The Bully of Bentonville

by Anthony Bianco

  Given the prohibitive odds, why do Wal-Mart workers like Noble and DiIenno continue to try to organize the company after so many years of failure and frustration? Many are motivated by the same sense of the dignity of work that drew them to Wal-Mart to begin with, the idea of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. It is the company’s avowed philosophy, after all—at least on paper. Anger over the company’s betrayal of its own ideals tends to drive the most passionate of Wal-Mart’s pro-union employees.

  There is no better example than Jon Lehman, a native Ozarker who spent twenty-four years working at Wal-Mart stores, starting as a part-timer during his high school years in Harrison, Arkansas, and ending as a store manager in Indiana making close to $200,000 a year. Lehman’s long run at Wal-Mart began when Sam Walton was still going strong, spanned David Glass’s entire tenure as CEO, and spilled over into Lee Scott’s first few years as boss. Through most of it, he embraced the Wal-Mart Way wholeheartedly. “I was really into them,” said Lehman, who not only enjoyed leading his associates in the company cheer but also tacked on the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies or Gilligan’s Island whenever he felt that morale was bumping bottom. “I’d say, ‘All right everybody, stand up! We’re going to sing a silly song.’ And they’d look at me kind of funny,” Lehman recalled. “‘Mr. Sam told us to do that, people,’ I’d say. ‘Read Rule Number Six’ [of “Sam’s Rules for Building a Business”].” 8

  Yet by 2001, Lehman was so disillusioned with Wal-Mart that he defected to the UFCW and worked full-time in its campaign to organize his former employer, first in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and later in Las Vegas. In Louisville, Lehman made such a nuisance of himself, parading through Supercenters that he used to run with a big sign reading “Union Yes,” that Wal-Mart went to court and obtained two restraining orders against him. “I got to where I wouldn’t drive by a Wal-Mart without going in there and raising some hell,” said Lehman, a deceptively mild-mannered forty-four-year-old whose unflappable calm and good cheer mask kamikaze conviction.

  Lehman seemed destined to work for Wal-Mart the way that some boys are stamped from an early age as future cops, pilots, or insurance adjusters. The eldest of four siblings, Lehman was “raised up” in Harrison, home to Wal-Mart No. 2. His father was a Baptist preacher subsisting off the donations of a small congregation, and his mother was the church organist. The Lehman family needed every one of the dollars it saved by shopping at the Wal-Mart that opened in 1964. Jon’s favorite babysitter, Sue Cox, started as a fabric cutter at the Harrison store from the day it opened (and would not retire until 2004, with millions in her profit-sharing account).

  As kids, Jon and his younger brother, Gary, got haircuts at a barbershop near the Wal-Mart and were supposed to wait in the snack bar there for their father to pick them up. “He’d give us a quarter, but we never went and drank a Coke,” Jon recalled. “We went into sporting goods.” The Lehman brothers especially liked the sporting goods department because it was connected to the rest of the store by a long concrete ramp perfect for testing the aerodynamic potential of shopping carts. One day when Jon was eight and Gary six, they flew sideways off the ramp and crashed into a table of towels. “This old woman picked us up by the collar and sort of hurled us into these folding chairs up in the manager’s office,” Jon said. “They were doctoring the cut on Gary’s arm with a Band-Aid. The man I assumed was the manager got on the PA system and paged my dad, but he wasn’t there yet. So we had to just sit there and wait while this guy kept staring at us.”

  The mishap did not prevent Jon from landing a part-time job at Wal-Mart during his high school years, nor did it prevent him from becoming a true believer in the Wal-Mart Way. Lehman spent at least as much time at the store as in school, starting as a janitor, cart pusher, and errand boy before moving up to sales jobs in shoes and then in menswear. “I worked my butt off at Wal-Mart,” he recalled. “My grandpa told me if I worked hard at Wal-Mart, there was a chance I could get ahead in life.”

  After graduating from high school in 1979, Lehman was accepted into the Wal-Mart management training program and was assigned to Wal-Mart No. 265 in Terrell, Texas—known within the company as “Terrible Terrell” because it was home to a state prison. A year into his training, Lehman enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, where he had won a small music scholarship (he’s proficient on the trumpet). He remained with Wal-Mart even so, transferring to a store near the Baylor campus. Through his church, he met Jill Brown, a granddaughter of country music star Judy Lynn, and married her in 1985. Frustrated by the slow pace of his advance through Baylor, Lehman dropped out in his junior year and devoted all of his energies to getting ahead as a Wal-Mart store manager.

  Lehman no doubt would have gotten a store of his own in a few years had he and Jill not been set on living in Dallas. As it was, though, he spent seven years as an assistant manager cycling through Wal-Marts scattered along Dallas’s exurban fringe. While working in the store in Grapevine, Lehman caught Tom Coughlin’s act for the first time. Coughlin, who was then the company’s vice president of operations and, more important, an old hunting buddy of Mr. Sam’s, noticed that someone had divided the store’s inventory of Red Ball rubber boots between two end-cap displays when, in Coughlin’s view, one would have done nicely. Big Tom made his point by kicking one of the end caps to pieces, stopping only when he tore a hole in one of his eel-skin cowboy boots. “The funny thing was, by the time Tom got to the front to leave he calmed down and was complimenting us on how the store looked,” Lehman said. “He looked at my name tag and said, ‘Jon, you look good today, even if you are wearing a pink shirt.’ I never wore a pink shirt to work again.”

  One sweltering July day in 1986, Lehman was working in Wal-Mart No. 426 in The Colony, a small town about twenty-five miles north of Dallas, when a call came in from Bentonville. Walton was en route to Dallas on a corporate jet with Glass, Jack Shewmaker, Don Soderquist, and a fourth executive, and they needed a ride from the airport in nearby Addison to an office downtown. Lehman was chosen because he was the only manager who had not driven a pickup truck to work and had room for five passengers. With a felt-tip marker, he copied out his store’s vital statistics on his palm and took his beat-up Ford LTV to a car wash. He blew all his quarters on copies of the Wall Street Journal and a couple of other newspapers, and still got to Addison early.

  Walton took the passenger seat, picked up one of the newspapers that Lehman had carefully feathered across the front seat, but gave it no more than a glance. “Jon, where are you from?” Walton asked.

  “Well, I’m from Harrison,” replied Lehman in his best Ozark drawl.

  “Harrison? That was my second store.”

  “I know that, Mr. Walton.”

  “Don’t call me Mr. Walton. Call me Sam.”

  They got to talking about Harrison, and Lehman went into the story of how he and his brother had crashed the shopping cart. “Mr. Sam just sort of locked on me,” Lehman recalled. As he got to the part where the manager paged his dad, Walton’s jaw dropped and he started shaking with laughter. “That wasn’t the manager; that was me,” Walton said. “I can even tell you what you boys were wearing that day. You had on matching white shirts with these little blue and white stripes.”

  As they talked, Lehman said he’d eventually like to get up to Louisville, where his wife had relatives. “Why don’t you do that then, Jon?” Walton said. “Tell your district manager you want to go to Louisville and tell him Sam told you to tell him.”

  In his first year as a Wal-Mart store director, Lehman earned a $90,000 bonus on top of his $52,000 salary—a lot more money than he’d ever seen, nearly enough to put him in the top rank of store directors. Sam Walton had flown in for the grand opening in Clarksville, and he returned a few months later for a visit.

  In 1990, Lehman was chosen to open a new store across the river in Louisville proper this time, and again Mr. Sam was there with bells on. Over the next decade, Lehman would change stores
six times, usually moving because Wal-Mart offered him a bigger or a better store to run, but sometimes it was to get away from a district manager who disliked him or vice versa. As it was, Lehman was making more money and living larger as a Wal-Mart store director than he could ever have imagined while growing up poor in Harrison. Throughout the 1990s, he never made less than $140,000, and in 1996, his best year, he pulled down close to $220,000.

  It was only after his experience as a union organizer that Lehman recognized how the cash and the comfortable life it bought had warped his moral code. Sure, it could have been worse; had he been more ruthless in suppressing labor costs he might have boosted his income into the $300,000 to $400,000 range that defined the top tier of Wal-Mart store managers. But even to reach the sales and profit numbers required to make his more-modest bonuses, Lehman routinely altered pay records to delete overtime and to make it look as if workers had taken breaks they in fact had forgone—and he admitted as much under oath in 2003, testifying in a class-action suit brought against Wal-Mart in Indiana. “At the time, I didn’t think I was stealing time,” Lehman said. “Now, I’m very ashamed of it. I believe what I did was appalling.” 9

  Lehman also admitted to passing over deserving female associates for promotions without ever giving it much thought. “There are no policies at Wal-Mart that say, ‘We discriminate against women,’ of course, but it’s one of those systemic things that’s taught and passed down. I developed that mentality, too,” Lehman told me. “It’s just like growing up in Harrison. They called blacks niggers down there. When I first moved away from Harrison to a town that was half black, I had to make a conscious decision right there: Was I going to continue the mentality that blacks are the scum of the earth, or was I going to love them? I never consciously made a decision before that to be prejudiced against blacks, but I think that’s what’s happened at Wal-Mart against women. It’s taught. It’s kind of a rite of passage thing. You come up through the ranks, and the attitude is that women don’t make good managers because they have babies and they don’t want to move. That’s just the way it is, so you go with it.”

  Lehman’s path began to diverge from Wal-Mart’s in 1997, when his wife fell severely and mysteriously ill. He resigned from his job and moved the family from Springfield back to Louisville, a renowned medical center, where Jill eventually underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor. After a half-year of unemployment, Lehman accepted an offer from Meijer, the Michigan-based chain that had pioneered the superstore, to run the store it was preparing to open in Louisville.

  Meijer did not pay its store managers nearly as well as Wal-Mart, but the most difficult adjustment for Lehman was running a unionized shop. Like any true Wal-Marter, he mistrusted labor unions on principle. “I would preach against the union in my floor meetings, tell all my workers that it was like a cult, you know—it was evil and all they wanted was to take your money,” he said. Meijer’s contract with the UFCW provided the workplace with a well-defined matrix of job descriptions, grade levels, pay categories, and so on that existed only in rudimentary form at Wal-Mart. Much as Lehman chafed under these constraints at first, he came around to the view that a more regimented, less frantically improvisatory workplace was better for all concerned. “I’m not saying it was a perfect system, but, man, it was a whole lot easier than trying to pull rabbits out of a hat all the time,” he said.

  Lehman found, to his surprise, that union officials did not come equipped with horns and pointy tails. “I got to know my union reps and they would tell me about stuff that was getting ready to happen with the workers that I didn’t know anything about. ‘Hey, did you know these people over here are upset?’” Lehman said. “It was a big help, and I started to really enjoy that relationship. I even started to think that I might want to go to work for the UFCW one day and to bring the truth back to Wal-Mart associates and let them know how good the union really is.”

  In 1999, Wal-Mart’s district manager for the Louisville area enticed Lehman back to the company by making him manager of a Supercenter slated for Louisville’s affluent Hillview district. Although the Hillview store was a considerable success, for Lehman the thrill he’d once felt working for Wal-Mart was pretty much gone. It was just a job now, a job he would have quit soon enough.

  Then one day a flyer turned up in the men’s room.

  It wasn’t much, just a printout from someone’s home computer bearing a simple message: We need a union. Lehman dutifully telephoned Bentonville’s union hotline and faxed the flyer to the home office. The next day, three labor relations specialists flew in from Bentonville and began meeting individually with the store’s salaried staffers, pressing them to identify the troublemakers among the hourly workers. “I wouldn’t say they were mean-spirited, but they were very probing,” Lehman recalled. “They asked me how I felt about unions, and that’s when I stuck my foot way down deep in my throat. I said, ‘You know, I think they have their place.’ I was trying to give a candid answer, but I saw in their faces that I’d made a mistake. I added real quick, ‘But we don’t have a need for a union here.’ They kind of relaxed a bit, but I walked out of there kicking myself all the way down the back hallway.”

  The United Food and Commercial Workers have remained more militant than most unions through organized labor’s long decline in the United States. It was formed in the 1979 merger of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the Retail Clerks, the very union that had chased Walton into the arms of the union-busting lawyer Tate. The UFCW absorbed other unions representing beauticians, barbers, shoemakers, and members of a few other trades to become the largest of the more than fifty unions in the AFL-CIO, with 1.4 million members currently.

  The UFCW was quick to recognize Wal-Mart as a threat to the retail and grocery stores that employed two-thirds of its members, but slow to take on the Herculean task of trying to organize the company. Throughout the 1990s, the UFCW essentially fought a publicity war against the company instead. Union researchers dug up all sorts of documented dirt about the company, ranging from its suppliers’ use of child labor abroad to the devious tactics it used to induce communities into subsidizing construction of stores and distribution centers at home. The UFCW scored a bull’s-eye hit on the Waltons by unearthing a slew of sweetheart deals between various family members and Wal-Mart. The union succeeded in taking a bit of the shine off Wal-Mart’s reputation and slowed its expansion into union strongholds like California, but accomplished little else beyond infuriating Bentonville, even as the threat posed to the UFCW membership grew exponentially with the Supercenter’s coming of age.

  The Supercenter taught the supermarket industry a lesson in brute capitalism. The typical chain supermarket could not slash its prices to match the Supercenter opening across the street and still turn a profit, largely because it was locked into UFCW contracts paying workers 25 percent to 30 percent more than Wal-Mart’s non-union staffers made. The result was that every time a new Supercenter opened in America, two big supermarkets went out of business, taking some 400 high-paying UFCW jobs with them. In the late 1990s, Bentonville began stepping up Supercenter openings, from 113 in 1998 to 157 in 1999 to 167 in 2000. The UFCW was left with two basic choices: negotiate supermarket industry wages and benefits down to Wal-Mart levels, or take on the task of trying to force Bentonville to pay its employees up to union standards.

  In September 1999, the UFCW organized a Supercenter “blitz,” sending representatives into 300 stores to pass out pamphlets and chat up employees. Over the years, the union had picketed hundreds of Wal-Mart stores and had even organized a march on Bentonville without getting much of a rise out of the company. During one Mother’s Day protest over Wal-Mart’s treatment of female employees, associates in some stores even brought cookies and soft drinks outside to demonstrators. This time, though, the home office went ballistic, going to court to obtain a restraining order banning UFCW reps from all of its stores nationwide. 10 “In taking such harsh action against us, Wal-Mart was telling us where the
ir vulnerabilities lie,” recalled Allen Zack, a senior UFCW organizer who was the union’s ranking Wal-Mart strategist at the time. “The difference was, this time we were going into stores and talking to associates. They didn’t want us anywhere near their workers.” 11

  One of those associates, a forty-five-year-old butcher named Maurice Miller, angered by his manager’s failure to come through with a promised promotion, turned to the UFCW for help in organizing the meat-cutting department of Wal-Mart No. 180 in Jacksonville, Texas. To unionize a workplace, at least 30 percent of its workers must sign cards calling for an election that is administered by the NLRB. If the union prevails, the employer is required by law to meet with it and bargain in good faith over a contract. (What sounds simple in theory is fraught with complications in practice.) Wal-Mart employed only twelve butchers in Jacksonville, but it took Miller months of heavy persuasion to convince a majority of them to back the union. In February 2000, the butchers voted in the UFCW by a 7-to-3 margin, establishing the Jacksonville meat counter as the first unionized Wal-Mart unit in the United States.

  This breakthrough emboldened hundreds of Wal-Mart employees around the country to sign union cards. The NLRB authorized elections for the meat departments of four more Supercenters, including one in Florida and another in Illinois. Just two weeks after the vote in Jacksonville, however, Wal-Mart offered its draconian response. It disclosed plans to eliminate meat-cutting in all Supercenters in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Kansas—180 stores in total—and switch to pre-cut, cellophane-packaged meat. Undoubtedly Wal-Mart would have gone to pre-cut meat in all its Supercenters eventually, even if there had never been a pro-union vote; the cost savings were hugely compelling. But it’s equally likely that Bentonville accelerated the move in an attempt to stop the UFCW’s organizing momentum.