Unions Go Abroad in Fight With Wal-Mart

After years of concerted but futile attempts to organize workers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., union leaders are joining forces to stop the world’s largest employer from exporting its low-wage jobs across the globe.

In Canada, Germany and Japan, unions are using protests, the courts and political pressure to thwart the giant retailer’s expansion.

The effort, one of the most extensive union campaigns in modern labor history, is gathering speed. International labor leaders, meeting in Chicago this week to craft an anti-Wal-Mart campaign, say slowing the retailer is crucial to protecting the wages and living conditions of millions of workers.

Wal-Mart, union officials say, represents all that is wrong with the global economy, including sweatshop abuses and the extinction of mom-and-pop businesses.

“Our emphasis is to get Wal-Mart to abide by the rules,” said Jan Furstenborg, head of the commercial division of Union Network International, a Swiss-based umbrella organization that represents more than 900 skills and services unions around the world. “We want the company to realize they have to change if they want to be part of the global business community.”

Wal-Mart and its supporters argue that the retailer has raised living standards from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Detroit, by delivering jobs and low prices to some of the world’s poorest neighborhoods. The retailer, which draws 138 million shoppers a week to its 5,379 stores and restaurants worldwide, says it pays its workers equal or better wages than its competitors. Last year, Wal-Mart revenue was $285 billion.

Denying that the company was anti-union, Bryan Miller, a Wal-Mart senior vice president, said the retailer preferred to have “a direct relationship with our associates” without the involvement of a third party. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people around the world, the majority of whom are nonunion workers in North America.

Labor experts say union leaders face an uphill task, given Wal-Mart’s deep pockets, its broad support and a disagreement within the labor movement over how to confront the challenges of free trade.

They cite Canada, where unions remain a powerful presence, as an example. In 2003, 32.4% of the Canadian workers were unionized, compared with 14.3% in the U.S., according to Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank.

But labor’s defiance hasn’t slowed Wal-Mart’s march across Canada, where it now controls 52% of the retail market and has been named in a national survey as the country’s best retail employer for two consecutive years. More than 100 communities across the nation have lobbied the retailer to open stores in their neighborhoods, the company said.

“They’ve really totally shaken up the whole of Canadian retailing,” said Richard Talbot, a Toronto retail consultant. “Everybody else is playing catch-up.”

At a time of stagnant wages and rising costs, it isn’t easy to persuade people, even union members, to give up Wal-Mart’s low prices. Fighting that battle is particularly hard in sparsely populated Canada, where people drive hundreds of miles across the prairie to buy groceries.

At this year’s Saskatchewan Labor Federation School, workers’ voices started quietly, gaining strength with each chorus of “Union Maid,” Woody Guthrie’s ode to the working class.

“Let’s make sure all the women and men of Wal-Mart can hear us,” yelled an employee of a retail cooperative.

The 140 students at the training school had one target in mind: the Bentonville, Ark.-based retail giant. In two nearby towns, the local United Food and Commercial Worker’s Union was engaged in a contentious organizing drive. Union leaders knew they were taking on a formidable foe: In Quebec, Wal-Mart closed a store after its nearly 200 employees voted to unionize. The retailer said the store was unprofitable.

But in opening remarks, Paul Meinema, the UFCW’s chief organizer in Saskatchewan, urged the audience to assess the real costs of succumbing to Wal-Mart’s “everyday low prices.”

“Is the price of whatever you’re buying at Wal-Mart worth the price of a person starving to death or worth the price of an associate being abused?” he asked, imploring them to talk to their family and friends.

Wal-Mart has gone to great lengths to keep its North American facilities free of unions. After butchers at a store in Texas voted to unionize in 2000, the company switched to pre-packaged meat. Unions have filed dozens of complaints against Wal-Mart, a number of which have been upheld by regional or federal labor authorities.

With growth slowing in the United States, Wal-Mart needs to squeeze more from the rest of the world. The company hopes to increase international sales from 20% to one-third of its revenue within five years.

Wal-Mart’s foreign division includes more than 1,500 facilities in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Britain. Wal-Mart also owns a 42% interest in Seiyu Ltd., a Japanese retailer.

This year, Wal-Mart plans to open as many as 165 stores in foreign countries.

The same forces that make it possible for Wal-Mart to export its big-box retailing to rural China pose a threat to organized labor. Open borders and new technology have made it easier for firms to seek out places with lower wages and less-restrictive work rules. That has accelerated the shift in developed economies from heavily unionized, higher-paying manufacturing jobs to lower-paying, less-secure service sector jobs.

These challenges brought Union Network International officials and other unions to Chicago this week, looking for ways to spread their anti-Wal-Mart message, identify new regions such as South Korea for organizing, and devise strategies to put pressure on the U.S. retailer.

Building that global campaign got more complicated last month when the UFCW joined three other unions that split from the AFL-CIO. But Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and a leader of the breakaway group, insists that the U.S. labor movement is united in its bid to defeat Wal-Mart.

“We’re exporting good American jobs chasing low wages and low benefits,” he said. “We’re exporting a model that says, ‘We don’t care at all what your countries’ standards and benefits are, we’re going to change that.’ ”

Inspired by U.S. unions, foreign labor groups are forging coalitions with community activists and environmentalists to spread their anti-Wal-Mart message. Union members helped persuade officials in Vancouver and Campbell River, Canada, to turn down permits for two Wal-Mart stores in July.

After reports surfaced that Wal-Mart might be buying a Turkish retailer in Russia last year, Alan Spaulding, international director for the UFCW in Washington, hopped on a plane to Moscow to mobilize labor leaders. He has paid similar visits to Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

When Wal-Mart put India on its expansion list this year, Union Network International sent a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressing concern that Wal-Mart’s “uncontrolled entry” into the long-protected retail market could spark a globalization backlash among small businesses displaced by the retailer.

“We want to arrive before Wal-Mart arrives,” Spaulding said.

Wal-Mart insists that the union campaign has not had a significant effect on the company’s image -- or its bottom line. But over the last year, Chief Executive H. Lee Scott has promoted his company’s side of the story more aggressively. He recently visited Brussels, headquarters of the European Union agency that monitors anti-competition policies. And when the Indian prime minister was in Washington in July, Scott was on his schedule for a “get acquainted meeting.”

Steve Spiwak, an economist with Retail Forward, said Wal-Mart had learned that it needed to “grease the process” to succeed abroad. And though he is skeptical that the retailer will budge on its union stance, he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the company ends up boosting wages or taking other steps to fend off criticism.

“One thing about Wal-Mart, it is a learning organization,” he said. “They rarely make the same mistake twice.”

Wal-Mart insists it is not trying to impose a U.S. blueprint on other countries or cultures, saying it leaves management of foreign operations in the hands of locals and adheres to local laws.

In all its foreign markets, except Puerto Rico and China, Wal-Mart has invested in retail operations that were unionized and has continued those relationships, according to the company.

In China, Wal-Mart has agreed to let the government-sanctioned trade union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, into its operations. So far, none of its staff has requested representation by the union, according to the company. Labor experts said that was not surprising because the ACFTU operates as an arm of the Communist government and was not viewed as a reliable advocate for workers.

Miller said Wal-Mart had developed “great relationships” with workers’ groups in countries such as Japan, where unions have traditionally worked closely with management. Atsushi Yoshioka, chairman of the Seiyu Workers Union, agreed that Wal-Mart had improved working conditions, cracking down on unpaid overtime and encouraging employee feedback.

But when Wal-Mart made a play this year to buy another Japanese retailer, Daiei Inc., the union there opposed the purchase. A government agency awarded Daiei to another bidder.

In Germany and Britain, where unions have been involved in legal fights with local Wal-Mart subsidiaries in the last year, the battle lines have been drawn.

“The perception is that Wal-Mart is very much a predator,” said Harry Donaldson, an official with Britain’s GMB, a union that represents employees at Wal-Mart’s ASDA chain.

Naoko Nishiwaki in The Times’ Tokyo bureau, Christian Retzlaff in The Times’ Berlin bureau, and Sergei L. Loiko in The Times’ Moscow bureau contributed to this report.