000382 Wal-Mart Says Illinois Workers Drop Union Vote

Dallas, TX - Wal-Mart Stores, the world's biggest retailer, said a union that recently won the first successful organizing vote at one of its stores had dropped plans for a vote at a second location.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) would not hold the vote among meat department workers at a store in Normal, Illinois, because the “associates”, as they are known in company parlance, had withdrawn their support.

“The only thing that happened was that our associates saw through the empty promises of the union,” said Jessica Moser, spokeswoman for the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company.

At UFCW headquarters in Washington, a spokeswoman said she could not confirm whether UFCW local 536 had withdrawn its petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a union vote.

The NLRB has the power to order a union vote once enough workers have submitted cards asking to be represented by a union.

Wal-Mart said all five of the 10 meat workers who had submitted union cards had written to the NLRB to withdraw the cards again.

The UFCW in February held the first successful union vote in the history of nonunion Wal-Mart, organizing 10 workers in the meat department of a Wal-Mart Supercenter grocery store in the East Texas town of Jacksonville. The NLRB had earlier recognizedWal-Mart's fresh meat departments as separate from the rest of the store workforce and eligible for their own representation.

Another UFCW union vote is scheduled in the meat department of Supercenter in Palestine, Texas, on April 12 and the union has asked the NLRB for a vote in a store in Ocala, Florida.

The 1.4-million member UFCW viewed the Jacksonville vote as a crucial breach in Wal-Mart's long-successful defenses against unions that could pave the way for more union inroads among Wal-Mart's global work force of 910,000. Currently, only a few Canadian employees are unionized because of requirements by regulators there.

Wal-Mart argues it has an “open door” approach to labor relations that makes unions unnecessary.

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