The Bully of Bentonville

by Anthony Bianco

  For Lavoie, the last straw came when she and her best friend, a part-time cashier supervisor named Joanne Desbiens, were both turned down for promotions on the same autumn day in 2003. “Joanne came over to my place and she was really crying,” Lavoie recalls. “I was a little harder than her; I didn’t take it so badly. I just looked at her and said, ‘Well, Joanne, I have nothing else to lose.’”

  The first approach to the United Food and Commerical Workers already had been made in late 2002 by three of the store’s minority of male workers, one of whom had promptly quit in anger and frustration. However, it wasn’t until Lavoie and Desbiens signed on that the organizing campaign gained traction, says Herman Dellaire, an organizer for UFCW Local 503 in Québec City. “The difference was that they were cashiers, which is a big department in the store, and much more popular with their co-workers,” Dellaire says. “They also had very strong personalities and were not afraid of the store managers.” 3

  Local 503 had a strong personality of its own—its president, Marie-Josée Lemieux, who in 1999 became the first woman to head a UFCW local in all of Canada. Lemieux, who was almost exactly Lavoie’s age, was a ferociously energetic idealist who made something of a personal crusade out of the Jonquière campaign.

  In Québec, unlike the United States, a store can be unionized without an employee election. If a majority of the hourly workers sign union cards, and if those signatures then are certified by the provincial government, the law requires management to sit down with union representatives and negotiate a collective-bargaining agreement. If no agreement is reached, a government-appointed arbitrator can impose a contract. In Québec, the process moves along with an alacrity that tends to blunt the sort of anti-union tactics Wal-Mart puts to such effective use in the United States. In fact, if the necessary number of signatures can be collected covertly, a store can be unionized before management even knows an organizing drive is under way.

  Lemieux and Dellaire kept their distance while Lavoie, Desbiens, and a handful of helpers began meeting outside of work with colleagues they knew to be dissatisfied. Discretion was essential, for they knew that there were a few workers who either truly liked their jobs without benefit of a union or were so fearful of losing them that they would oppose unionization. Of the store’s 190 employees, 45 were salaried managers, leaving 145 workers in the prospective bargaining unit. Organizers had collected only about 25 of the 73 signatures needed when a co-worker ratted them out to management. The next morning, Lavoie was summoned to the office and handed several of the pink slips cashiers get when their daily accounts don’t balance. “After that, they called me in every day to reprimand me for things that were not happening,” says Lavoie, who’d never before received a single pink slip. “They followed me absolutely everywhere. They would not let me be.”

  Lavoie persisted even so, and the store was riven into bitterly opposed camps as management began holding the usual mandatory anti-union meetings and issuing dire warnings about the future of the store. Complaints of intimidation and harassment cut both ways, as pro-company employees told of organizers pestering them at home at all hours. “[Employees] signed the cards just to get some peace,” says Noella Langlois, a clerk in apparel. “They thought they would vote against it in a secret vote.” 4

  The UFCW fell one signature short of the required number for automatic certification and decided to take its chances by petitioning for a secret vote in April 2004. The move backfired, as the union was voted down 53 percent to 47 percent. A group of assistant managers and department managers gathered just outside the front door to celebrate for the TV cameras and to taunt union supporters as they left the store. Many workers who’d voted against the union were so appalled by this spectacle that they switched sides. After the required three-month cooling-off period expired, Lavoie and her allies started over and collected a surfeit of signatures so quickly that this second campaign succeeded before management even realized that it was afoot.

  The Jonquière store was automatically certified as a UFCW shop in August 2004, giving a big boost to the union’s organizing campaigns in two dozen other Wal-Mart stores across Canada. Two months later, just as the UFCW and Wal-Mart representatives were preparing to begin the mandatory contract negotiations, Wal-Mart Canada issued an ominous press release from its headquarters in Mississauga, near Toronto. “The Jonquière store is not meeting its business plan,” it declared, “and the company is concerned about the economic viability of the store.” 5

  Nine days of negotiation between the UFCW and Wal-Mart produced nothing but acrimony. “When we got to working hours and schedule, it was never, never, and never,” recalls André Dumas, now the acting president of UFCW Local 503 in Québec City. Honoring the union’s demands would have meant adding thirty workers to the payroll, retorts Andrew Pelletier, Wal-Mart Canada’s chief spokesman. “We felt the union wanted to fundamentally change the store’s business model.” 6

  The UFCW and the company were glaring at each other from opposite corners of the ring when a Wal-Mart store in Sainte-Hyacinthe unionized in January 2005. This had to be all the more worrisome to Wal-Mart because Sainte-Hyacinthe, a prosperous agricultural center an hour east of Montreal, was no Saguenay-style union redoubt. Louis Bolduc, the UFCW’s Québec president, could not resist taunting Wal-Mart at a press conference announcing its latest triumph. “We hope the employer isn’t going to tell us that all of a sudden Sainte-Hyacinthe is struggling financially,” Bolduc said. 7

  Lavoie and Desbiens were playing bingo on Feburary 9 when a reporter called for comment on Wal-Mart’s announcement that it was closing in Jonquière. They were too stunned to manage a response more coherent than What are you talking about!? It had never occurred to either woman that Wal-Mart would go so far as to shut down a store that seemed to be busy all the time. Lavoie began frantically calling friends currently on duty but learned nothing useful. “They were all crying,” she says.

  The tears flowed again when Lemieux died in her sleep of a heart attack a month later. Lemieux, who was just forty years old upon her death, had been complaining of chest pains ever since Wal-Mart announced the shut-down in Jonquière.

  Wal-Mart’s draconian response to the Jonquière unionists scandalized all Québec. Three of its other forty-six stores in the province were temporarily closed by bomb threats. Bernard Landry, a prominent separatist leader and a former premier of the province, urged Québecois to join him in boycotting Wal-Mart. Newspaper columnists turned the company’s name into a scatological pun: “Wal-Marde.” A TV broadcaster likened Wal-Mart to Nazi Germany and then apologized, just as Wal-Mart had in Arizona. Jean Tremblay, the feisty, populist mayor of Saguenay, gave media interviews by the dozen denouncing the company as a freebooting scofflaw. “Because you are big and rich and strong, you can close a store to make your workers in other stores afraid? No!” Trombley said. “If you want to do business in Québec—or in Russia or in China—you have to follow the law. And you have to respect the culture.” 8

  From his office in Ontario, Pelletier repeatedly insisted that the reasons Wal-Mart gave up on Jonquière were purely financial and had nothing to do with stifling unionism. The store “has struggled from the beginning,” the spokesman said. “The situation has continued to deteriorate since the union.” 9 In Bentonville, Lee Scott seconded Pelletier’s comments. “You can’t take a store that is struggling anyway and add a bunch of people and a bunch of work rules,” Scott declared. 10

  To which the people of Canada responded pretty much as one: “Liars.” A national survey by Pollara Inc., Canada’s largest polling organization, found that only 9 percent of Canadians believed that Wal-Mart closed the store in Jonquière because it was struggling financially. In the opinion of nine of ten Canadians, it was all about the union. Some 31 percent of those queried said that they would either do less shopping at its stores or stop going to them altogether—a figure that rose to 44 percent among Québecois. 11 In another survey taken six months after the Jonquière
pullout, Québecois ranked Wal-Mart eleventh out of twelve retail chains when it comes to meeting their needs and expectations. Only Starbucks did worse. 12

  The harsh treatment Wal-Mart meted out in Jonquière did indeed seem to intimidate its workers elsewhere, reversing the UFCW’s organizing momentum. Workers at stores in Brossard, near Montreal, and in Windsor, Ontario, voted against unionization by 74 percent and 75 percent, respectively. In earlier elections in these same stores, Wal-Mart had prevailed with just a 55 percent margin. However, the UFCW pressed on and succeeded late in 2005 in unionizing two Wal-Mart tire-and-lube shops in Gatineau, Québec, and a third in British Columbia. Meanwhile, the contract negotiations in Sainte-Hyacinthe progressively backed Wal-Mart into a corner. Unless the company can break the pro-union resolve of employees, it will face a no-win choice between having a collective bargaining agreement forced on it by the provincial government or closing a second Québec store.

  What is a growth-loving, union-hating multinational to do? For a start, Wal-Mart has been trying to rehabilitate its sullied image in the province by stepping up its advertising and softening its public relations. Wal-Mart Canada finally opened an office in Montreal, thus belatedly outsourcing PR responsibility for Québec to French-speaking natives. The Jonquière backlash undoubtedly has hurt Wal-Mart at the cash register, though not nearly to the extent implied by the Pollara poll. The allure of cut-rate prices and convenient locations is not easily resisted, even by tough-talking Québecois, who, in the famous phrase of humorist Yvon Deschamps, are “socialists at heart and capitalists in the wallet.”

  On the other hand, if Wal-Mart were to close down in Sainte-Hyacinthe as it did in Jonquière, the company might well suffer a public relations and political meltdown that could threaten the viability of its remaining forty-five Québec stores. “They will close all the stores in Québec,” predicts Sylvie Lavoie. “The list will be long, because if they close Sainte-Hyacinthe, the boycott will be long, as well.”

  In Jonquière today, hatred of Wal-Mart coexists with resentment of the UFCW. Carol Neron, a local newspaper columnist, is convinced that the union leaders in Washington, D.C., were aware that Wal-Mart never would have allowed a unionized store to survive, but were only looking for a way to incite public opinion against the company by provoking it into the very action it took in Jonquière. “Many people, myself included, think that our people have been used as cannon fodder,” Neron says. 13

  Meanwhile, many local business owners would gladly exchange Jonquière’s newfound international notoriety for the obscurity of the pre–Wal-Mart days. André Poulin, who owns a business that supplies high-tech maintenance services to aluminum manufacturers around the world, says that wherever he goes his clients ask him about the UFCW’s showdown with Wal-Mart in Jonquière. “In the aluminum business, I know companies that would get a 40 percent tax deduction if they would come here, but now they are not interested,” Poulin says. “I don’t have any problem with unionizing Wal-Mart, but why did we have to be the first one—the guinea pig?” 14

  In the fall of 2005, the Québec Labor Relations board ruled in favor of the seventy-nine Jonquière workers who had filed complaints that Wal-Mart had illegally dismissed them for pro-union activities. Under the law, the Québec authorities could force Wal-Mart to rehire the employees it fired, but they are more likely to fine the company. Pelletier says that he was surprised by the adverse ruling. “Anybody connected to Jonquière knows how hard we tried to save the store,” he says, adding that Wal-Mart probably will appeal once the board issues a final ruling. 15

  For Lavoie and her allies, the labor board’s ruling was bittersweet vindication. Even so, finger-pointing and second-guessing persist within the ranks of Jonquière’s former Wal-Mart employees. Not long ago, Lavoie’s ten-year-old daughter came home crying from school after she had been harangued by the child of a former Wal-Mart manager. A hero to some and a villain to others, Lavoie insists that the injustice of Wal-Mart’s labor practices left her no choice but to fight. “Je ne regrette pas,” she says. “I regret nothing.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHERE WOULD JESUS SHOP?

  Drive along Queens Boulevard through the heart of the New York City borough of Queens to the neighborhoods of Rego Park and Elmhurst, and you will see one of the most densely developed—and lucrative—shopping districts in America. In addition to a hodgepodge of commercial development, two large shopping malls flank the spot where the road dips beneath the Long Island Expressway; one of them, Queens Center mall, is among the most profitable in America. In the span of a single mile along the six lanes of Queens Boulevard are many of the best-known names in retailing: Macy’s, J. C. Penney, Sears, Marshall’s, Gap, Limited, Disney, Old Navy, Circuit City, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. It is safe to say that Rego Park is not hostile to shopping or to chain stores.

  But when word leaked out in late 2004 that the biggest retailer of them all, Wal-Mart, was negotiating to open a store in a new shopping complex being planned for open space between the two existing malls, the reaction was swift, visceral, and negative. It could be summed up with the name of one of several grassroots groups that sprung up to oppose the big-box bully’s designs on New York: Wal-Mart No Way.

  While Wal-Mart had distantly ringed New York City with stores over recent years, its store in Rego Park was to be the first one located within the nation’s biggest metropolitan area. For a company that was born in the Ozarks and that grew big by opening stores in underserved, poor, rural communities, New York represents the climactic prize in its conquest of America. What Wal-Mart did not know—or at least did not fully appreciate—was that so many locals would be appalled by its designs on New York. The opposition to the Rego Park store (and, later, to rumored Wal-Mart projects proposed for other boroughs) was not rooted in concerns about traffic congestion or noise, but in ethics and personal values. “Wal-Mart discriminates against women and destroys good jobs, and it would take away business from local businesses,” said one New Yorker, Lupita Gonzalez, summing up the feelings of many. “I don’t want it here.” 1

  Within weeks, many city council members and congressional representatives had joined the chorus of opposition, criticizing Wal-Mart for its many well-documented transgressions against progressivism—poverty-level wages, unaffordable health insurance, off-the-clock work, union-busting, child-labor law violations, punitive firings, and demotions. “We are not against Wal-Mart because it is big,” said Anthony D. Weiner, a New York congressman who at the time was running in the Democratic primary for mayor. “We are against Wal-Mart because it is a bad neighbor on many levels.” 2

  Less than three months after news of Wal-Mart’s plan for Queens had leaked out, the plan was dead. The mall’s developer, the Vornado Trust, concluded that the flak it was taking for Wal-Mart could endanger its entire Rego Park development, which included a pair of twenty-five-story apartment buildings as well as the mall. It said Wal-Mart was no longer part of the deal.

  Wal-Mart, which has not lost many development battles, remains determined to have its way in New York. “We’d still be a large, successful company without being in New York, but there are customers there who need to be served,” Lee Scott declared not long after the Rego Park defeat. “I think New York will be good for us and we’ll be good for New York.” And make no mistake, Scott added, “We will be in New York.” 3

  Wal-Mart must attract more educated, upscale customers who don’t live paycheck to paycheck if it is to meet the ambitious growth goals it has set for itself. But as it pursues new customers, extending its reach further into more affluent parts of North America, Wal-Mart is finding that its reputation precedes it—and that its reputation is a hindrance. As it seeks to open new stores, Wal-Mart is running into mounting opposition from local residents, including many potential customers, who look beyond its “Every Day Low Prices” sloganeering to see how it delivers those prices. Many of these consumers end up concluding that they cannot in good conscience stand idly by while
another Wal-Mart opens in their community. In the words of Peter McKeever, an alderman in Madison, Wisconsin: “This is a business that is not consistent with our values.” 4

  In Guelph, Ontario, a city of 100,000 some sixty miles from Toronto, the Jesuit Fathers of Upper Canada opposed the company in a particularly spirited—and spiritual—battle over Wal-Mart’s insistence on building a 135,000-square-foot store on a plot of land sandwiched between the Jesuit Centre and two cemeteries. The Jesuits’ primary objection was that noise and traffic created by a Wal-Mart would be “incompatible with the peace and serenity people expect at Woodlawn and Marymount cemeteries; and also with the quiet solitude that draws retreatants seeking an encounter with God in prayer at the Jesuit Centre.” Where would Jesus shop? Not right next door. In testifying at a public hearing, the Jesuit Centre’s director, Reverend James W. Profit, added a ringing denunciation of rampant materialism as epitomized by Wal-Mart. “Consumerism masks the need we all have to turn inward to encounter God immanent at our core,” he said. “The big box spirituality defining meaning and value in possessions is incompatible with the Jesuit spirituality defining meaning and value in seeking the Divine in all things.” 5

  Wal-Mart’s Canadian communications chief, Andrew Pelletier, knew better than to engage a learned Jesuit in theological debate. “I apologize if we appear to be a little gun shy,” he said. “How are we going to win the debate in the news media: the Jesuits versus the world’s largest retailer? You’re all going to call us Goliath.” 6

  Wal-Mart refused to consider another building site in Guelph, even after the city council voted down the zoning change needed near the Jesuit Centre. True to form, the company persisted in its lobbying and gradually outmaneuvered the Jesuits. The election of a vehemently pro–Wal-Mart mayor tipped the balance in its favor in 2003 and the city council reversed itself the following year and rezoned the site. In desperation, the Jesuits and their supporters tried to concoct a court appeal around a novel notion: In building a store so close to the Ignatius Jesuit Centre, Wal-Mart would infringe on the order’s freedom of religion as protected under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The argument failed to gain legal traction, making a Wal-Mart groundbreaking in Guelph likely sometime in 2006.