Wal-Mart turned over boxes of records to the NLRB that established that it had begun experimenting with case-ready meat on a small scale in Arkansas for the better part of a year. However, the agency found no mention whatsoever of a plan to extend the program to Jacksonville. “I was very, very suspicious of that, but in the end all I had were suspicions,” recalled Page, the NLRB’s chief prosecutor. 12
Enter Michael Leonard, on a Harley-Davidson. Leonard was a talented field organizer who somehow managed to rise to the third-highest position in the UFCW without ever acquiring the slick, blow-dried patina of the professional union executive. He loved big bikes and he looked the part, even in a tie and jacket. Leonard, a native of Louisville, was a second-generation employee of Kroger Co., now America’s largest grocery chain. His dad drove a truck for Kroger, and Michael worked as a clerk in Louisville before and after a tour of combat duty in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. “The grocery industry I grew up knowing was one where if you worked full-time, you could own a home and be part of the middle class,” Leonard recalled. “It was a good job.” 13
Leonard was the regional director for Kentucky and Ohio when UFCW President Douglas Dority brought him to Washington just a few weeks after the Jacksonville vote and put him in charge of “strategic programs.” Leonard quickly concluded that nothing else that the UFCW might do to advance its strategic interests compared to battling Wal-Mart. He easily convinced Dority to let him focus exclusively on Wal-Mart, but the issue of how best to take the fight to Bentonville proved contentious among the union’s leaders. Leonard, the consummate field organizer, wanted to enlist the union’s 600 locals in an all-out drive to force Wal-Mart to the bargaining table. “You can’t run from your basic mission as a labor union, which is to organize and represent workers,” Leonard recalled. On the other hand, the locals answered to their members every week and were loath to commit money to organizing unless it offered a quick and certain payoff.
Leonard won the argument and the union’s executive committee agreed to a full frontal assault on Wal-Mart. He and Zack laid the organizational groundwork for a national campaign, one that could strike wherever the company seemed most vulnerable. At the same time, they wanted to heighten the drama of the UFCW’s showdown with Bentonville by creating a central battleground. They chose Las Vegas, which was a show unto itself, of course, but also happened to be the most heavily unionized major city in America. Wal-Mart usually shied away from union strongholds, but Las Vegas’s sizzling growth pace and large working-class population made it irresistible. Wal-Mart had just opened its first Supercenter in Las Vegas and was planning to add five more in 2001. The supermarket contracts the UFCW had negotiated in Las Vegas ranked among the most generous in the country. The members of UFCW Local 711 had a lot to lose, and rallied to the union’s calls to arms.
The UFCW went noisily into Las Vegas in the fall of 2000, as if merely attracting the attention of Wal-Mart’s associates was half the battle in unionizing the company. There were indeed lots of disgruntled associates amid the blue-smocked ranks of true believers in Las Vegas, but they were more like cult members in need of deprogramming than wage slaves with a grievance. “Wal-Mart is ruthless in controlling its employees, and I don’t just mean the sophisticated surveillance it puts them under. It really gets into their minds,” Leonard stated. “I can’t believe how many times I heard people say, ‘That’s not the Wal-Mart Way.’ It was almost biblical or something.”
Las Vegas’s overriding identity as a city of tourists and transients worked against the UFCW’s Wal-Mart campaign. In Vegas, the employee roster of a retail establishment tended to turn over nearly as fast as the clientele of a craps table. In fact, many of the city’s clerks and cashiers were just biding their time to meet the year-long residency requirement of casino employment. Tenured Wal-Mart employees (that is, anyone who’d put in at least a year) might have been straitjacketed into the Wal-Mart Culture, but a great many other workers cared so little about their jobs that they would gladly sign a union card today only to vanish tomorrow.
It took the union nearly a year to persuade a majority of the 200 workers at Sam’s Club 6382 on the outskirts of Las Vegas to sign union authorization cards. On September 18, a week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the union filed with the NLRB, which scheduled an election for November 29.
Greg Roberts, the manager of the Sam’s Club, had given no quarter in his battle with the union. He had confiscated the ballpoint pens the union had passed out after the company started charging workers for the pens they used on the job, and even ordered workers to remove the UFCW-provided American flag stickers they’d affixed to their name tags after 9/11. 14 But it was only after the vote was scheduled that Bentonville pulled out all the stops. “Loss prevention” managers—security experts who catch shoplifters and employee thieves—from around the country were flown in to patrol the store and the parking lot and keep union organizers off the premises. Several “people managers” were brought in from California to keep watch on union supporters, many of whom were transferred into jobs reducing their contact with other workers and some of whom were fired. Anti-union workers were promised raises and promotions at some unspecified future date. Meanwhile, the labor relations operatives from Bentonville stepped up the frequency of their anti-union seminars, segregating committed union supporters in separate sessions to keep them from influencing the other workers. Three large glass cases filled with anti-union messages were installed in the break room, covering an entire twenty-foot section of wall. Roberts added a new punch line to the Sam’s Club cheer that all workers had to perform at the start of every shift. “What are we going to do?” he’d ask. Mandatory answer: “Vote no!”
Leonard could have let Wal-Mart get away with what he believed were rampantly unfair labor practices and hope that his majority would hold through the election. Or, if it looked like the union was going to lose, he could file allegations against the company and stampede the NLRB into postponing the election. A few days before the scheduled vote, Leonard flew out to Las Vegas and effectively conceded defeat at Sam’s Club 6382 by filing a massive complaint with the NLRB. By the time the board finished adjudicating the complaints, almost all of the workers who signed UFCW cards were gone from Wal-Mart. The board ultimately upheld many of the unfair labor practice allegations made by Leonard, handing the UFCW yet another Pyrrhic victory.
As the Battle of Las Vegas raged, Jon Lehman’s disillusionment with Wal-Mart reached the flash point. In the summer of 2001, he approached the UFCW for a job as word of the union’s national organizing drive spread through the loosely organized underground of disaffected Wal-Marters around the country. Leonard was skeptical. “There were a lot of people out there who’d worked for Wal-Mart, but I only wanted the sort of bona fide folks that any organization wants as employees and weren’t just looking to settle a score or something.”
Lehman persisted, telephoning Leonard over the next month or two to talk about Wal-Mart, impressing the UFCW leader with his knowledge of the company and his character. “Jon just seemed to me to be a very decent, honest guy,” said Leonard, who cautioned that he could not offer Lehman anything close to the $160,000 a year he was making as a store manager in Louisville. Lehman’s willingness to take a big pay cut cinched it for Leonard, who finally extended an offer of full-time employment at $80,000 a year in November, just as the tussle over Sam’s Club 6382 was climaxing.
The warm relationship Lehman had enjoyed with his district manager had frosted over since he’d begun talking with the union. “Suddenly, I couldn’t do anything right,” he said. Lehman had been invited to a resort near Bentonville for a week-long leadership seminar, but was taken aback to find that one of his roommates worked for the home office and had just returned from Las Vegas. Lehman returned to his room one night to find that someone had gone through his briefcase, which contained printouts of his e-mail correspondence with Leonard and Zack.
He became even more alarmed afte
r a childhood buddy who worked at the home office gave him a private tour. “He took me into a room that was wall-to-wall computers and these little people sitting there with headsets,” Lehman recalled. “He told me this was where they monitored Intranet and telephone traffic at the stores. I was thirty or forty feet down the hallway before it hit me: Oh, shit! I hope they haven’t been listening to all my phone calls to Washington.” (Wal-Mart says that it only monitors phone calls in stores at risk of bomb threats.)
Lehman left Wal-Mart without telling his colleagues that he was taking a job with the union, and thus was able during his first few months with the UFCW to function as a kind of covert advance scout. He spent long hours kibitzing with managers and associates in dozens of Wal-Marts throughout Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, gathering intelligence to help the union brain trust in Washington focus on the most promising organizing opportunities in the region. Leonard decided that the place to start was the hometown that he and Lehman shared—Louisville. Leonard parachuted in one of the union’s best organizers, Harold Embry, to run the campaign, which began in March 2002.
Lehman was one of two dozen organizers working the campaign. But none of the others could electrify a store the way he could just by walking into it and moseying around. He was not just another union guy in a UFCW windbreaker: He was a dissident, a defector. He’d hired many of the workers he now was trying to persuade to sign union cards—as well as many of the managers bent on stopping him. And Lehman’s style was deliberately provocative. His theory was that the best way to expose Wal-Mart as a bullying, self-interested employer was to set off Bentonville’s union trip wire. “You suddenly take a store from union threat level of zero up to three or four and look, here comes the Citation jet!” Lehman said. “Workers who had no inclination to even think about unions soon are complaining, ‘Why are they making us go to all these meetings and showing us these videos that make the union look like crooks?’…And then my phone starts to ring. It’s like, ‘I want to sign a card, by God. I’m tired of this bullshit.’”
Lehman made a big hand-lettered placard saying “Union Yes,” like the one that the plucky minimum-wage worker played by Sally Field holds aloft in the movie Norma Rae while standing defiantly atop a table. Lehman carried his sign as he threaded his way through the checkout lanes at a dozen Wal-Mart stores throughout Louisville. This was provocation squared. Even customers reacted, making thumbs-up or thumbs-down gestures as they waited in line. Lehman would usually get in a good fifteen to twenty minutes of sign time before a posse of managers succeeded in herding him out an exit. (Under the law, they could not lay hands on him.)
Most of Lehman’s buddies in Wal-Mart management treated him like he was radioactive. The manager of a Supercenter in Louisville told him, “Do you know what the labor relations guys call you now?” Lehman shook his head. “The Antichrist,” his friend said. One evening in June 2002, a sheriff appeared at his door with a summons. Wal-Mart obtained two temporary restraining orders against Lehman, one for each of the counties that encompassed most of the Louisville metro area. One of the orders was rescinded. However, the “temporary” restraining order for Jefferson County still stands, nearly four years after it was issued.
Lehman’s freelance shenanigans annoyed Zack, who believed that the UFCW s best hope against Wal-Mart was a subtle, legalistic strategy that he and the union had been teasing out for years. Its object was to lessen the playing field’s tilt in Wal-Mart’s favor by persuading the NLRB to impose an “extraordinary nationwide remedy” against the company. In 99.9 percent of unfair labor practice complaints issued by the board, the sanctions applied are narrowly local. But if an employer is caught using the same illegal tactics in various places, the NLRB can impose nationwide penalties. Even in such cases, the typical remedy is the decidedly un-extraordinary bulletin board posting in which an employer admits to breaking the rules and swears never to break them again. On the other hand, violating a nationwide remedy puts a company on a slippery legal slope that can send it careering out of NLRB hearing rooms into Federal courts where judges could impose large fines and other draconian penalties on repeat offenders.
In the wake of the UFCW’s blitz of 300 Wal-Mart Supercenters in 1999, the UFCW had barraged the NLRB with allegations of unfair labor practices against the company. By 2001, the board had found that Wal-Mart had indeed broken the law in a half-dozen different locales. Furthermore, it found that the cases had common elements, suggesting a nationwide anti-union strategy directed out of Bentonville. Page, the NLRB’s general counsel, told Wal-Mart’s chief labor lawyer that he was going to file a national complaint but wanted to give the company a chance to come in and argue its case first. This was just two months after George W. Bush had been sworn in as president. As a Clinton appointee, Page expected to be replaced. If the customary pattern of presidential appointments held, his time in office would expire in the fall. But in April, just a week before Wal-Mart’s lawyers were due in, Page got a call from the White House giving him thirty-six hours to clear out his office. Page’s successor decided against bringing a national complaint against Wal-Mart.
For lack of a better alternative, Al Zack clung to the hope that the union somehow could maneuver the Bush Administration NLRB into seeking an extraordinary nationwide remedy against Wal-Mart. “Even after Page left, we did see indications at times that the board was considering extraordinary remedies; they’d dance up to it and then dance back,” Zack said. “Especially with a Republican in the White House, we needed to be consistent in our behavior in the field so that there would be similar violations all around the country and Wal-Mart couldn’t blame violations on a rogue manager.” And consistent Lehman was not. “Jon would go off and do things on his own that we told organizers not to do because it could hurt us with the NLRB,” Zack said.
In the end, Lehman and his fellow organizers in Louisville collected hundreds of signed union authorization cards. In several locations, including the Hillview Supercenter that Lehman had opened in 1999, the union attained the 30 percent minimum threshold needed to petition for an election. But Leonard didn’t ask for a vote, because he wanted to be certain of victory. Ultimately, the union was unable to get 50 percent support in any store.
In early 2003, Michael Leonard finally conceded defeat in Louisville, and transferred Embry and Lehman to Las Vegas. In Vegas, Lehman worked alongside a half dozen other former Wal-Mart employees. One, Stan Fortune, forty-seven, was an ex-cop who’d spent seventeen years working at Wal-Marts throughout the Southwest, moving up through the store security ranks to become co-manager (the second-ranking position) at a Texas Supercenter. When Fortune refused to fire a pro-union worker, Wal-Mart fired him. Another disillusioned Wal-Mart employee was Gretchen Adams, fifty-seven, who worked for Wal-Mart for ten years in five states, starting as a deli manager and ending as a co-manager of a Supercenter in Florida.
One day Lehman let Fortune reporter Cora Daniels accompany him as he tried to infiltrate a Wal-Mart. “Lehman gets out just a few hellos to workers before declaring, ‘We are being stalked,’” Daniels wrote. “Since his head never seems to look anywhere but straight down the empty aisle, I’m convinced he’s paranoid. But out of nowhere, one of the store’s managers appears. The two exchange pleasantries the way co-workers do: Lehman compliments the manager on losing a little weight; the manager says politely, ‘Thank you for noticing.’ Then the manager asks Lehman to leave. It is back to the car. Lehman hasn’t talked to a single new face today about the union.” 15
Lehman gravitated toward working the Supercenters’ third shift, which began about 10:30 P.M. and ended at 8:00 A.M. He found that he had a lot more room to maneuver and improvise in the wee hours. Managers were scarcer and less inclined to care about union interlopers and the late-night workers tended to be rougher around the edges and more outspoken than their colleagues.
In October 2003, 70,000 UFCW members went on strike against the three largest grocery chains in southern California: Safeway, Albertson
’s, and Kroger. The supermarket companies justified the hard line they took in negotiations over health and retirement benefits with an argument that can be summed up with the cry: Wal-Mart is coming! Wal-Mart is coming! Bentonville had announced plans to gingerly enter the California grocery market by opening forty Supercenters over three years. Of course, if the usual pattern held, Wal-Mart would follow this toe dipped in water with a headlong dive into the pool. Safeway and the others were trying to hold the line on wages and benefits in anticipation of full-on competition with Wal-Mart. The resulting impasse lasted 139 days, the longest strike in the history of the U.S. supermarket industry.
The California grocery strike was a great convulsive trauma that drained the UFCW’s treasury and monopolized its attention, shoving the Wal-Mart campaign so far down on the union agenda that it effectively disappeared. When, in March 2004, the UFCW’s members ratified a contract that closely resembled the one its negotiators had rejected at the outset, not even Leonard wanted to continue battling a chain like Wal-Mart that was larger than Safeway, Albertson’s, and Kroger combined. As soon as the strike ended, UFCW President Doug Dority stepped down and Leonard, a longtime Dority ally, retired with him. Leonard had planned to leave a year earlier, when he turned fifty-five, but had gotten caught up in the Wal-Mart campaign. Zack also called it quits. “I thought it was time to give someone else a chance to beat their head against the stone walls of Bentonville,” said Zack, who was about to turn sixty. All of this happened so quickly that Lehman and the other Las Vegas campaigners were left hanging. “We were all calling Mike’s secretary, saying, ‘Where’s Mike?’” Lehman recalled.
The Vegas campaign puttered along ineffectually for another few months until June 8, when Lehman, Adams, and Fortune were summoned to UFCW headquarters in Washington. (Miller had left to take a job with a local in Texas.) Lehman was expecting to sit down with representatives of the AFL-CIO to discuss tactical changes in the Wal-Mart campaign. Instead, he and his colleagues were gently but firmly let go. The UFCW’s new president, Joe Hansen, had ordered the dismantling of Leonard’s strategic issues department, effectively ending the Wal-Mart campaign in its fifth year. Lehman, Adams, and Fortune shared a cab to Reagan Airport, where they drowned their sorrows at a T.G.I. Friday’s while awaiting flights home. Leonard felt bad for his protégés but did not take issue with Hansen’s decision. “We’d taken it as far as we could and had to make a change,” he said. “Wal-Mart is just too much for one union.”
The Bully of Bentonville Page 14