By Josh Eidelson: How Wal-Mart keeps wages low

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/josh-eidelson-how-wal-mart-keeps-wages-low/2013/09/12/283d72de-1b35-11e3-82ef-a059e54c49d0_story.html

Thursday, September 12, 8:37 AM

Josh Eidelson covers labor as a blogger for The Nation and a contributing writer at Salon. He worked as a union organizer for five years.

Mayor Vincent Gray (D) vetoed the District’s landmark retail “living wage” bill Thursday. Before Gray’s decision, this summer has seen a stepped-up debate over whether Wal-Mart’s low-wage business model is good for the District and the country. But amid the arguments over whether the D.C. Council should mandate that Wal-Mart and certain other companies pay a living wage, there’s been too little talk about how the company has managed to keep its pay so low: by aggressively — and allegedly illegally — suppressing employees’ efforts to change that business model themselves.

Last year, Lisa Lopez was one of 400 nonunion Wal-Mart workers to join a high-profile Black Friday walkout. In June, she was one of around 100 strikers who traveled to the retail giant’s Arkansas headquarters to take part in a week of protests. Now she’s one of 20 strikersto have been fired within weeks by Wal-Mart. Another 50-plus have been otherwise disciplined since returning to work.

“I think they don’t want me to actually let people know what’s really going on at Wal-Mart as an associate,” Lopez told me in an interview for the Nation following her June 21 firing. “So they’d rather get rid of me.”

Firings like Lopez’s may not come as a shock — Wal-Mart once shut down a store in Canada after workers there won collective bargaining rights, and it eliminated its entire U.S. meat-cutting department after a handful of meat-cutters at one store voted to unionize. But the alleged retaliation defies an eight-decade-old promise from the federal government to most U.S. workers: Banding together to improve your workplace, whether you win or lose, shouldn’t cost you your job. That 1935 law — the National Labor Relations Act – is still on the books. But its ban on retaliation today reads more like a cruel joke than an ironclad commitment. A 2009 study released by the progressive Economic Policy Institute found that pro-union workers are fired — allegedly illegally — in at least a third of unionization election campaigns supervised by the government.

FULL story at link.