| Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies -- including Wal-Mart. In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized. According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise. The actions by Wal-Mart -- the nation's largest private employer -- reflect a growing concern among big business that a reinvigorated labor movement could reverse years of declining union membership. |
What is losin’ an occasional skyscraper or two compared to that menace, Mr. Bones? I ask thee! Should Samuel Gompers and Walter Reuther rise from the dead and walk among us, sir, how shall militant conservative ideologues and card-carryin’ GOP extremists ever feel safe again?
Black Friday is not entirely unconnected with the Senatorino from Illinois: [1]
| The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states. The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said. |
OF COURSE they were tellin’ Mizz Dumdumb how to vote! What has her lack of I.Q. points to do with it one way or another?
Well, perhaps that is not entirely a rhetorical question. Neocomradess Dumdumb speaks as if she completely failed to notice that her commissars were tellin’ her more than simply how to vote herself. Even makin’ the most liberal (pardon my French) allowances for which corporate employees are to count as petty managers or paramanagerial or quasimanagers, Big Management is outnumbered as hopelessly as ever if only people get to vote and not dollars too. That side of the correlation of farces has scarcely changed in a hundred and fifty years or more. Neocomradess Dumdumb was bein’ solicited to try to get everybody she has the whip hand over to help J. Sidney McCain out at the polls on Tuesday, 2 Dhú l-Qa‘da 1429. [2] Or help him in, rather. Look at the commissarial agitprop, Mr. Bones: "Employees would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation" can not have directed at Mlle. Dumdumb herself, it is plainly what she is supposed to get everybody underneath her to believe, and repeat, and e-mail Congresscritters and fishwrap editors about. [3]
The Jingo reports this story with a refreshing frankness, no doubt on the assumption that it will not be widely read outside OnePercenter circles:
| The United Food and Commercial Workers was successful in organizing only one group of Wal-Mart workers -- a small number of butchers in East Texas in early 2000. Several weeks later, the company phased out butchers in all of its stores and began stocking prepackaged meat. When a store in Canada voted to unionize several years ago, the company closed the store, saying it had been unprofitable for years. Labor has fought back with a campaign to portray Wal-Mart as treating its workers poorly. The UFCW helped employees file a series of complaints about the company's overtime, health-care and other policies with the National Labor Relations Board. Dozens of class-action lawsuits were filed on behalf of workers, many of which are still winding their way through the courts. Wal-Mart has been trying to burnish its reputation by improving its worker benefits and touting its commitment to the environment. |
Ah, the environment! Divide-and-conquer strategy can never come amiss for the core Party of Grant and Hoover. Indeed, Mr. Bones, that is why "The Union makes us strong." Settin’ green minds against blue collars and Hillarious feminists against Obamaniac civilrightists and so forth and so on is probably the first thing that occurs to the mind of the Harvard Victory School MBA when she encounters turbulence.
Fifteen decades of that finagle have still not made the world perfectly safe for Taylorism, however, so we good guys are not going to go extinct next week either. Or next year. Not even if the Commanderissimo Presumptive
be actually installed and coronated.
Concerning J. Sidney, the Jingo says very little:
| Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, opposes the Employee Free Choice Act and voted against it last year. |
If I was an anti-labor jingo, though, I should worry a little bit about my starboard flank. JSM was not brought up to be a Taylorite. True, all PowerPointe®s to some extent think alike, but some is not all. The violence profession’s characteristic notions of Big Management are not identical with those of either the corporate boardroom or the graduate-school seminar room. Dr. Ike’s MIAC diagnosis, the discovery of a "military-industrial-academic complex," was a valuable contribution, no doubt about it, but all the same, anti-unionism makes a great deal more sense in the "industrial" pigeon-hole than in the other two. The cause of Wal-Mart is not -- not instantly or automatically or necessarily, anyway -- the cause of them all. And then thee are to consider further, Mr. Bones, that J. Sidney McCain was not even a mainstream violence pro, he was no better than a flyboy. No different than a flyboy, actually. Even if the holy Homeland’s authentic Jominis and von Clausewitzen see eye-to-eye with Freddy Taylor and the Harvard Victory School when it comes to Organised Labour,[4] that establishes nothing about J. Sidney worth mentioning. Bein’ a dumb Mugwump, JSM might very well betray his nominal neocomrades, for about the thousand and eleventh time!, on an issue like this one. Some of the previous JSM betrayals were, as I recall, along the general line of thinkin’ that Daddy Warbucks Industries LLC was makin’ a hog of itself rather too blatantly.
___
[1] Wherefore we mun singen, Deo gratias!
[2] The former 4 November 2008.
[3] Though the Five of Nine are workin’ on it, they have not yet wound the clock back to when employees can be dismissed for not votin’ right in a legal election, whether an election for POTUS or only for shop stewardess. There is a wink-wink-nod-nod element present here in patches like
| "We feel it's important that our employee partners fully understand the implications that the Employee Free Choice Act could have on their work environment and benefits," said Heather Trainer, a Cintas spokeswoman. |
"Our employee partners" is excellent. That little lady’s heather must be admirably well trained!
Furthemore, " Cintas designs, manufactures and implements corporate identity uniform programs and provides entrance mats, restroom cleaning and supplies, promotional products, first aid and safety products, fire protection services and document management services for approximately 800,000 businesses. Presumably Neocomradess H. Trainer is a practitioner of advanced or peripheral DMS, "document management services." Ballots are after all documents, night wahr? But God knows best.
Meanwhile, Neocomradess Dumdumb might be twice as bright as she is and still be perplexed exactly how to go about doin’ as she was told. Yet naturally the Wall Street Jingo would not bore its valued customers by printin’ a commissarial pep-talk template in full, even if we gratuitously suppose that it possesses such a document to print.
We can only hope, Mr. Bones, that Neocomradess Dumdumb did not take the risk of allowin’ a Jingo journalist to learn her actual identity. She probably needs her job, and would not care to make it an instrument of social experimentation. One cannot even be certain that the slaves of Murdoch would really drop a dime on her, but one can certainly not be sure they would not. If they do turn her in, though, perhaps some colleague of Neocomradess H. Trainer will intervene to advise Wal-Mart not to fire the disloyal ratfink until after the election. Preferably well after it. Ideally, so well after it that the ratfink herself does not make the connection between cause and effect and then rush out lookin’ for more journalists -- or even lawyers, Father Zeus forbid! -- to talk to.
That plan need not entail an impossibly long delay, in light of the shortage of I. Q. points already noted. BGKB.
[4] The Jingo crew and their neocomrades might make a point of always spellin’ "organized labor" like that, so as to insinuate that that whole icky ‘union’ business is alien and effete and worthy of Airstrip One. Or maybe even of Canada! Yet effeteness is not, perhaps, the Big Management Party’s commissars’ agitprop of preference:
| The business-backed lobbying groups are running ads in states where a win by a Democratic Senate candidate would boost support for the legislation in the Senate, saying the loss of secret ballots exposes workers to bullying labor bosses. In one, they use an actor from the "Sopranos" TV series about mob life to hammer home their point. |
(Oh, well, they will definitely not be askin’ this keyboard for advice in any case!)
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