Florida Wal-Mart Workers Stage Protest (the store to cut workers’ hours) [View All]

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/business/17protest.html

Florida Wal-Mart Workers Stage Protest

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: October 17, 2006

In a rare demonstration, more than 100 Wal-Mart employees rallied yesterday at a store in Hialeah Gardens, Fla., a Miami suburb. They were protesting a new policy on employee absences as well as efforts at the store to cut workers’ hours.

Henry Gonzalez, the garden department manager at the store, said, “People were unhappy that they were going to cut all of our hours, and some people in my department were even being cut back to just six hours a week. How is someone supposed to pay the bills on that?”

Officials at Wal-Mart headquarters said the protest, which lasted for more than an hour, was spurred largely by the store manager’s plan to reduce payroll by cutting most workers’ hours to 35 hours a week from 40. During the protest many workers chanted, “Forty hours, forty hours.”

Wal-Mart officials said the top manager at the store had violated company policy by reducing hours across the board, instead of doing it the usual way by reducing hours here and there to take into account the needs of particular departments and shifts.

FULL stroy at link above.