Walmart Organizing Comes of Age: An Interview With UFCW Organizing Director Pat O'Neill

[Omaha Steve]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12876-walmart-organizing-comes-of-age-an-interview-with-ufcw-organizing-director-pat-oneill

Wednesday, 21 November 2012 09:12 By Amy Dean, Truthout | Interview



Walmart employees and their supporters strike outside of a Walmart store in Pico Rivera, California on Tuesday November 20. (Photo: Aurelio Jose Barbera / UFCW International Union)


United Food and Commercial Workers' Pat O'Neill talks about the difficulty of organizing retail and the new tactics that have been developed, shoppers' support and Walmart workers' extraordinary courage in the rolling actions leading up to Black Friday.

This fall has witnessed a wave of rolling strikes and other employee actions at America's largest private-sector employer: Walmart. The actions, spread across more than a dozen cities, have been the first in the retailer's 50-year history. This week, things are set to get bigger: Walmart associates across the country are now promising pickets, leafleting, and creative flash mobs on and around Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

One of the main groups involved in planning the actions has been OUR Walmart, a labor-community organization for Walmart employees, backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Rather than going through the arduous process of forming a traditional union by signing up majorities in each store, they have developed a more flexible process for employees to get involved early on. Smaller groups can use OUR Walmart to take collective action to advocate for rights and for better conditions. Such advocacy harkens back to the early days of the US labor movement, before the labor laws of the New Deal institutionalized processes for collective bargaining. It may also be a bellwether for future employee action, reflecting an age in which labor law has again failed to catch up with the reality of the American economy.

To get inside insight on the new activism taking place at Walmart, I talked with UFCW Organizing Director Pat O'Neill. We discussed the rolling strikes, the revived use of "minority unions," and why OUR Walmart is not calling for a boycott.

FULL story at link.