hours, workers are now required to call an 800 number when they are sick. “If we are at an emergency room and spend the night in a hospital and cannot call the number, they won’t respect that,” says Larosa, who has worked at the store for six years. “It will be counted as an unexcused absence.”

You’ve gotta call some 800 number when you are sick. (After all, if the manager isn’t scheduling, why call him, right?—so….what exactly is the point of having a manager?)

The Wal-Mart spokesman called the reduced hours thing a “mistake.” Hah! Fat chance dude! A company like Wal-Mart does not make a mistake like that! After all, Wal-Mart did hire the person who wrote the memo that raised many concerns about Wal-Mart discriminating against unhealthy workers, as the head of human resources.

Is this the last we will hear about problems with Wal-Mart and the way they treat their employees? I don’t think so. I think it will continue to worsen. Wal-Mart’s power over its employees comes from the fact that it can easily shut down any of its stores if any group wants to unionize. As the article points out:

Is this the first step to forming a union at the store? That’s unlikely, given the fate of previous attempts to unionize store employees. When employees in Jonquière, Que., Canada, voted last year to unionize, Wal-Mart shut the store.

This raises a question, at least from my point of view, about the power of unions. Toyota is another very successful company that does not have unionized employees. However, Toyota pays their employees about the same that GM pays their heavily unionized employees, with similar benefits.

Nonunion auto plants in the South, mainly run by foreign automakers, have been careful to pay workers as well or better than workers in Midwest union factories run by Detroit’s Big Three.

There is a reason why Toyota pays their employees so well. It is so that they don’t unionize! This shows the power of unions though. Toyota cannot shut down its plants with the same ease as Wal-Mart can shut down its stores, so if some of Toyota’s employees want to unionize, they could. But because of the negative stereotyping and heavy burden unions are to employees—and not just businesses—Toyota workers choose to be free of unions, and get paid the same.

Could something like this happen in Wal-Mart? No. Wal-Mart has no competitor that is anywhere close to its strength as Toyota is in the crowded auto market. Wal-Mart can take a loss of a store to send a message to other workers elsewhere that if they attempt to unionize, they’ll lose their jobs and there is nothing they can do about it.

I feel badly for those who work at Wal-Mart, based on what keeps coming out of corporate headquarters, because generally speaking, the workers that get the short end of the stick, that get the lousy hours, that have to phone in to a computer when they are sick are the poor who really can’t find jobs elsewhere.