Works In Progress - July 2003 - An Injury To One: On Wal-Mart and the UFCW

Once upon a time in Washington State, an injury to one union injured all union members. In downtown Olympia the Crane Cafe, The Spar, Ben Moore's, the China Clipper, the Olympia Oyster House, the Olympia Hotel, the Governor House, and dozens of other taverns and restaurants proudly displayed the little sign with the antique lettering which swept up from the left, "This is a Union House!" As a boy, I remember when a fry-cook from the Crane Cafe bought a lot out here on the South Bay Road and built a house. I went to South Bay Grade School with his son, Stan. A fry-cook can't do that today because now all of the restaurants pay scab wages. In those days, if a scab restaurant had opened and thrived, that cook might have had to have taken a pay cut. He might not have built his house. Stan and I might never have played ball together.

Union members stuck together back then. The times of mobs storming and sacking union halls, egged on by the business community and backed by lumber barons, still had a galvanizing effect on the rank-and-file. They remembered the pick handles upside their heads, the tarrings and featherings, the lynchings. So loggers, millwrights, carpenters, brewers, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, phone company employees, longshoremen, and other union members would have stayed away from a nonunion joint until such time as it would have gone union. An injury to one injured all.

So Stan and I got to play catch. Herbert Hoover once told a visiting delegate, "We have forty-seven states and The People's Republic of Washington." By that bit of sarcasm, he meant that our state had unionized almost completely - a proposition he did not like. Growing up here, I remember that J.C. Penney's, Miller's (a department store across from Penney's on Capitol Way), Sears and Roebucks, Mottman's (another department store on Capitol Way) and Montgomery Ward's all ran union shops. If they hadn't, my dad, a union carpenter, would never have darkened their doorways.

About the time I had turned six, Safeway opened a unionized store downtown, and soon after, Ralph Storman built his first Thriftway on a cow pasture between Fourt and State streets on the East side. It, too, went union. Now the supermarkets in our area represent the last bastion against slave wages in the over-the-counter sales business in our area. Sears, Penney's, Ross, and the rest lie busted.

Forty years ago, union membership guaranteed a hundred percent medical coverage for most workers. I remember paying for a prescription with a dollar and my union card. We achieved that by sticking together. We even made one of our business agents trade in his brand-new Volkswagen on a new Chevy. Yes, Volkswagen had organized, but their union workers didn't live in America; an injury to one - even to the United Auto Workers clear over in Detroit, three time zones distant - injured us all.

You could call me a throwback to those times. I still believe that true patriotism starts in my wallet and not neccessarily with a flag waving from the aerial of a Toyota pickup. Some people complain about unions. They say unions drive up prices through higher wages and benefits. Mostly, these same people complain about welfare, too. They decry welfare recipients as those who do nothing but raise taxes. But we common mortals find it impossible to live up to their Horatio Alger idea. When receiving the low pay and no benefits a company like Wal-Mart smidgens, it forces us to seek help from the public dole. We may not want to; we have no choice. You either gain assistance from the government, or you live in your car (should you have one). Don't even THINK about trying to raise a couple of children without buoyance.

On Wednesday, the 28th of May, THE OLYMPIAN ran a front-page story on how Wal-Mart intends to sneak into the south end of Lacey with a "Supercenter" which will sell groceries and will employ only scabs. The scabs will get a few cents more than minimum wage. Wal-Mart will offer much lower prices at first, which will result in the closing of at least one of the two union supermarkets on College Street a quarter-mile away. Since the surviving market will have to lay off store clerks, the number of good jobs lost could reach a hundred or more; when I talked to Ruth Underwood of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local 367, she estimated the job toll at around 150 jobs. "Neighborhood small businesses close when Wal-Mart opens a store. Aberdeen [ Washington ] was thriving downtown until Wal-Mart came in, andthe small businesses which had supported families had forever padlocked their doors."

So much for Wal-Mart 'family values.' Barbara Ehrenreich records in her book, Nickel and Dimed - On (Not) Getting by in America, "No one gets paid overtime at Wal-Mart, I'm told, though there's often pressure to work it. Many feel the health insurance isn't worth paying for. There's a lot of frustration over schedules, especially in the case of the evangelical lady who can never get Sunday morning off, no matter how much she pleads. And always there are the gripes about managers: the one who is known for sending new hires home in tears, the one who takes a ruler and knocks everything off what he regards as a messy shelf, so you have to pick it up off the floor and start over."

I find it interesting that the employees have to pay for the optional health insurance out of their scab wages. The Walton Foundation, which Wal-Mart funds, endows enough ultraconservative politically active groups around the country to pay outright all of their employee health-care costs and still have enough left over for a robust pension plan. In our state, for example, they bankroll the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which insidiously attacks - wouldn't you know it - labor laws and labor unions. In particular, they have gane after the Washington Education Association, our foremost stalwart against the advent of voucher-scab schools. Evergreen Freedom Foundation also fights against Washington's prevailing wage law, which forces contractors to pay union scale on state projects. Apparently Evergreen Freedom Foundation wants the freedom to jackhammer the economic foundation of the middle class, thereby setting up a two-tier caste system. (Guess who gets the untouchable end of the stick?)

I don't do well with numbers; Blaine Shervinski does, though. He works for the UFCW as one of their business agents. He ran some numbers by me the other day which all but cured my attention deficit: a grocery clerk earns about $36,000 a year, plus health and welfare benefits amounting to about $8,500 a year, plus vacation pay - which equals more than $2,200, and another $1,100 and change socked into her or his pension plan annually. That adds up to a rather healthful $47,800 in wages and benefits paid out to each journeyman who works a full shift (sans vacation time) for a year. You can't buy a Lincoln Town Car and a time share condo on the Carribean with that kind of money, but you can raise a couple of children, buy a house, send the kids to college, see the doctor when necessary, get a set of false teeth when your teeth go bad, and you can retire on a comfortable nest egg.

Compare that to what a Wal-Mart Associate makes; $17,000 per year, period. A hundred new jobs provided by Wal-Mart nets the community a pretty tidy sum of $1.7 million. Not Bad. But if we lose 150 good paying jobs, a conservative estimate, and we lose that tax base, a whole lot of chuck-holes won't get filled. Schools won't garner enough to supply their music departments with instruments, a big NO to art supplies, ditto on athletic equipment, and an emergency medical call could get re-routed through Timbuktu. In short, if we keep forfeiting jobs to giant scab corporations, we'll end up as a third (or fourth) world country.

The real reason we should oppose that rapacious titan, Wal-mart, however, has less to do with mere money and whether River Ridge's marching band can afford uniforms. The prime motive resides in melancholy. We need not spread it. We already have melancholy in ample supply: a million jobs lost in America each year, 40 to 80 million Americans without health care, more and more of us going homeless every day, a government so fearful of raising taxes on the rich that it waxes increasingly mean-spirited towards the poor. We're stuck with a 'selected' resident of the White House who tells us lies so he can use our children to kill people the world round. Rachel Corrie. Melancholy feelings abound.

If we stand up to Wal-Mart, we can stop them. Gig Harbor did. We can, too. When we "just say no" to the drug of low prices at the expense of our neighbor's happiness, we will win. We should garner our resistance. In such a happy happenstance our little corner of the world will have staved off melancholy and even pushed it back somewhat. An injury to one...