The workers in that article don't work for Walmart. They work for a distribution center owned and operated by another company. The article names Walmart to score points. On the Union thing..........if the claims are true then I am not sure why a union would be needed, the acts are illegal so all the workers have to do is file a claim.
Union Caterpillar workers in Canada lose jobs to....the US! http://teapartyeconomist.com/2012/03/05/jobs-move-to-the-usa/
Good for them. Now if the rest of the company would follow suit they wouldn't be in these messes again. Forcing supervision to falsify timesheets is totally fucked up. Walmart is known for these types of bullshit antics. They've pulled all types of illegal crap throughout the years. When the Waltons were no longer involved the company turned into a bunch of crooked suits. When the Walton children finished school and got back into the fold things turned around a little but the the company still gets into a lot of illegal policies.
Even piece work requires that minimum wage be met. If it's based on quotas then the quotas have to be set that minimum wage is met.
Legal US citizens already have ways they can go about addressing their issues. I'm going to guess here that those being discussed in the article aren't legal - wouldn't those warehouses being part of the teamsters actually screw them more?
True but why do you think Walmart uses contractors? Walmart got sued several years back over the use of illegals in their stores. They were contractors too. Just because you contract doesn't always relieve you of the responsibilities if you have knowledge of what's happening. Good points on the union thing but when you don't have a union(or lawyers in this case) to back you up then you tend to get fired for making waves(filing claims), that's why they continue to pull that shit. Yeah yeah, that type of firing is illegal but I live in reality and know how those things go down. You need something... strength in numbers. That can be numbers of employees or number of lawyers with money.
Don't forget the "Bubble" times either. I'm old enough to have been through a few of them. It wasn't that long ago that places like McDonald;s and Burger King needed to offer $10-12 per hour just to get people to apply for a job in their NH locations. Now that the economy has tanked, they're back to pretty much minimum wage. It's a supply demand thing here. Companies that are in tune with trends are only going to pay what the market demands. Late '80's and early '90's when I needed to hire as few as 6 employee's I'd have to rent an event room at a hotel to handle all the applicants. Late '90's to mid '06 I had a hard time getting people to apply at the "Fed Wage Determination" which was way above the published "Average Area/Demographic Wage". Hell, even when one of our locations went union, we had a hard time getting people to apply for a job at the union negotiated scale.
Contractors, yes. However, they were working on Wally property. Ultimately, your responsible for thing that be a hapnin' on your property.
Come on Sean, you and I both live in the real world. They have ways but those ways can still get you fired unless you can prove it's why you got fired. You can still be screwed over in reality. Sure, you might win a lawsuit eventually but what pays your family's bills during the lawsuit? The DoL isn't the cure all. You guys all know how I hate unions and that might not be what's needed out there but there's a lot of crooked shit going down right now with this kind of employment and in businesses like construction. People are being put in harms way because the employers know that the illegals and immigrants either don't know the regs and who can protect them or they fear for their jobs. In TN, if a company wants to get rid of you they can for basically no stated reason since it's a right to work state. Employee files a claim then the employer gets rid of them for something minor. Happens all the time. The week economy and buldging employment rates just make it worse. States are just not properly overseeing these issues. Hell the damn construction company doing the renovation of the Henley St. Bridge in Knoxville, TN has had two deaths in their first year of work, the second being an illegal immigrant. They were back working days after the second death which was the illegal. There is no way in hell that company should still have a TN contractors license after the deaths and citations involved.
Exactly. Hell, it's even one of OSHA's big emphasis programs now. Contractors being held responsible for their subcontractors.
You can absolutely be fired. There IS a lot of crooked shit happening. But they're still not legal and honestly not a lot of sympathy from me. It's better pay and conditions than wherever they are from or else they wouldn't be in Cali. Either way my main point is they won't unionize because they're not legal and union jobs would go to union workers with papers (for the most part). The employers do have them over a barrel and hopefully the publicity will get the government to do their job.
Yep, no real sympathy for the illegals but the legal ones I do care about. I think you are right about the unions if they did unionize. The current due payers would likely go first unless it was part of the bargaining agreement which it likely wouldn't be. I think the publicity is probably a better route for them than unionizing. Life is just not fair.
Just another thing to keep in mind. There are huge differences in company structuring that most people aren't aware of. If you start a company as a class "C" corp., this provides you the highest level of personal protection ( Vs. an S.P. or L.L.C.). As an employer, your required to have employees fill out I-9's etc. However, your not expected to be a document expert. If you CYA with the proper employment records, compliance certs. and insurance, you can literally get away with murder. Your company may go under but, $1,000.00 and a lawyer, your back in business with a new corp. name.
I agree with both statements. I often wonder how long it would take for certain industries to return to their "abusive" form if unions were abolished today. Americans forget that there was once a reason for unions to exist; workers were being exploited and sometimes killed because companies didn't give a shit about employees -- they were fungible. So the question now is, has corporate culture evolved over the last several decades so that they would not revert to their "abusive" ways? The more you hear about the Chinese company Foxxcon that manufactures Apple's products, the more it becomes clear that unions serve a purpose -- maybe not in their current form in the US, but definitely in developing countries.
Not sure you get why they contract out some services. Walmart has a pay scale determined by time with the company. Not all jobs rise to the level of that pay scale. Unloading trucks actually takes an amount of training and proficiency, it requires you to be able to read and write English, use computers and be proficient in basic math. Each warehouse has a pallet sorting area. It's heavy work, but requires little training or skills. It's not worth paying to the scale that more valuable employees get. That's why an outside contractor does the work. Those employees would never get a job at that facility as a Walmart employee.
It's why anyone uses subcontractors. Costs less and puts more of the liability on the subcontractors. They don't want to pay the wages to hire in house so they sub it out. Not a new concept and not something those Walmart or Target geniuses came up with. Same reason the government uses subs.... save money. It's not just the scale they don't want to pay. They don't want to pay benefits of full time employees or pay workers comp insurance fees among other things.
