Wal-Mart, John Tate et le combat pour une Amérique sans syndicats

Abstract

Hostility to trade unionism infused the corporate culture of Wal-Mart, whose revolutionary transformation of the retail industry in the United States made it, for a time, the nation’s largest and one of its most dynamic companies. A product of the rural South, Wal-Mart required an ideologically sophisticated strategy to stymie union organizing when it began to put its stores in metropolitan America. Employment lawyer John Tate proved his worth in this regard. The anti- union strategist’s ideas had been shaped by his clients, some of the most intransigent anti-union employers of the textile South and the small town Midwest. In the early 1970s Tate codified for Wal-Mart and other service sector firms the key elements of a successful union avoidance strategy: construct a business ethos that mimics the sense of community found in monoracial, small-town America; deploy a pension scheme that rewards loyalty for a core of longtime employees; and use the “free speech” rights of employers to pain unions as corrupt and self-serving institutions incapable of improving the wages or work life of employees. He proved successful: there are no unions at any of the 5000 plus Wal-Mart stores in the United States and Canada.