Wal-Mart fires 11,000, puts condition on severance pay

Wal-Mart's "Happy New Year!" to 11,000 of its workers this week was an announcement that they are all losing their jobs. The announcement came just two weeks after the company revealed plans to close 10 Sam's Club stores across the country (none in the South). The leopard doesn't change its spots, and Arkansas-based Wal-Mart is still Wal-Mart, which is to say something other than the bogus imagery of Mr. Sam, the Wal-Mart cheer, and the smiling, happy "associates" who, company PR insists, work there.

The real Wal-Mart is the miserly, union-busting,sweatshop-coddling mom-and-pop bankrupter that is telling those 11,000 "associates" they will get no severance pay unless they agree to waive any right to sue the company for discrimination, whether for age, race, or gender, according to today's Huffington Post. As a consolation prize, company officials have told these workers they can now apply for jobs at the company's new product sampling partner, Shopper Events (also Arkansas-based), which is hiring as many as 10,000 new workers. Hey, what do you think the chances are of a non-waiver-signing former "associate" landing a job with Shopper Events?

What is the subtext here? What sort of lawsuit is Wal-Mart worried about? I devoted a chapter to Wal-Mart in my book, Covering for the Bosses, and I learned a lot about this outfit. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in 2004 that claimed sex discrimination on behalf of 1.6 million former and current female employees. An internal audit that same year revealed thousands of labor violations, including the employment of minors during school hours and the working of employees through breaks and lunches.

Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton, once lamented the following: "I was so obsessed with turning in a profit margin of 6 percent or higher that I ignored some of the basic needs of our people, and I feel bad about it."

It's too late for Walton's crocodile tears. His successors aren't even shedding them.

Memphis composer's a piano player for hire ... in a tux

Happy 2010 to followers and readers! This first entry of the new year is a feature column about a Memphis composer who's also a regular working stiff--a piano player for hire ... in a tux. It's a little different from your typical labor story, but that's okay. This blog aspires to be a little different even as it pursues its central mission (for that, see the Manifesto, one of the blog's earliest entries). In the photograph, taken recently by my wife Suzanne at The Majestic, my favorite downtown haunt in Memphis, you see Boatner (to the right) and yours truly.

MEMPHIS – The new year is still a quarter-hour away, and our small group has gathered around the piano at Judd Grisanti’s Trattoria to hear John Boatner play As Time Goes By one more time. I’m a hopeless Casablanca fan, and, in my mind, Boatner is every bit as good as Sam was that night he played it for Rick.

As the clock ticks on to 11:57 or so, we all know what we want to hear next. Just as Boatner strikes the first notes of Auld Lang Syne, however, some philistine flips on the sound system and out comes Mylie Cyrus. We’re not to be deterred.

“Play it, John,” I demand. “Just play it.”

And he does, and we all enjoy our champagne and sing in 2010 with Auld Lang Syne.

The next time I see John Boatner is at The Majestic, a wonderful downtown haunt that offers diners silent films on a giant screen as well as great steaks and Sazeracs. He’s wearing a black coat with a red plaid scarf, drinking black coffee, and answering my questions about his long career as a pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher.

“Life would be hell without music,” he says. “You need three things in life: music, humor and laughter, and children.”

He’s the father of two grown sons, he’s got a hearty laugh, and he’s devoted to music.

You may have heard him if you’ve been in the famous lobby of The Peabody Hotel. He played the ivories there for 28 years as well as nine years at one of the city’s premier French restaurants, Paulette’s. He’s often in my hometown of Oxford, Miss., usually performing at the Downtown Grill on Homecoming Weekend.

“That’s support for the artistic things that don’t provide income,” the 70-year-old Memphis native says.

Trained in classical and sacred music at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, Boatner spent years in New York working in ballet studios and churches before returning to the South, where he has produced and directed dozens of concerts, including the first public concerts of black and female composers presented in Memphis.

He has composed 20 published works—from cantatas and ballets to experimental music and theater pieces such as his Toot Sweet Trilogy. His Easter Cantata For An Unbeliever, performed at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Cordova, Tenn., in June 2009, incorporated rock rhythms on percussion as well as guitar folk music. Ever lyrical and deeply spiritual, he can also be as experimental as an Edgar Varèse or John Cage.

But classical composition rarely keeps food on the table—even if your works have been performed as far away as Germany, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria. So Boatner is also a working stiff , piano player for hire—in a tuxedo. “Erik Satie is kind of my mentor,” he says. “He had to make a living playing piano.”

I ponder Boatner’s mustache and goatee. He even looks a little like the turn-of-the-century French composer, who also had a penchant for giving strange titles to his compositions, titles like Next-to-Last Thoughts and Pieces in the Form of a Pear. Satie kept food on his table by banging on the ivories in a Montmartre cabaret.

But years at the public piano can produce a bottomless well of stories. Boatner has played for Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, and President Clinton. He probably played for my wife Suzanne and me the evening I proposed to her at the Peabody lobby. “People come up to you and ask you for anything and everything, and you have to be ready.”

One evening after taking a break at the Peabody, Boatner returned to find one of the hotel guests picking out a tune at his piano. He went up to the man and said, “I think I look better than you do here.” When the man stood up to move out of the way, Boatner realized who he was. “By god, you’re Jon Voigt!” he said to the Academy Award-winning actor. Voigt wasn’t angry. “He was as nice as he could be,” Boatner recalls.

And after the exchange, Boatner sat down to play while Voigt listened.

Cratchit and Scrooge are alive and well

The art you see here is Maxo Vanka's The Capitalist, a 1941 mural that can be found in the St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, Pa. If you've been reading this blog, you know my fondness for Vanka's work. He was a Croatian artist whose murals fill the interior of this fascinating church. They depict the struggles of immigrants like himself in the USA, their backbreaking labor in the mines and mills. This mural features a wealthy "capitalist" going over his stock report while his black servant brings him dinner. In the background you find a crying angel and a hand reaching out from hell. Scrooge beware!

OXFORD, Miss. – A yuletide tradition for me is to watch A Christmas Carol, the classic 1951 film version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. I just love entering Charles Dickens’ world where the joy of redemption and rebirth ultimately overcomes miserly greed, grinding poverty and ghost-haunted nights.

One particular scene resonates this year. It’s when Scrooge is finishing work at his cramped office on Christmas Eve and admonishes his clerk Bob Cratchit for wanting the next day off. “Tis only once a year, sir,” Cratchit says.

“That’s a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December,” Scrooge grouses.

When Cratchit explains that his wife and children “put their hearts into Christmas,” Scrooge responds, “And their hands into my pockets.”

A lot of people these days feel like Bob Cratchit. They’re working harder than ever with little to show for it. Scrooge is alive and well, too, the old, unredeemed version.

Statistics show how hard people are working. Productivity is at its highest in six years, rising 9.5 percent between July and September after an earlier 6.9 percent increase.

Yet most folks, including most Mississippians, are earning less, particularly when those earnings are adjusted for inflation. Labor costs fell 5.2 percent during that July-September period. The Huffington Post’s Misery Index shows how jobless rates don’t fully portray what’s going on in the nation. Joining 15.4 million unemployed are 9.2 million underemployed plus millions more who’ve lost their homes, health care benefits, and credit rating. It adds up to nearly one-third of all Americans.

Things aren’t nearly so miserable for the fortunate folks at the top. The average CEO today earns about 275 times what the average worker earns. A CEO in 1965 earned just 24 times his average worker’s wage.

I hear a lot of angst out there--whether it’s from barbers, industry workers, government bureaucrats, journalists, or college professors. People are working harder for equal or less pay and benefits, made to feel lucky they have a job, and increasingly suspicious that the boss is taking advantage of the recession to push them around.

It’s the old speed-up or stretch-out that assembly line workers know only too well. It goes something like this: “Put your nose to the grindstone, buddy, because if you don’t there are plenty of others out there who’d like your job.”

People are getting angry. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say, “Tax the rich to pay for health care reform.” Conservatives don’t like that idea, of course. Let’s not have what they would call “class warfare.” Didn’t conservative Ronald Reagan declare that war a quarter century ago with his supply-side, “trickle down” economic policies?

Here in Mississippi, the recession and state budget crisis have offered conservative leaders a wonderful opportunity to take a much-coveted whack at certain government programs, seen in plans to close 10 mental health treatment facilities at a time when homelessness is growing and many of the homeless have mental health problems.

During President Obama’s recent jobs summit in Washington, a Goldman Sachs economist warned that high unemployment may be long lasting and it will be due in part to the fact that long-jobless people lose their skills and work ethic and thus become unemployable. As writers John Russo and Sherry Linkon point out, this view, shared by others at the summit, “is the most absurd, cruel version of blaming the victim.”

Near the end of that scene in A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit, his clothes threadbare but his spirits high, wishes Ebenezer Scrooge a “Merry Christmas!” The old miser turns in disgust to the poor man. “You, a clerk on fifteen shillings a week, with a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas.”

Scrooge laughs with a sneer and walks out into the snowy streets of London. We all know what awaits him when he gets home—a very rough night but also a bright and shining morning full of hope, repentance and overdue love for fellow human beings who aren’t as fortunate as he.

UNITE! Environmentalists in W. Va., immigrant workers in Fla. & N.C., musicians in Nashville, Wal-Mart-China protesters, & the jobless everywhere!

A round-up of labor news in the South as Christmas and New Year's approach shows environmentalists, immigrant workers, musicians, and Wal-Mart protesters taking a stand for justice, as other frontline activists battle for the jobless and the hungry everywhere. Let's take a look:

- Despite threats, harassment, bullying cops, and town hall-like meetings filled with pro-industry shouters and screamers, environmentalists in West Virginia may be making some headway in their fight against the mining practice of mountaintop removal (MTR). Both of West Virginia's U.S. senators, Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, have criticized the practice, which protesters say buries streams and thus violates the Clean Water Act, not to mention other sins against Mother Nature. They're calling on the U.S. Corps of Engineers to get rid of the so-called "Nationwide 21" fast-track permit allowing MTR. The EPA recently informed one major coal company that it is operating without a Clean Water Act permit.

The battle thus far has pitted environmentalists against many miners who are desperate to preserve jobs. In These Times magazine quoted retired miner Joe Stanley, however, as arguing, "We can do underground mining and do it safely." At public hearings, Stanley and others worried about the practice have had to face angry, red-faced, fist-waving crowds, which environmentalists suspect are backed by the West Virginia Coal Association.

Sounds like the health care reform debate, doesn't it? The irony is that there's not that much coal left to mine under those mountaintops. Still, it's an interesting dilemma to consider as world leaders gather in Copenhagen to discuss greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental issues.

- The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida continues its battle for immigrant workers across Florida. After winning agreements with Taco Bell, McDonald's, and other companies for better pay and conditions for tomato pickers and other field workers over the past several years, the CIW has taken the fight to Publix, Florida's premier grocer, and asked it to increase its payment for tomatoes by a penny per pound. Publix, with stores located across the South, argues the issue is between workers and growers, but CIW is having none of that. Take heart. The CIW is a tough outfit that has already overcome impossible odds in gaining recognition for the nation's most marginalized workers. CIW leader Lucas Benitez, a native of Mexico, won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award in 2003.

Immigrant workers in North Carolina have also waged a long, hard struggle for their rights, and the struggle continues. National Public Radio recently aired an earlier feature about the workers at the Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, N.C., and how a local minister risked alienating powerful members of his flock by siding with workers whose efforts to organize have been bitterly opposed by the company. This years-long struggle was vividly depicted in labor historian Leon Fink's The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South, and it proves that North Carolina's long-held reputation as a comparatively "progressive" Southern state doesn't hold up when organized labor and workers' rights are the issue. The Case Farm workers described in Fink's book are mostly Q'anjob'al-speaking Mayans from the mountain villages of Guatemala, another patch in the multi-colored quilt that the modern-day South has become. The workers actually won an election campaign in 1995, but they were still without a contract years later. Their union, the Laborers International Union of North America, finally gave up in 2001. At a labor conference in Memphis in 2006, Juan Montes, a Mexican-born leader in the effort to win a contract with Case Farms, had this to say: "The only way we are going to improve the life of the worker is to stay in there for the long term."

- The fight for workers rights isn't always on the shop floor or in a field. It can also be in a musician's studio. Musicians in Nashville, Tenn., and elsewhere have joined with labor leaders across the country in asking Congress to pass the Performance Rights Act. The act would close a loophole in copyright law that allows radio stations to play songs without fair payment to "singers, session musicians, and other performers on the track," says Lindsay Dahl of the musicFirst Coalition. The stations do pay royalties to songwriters but not to the others who made this music possible. A recent ad in Roll Call on Capitol Hill made the case for closing the loophole.

- Arkansas-based Wal-Mart may be the most virulently anti-labor company in the Western hemisphere. It shut down a store in Quebec, Canada, in 2005 after workers voted in a union there, and that nation's Supreme Court recently ruled it was within its rights to do so. The store was in Jonquiere, Quebec, a remote, blue-collar, jobs-hungry outpost that also happens to be one of Canada's fiercest labor strongholds. When Wal-Mart shut the store down, bomb threats followed in three of its other stores in the region, forcing the company to shut them down for a time, too.

Now the battle has shifted to China, where the China Labor Watch (CLW) has charged the company with systematic labor violations at the same time it has tried to present the public image of a company that supports high standards for workers. Good ol' Southern hypocrisy (I'm a born-and-bred Southerner, so I can say that), if you ask me (and by reading this, you did). The New York-based human rights group says Wal-Mart uses its power as a mega-retailer to squeeze its Chinese suppliers for the lowest possible prices on goods and thus continues to encourage sweatshop conditions for Chinese workers, including at one factory stretches of 24-hour workdays at 44 cents an hour, half the legal requirement. Much of this is old news to veteran Wal-Mart watchers. Even pro-business Business Week exposed the hypocrisy of Wal-Mart, along with Nike and other firms, in a 2006 investigation that showed how the company touted high standards to critics back home while still encouraging the same-old same-old through its practices abroad.

Remember: This is a company that employs more than 1 million U.S. workers and which, by most reports, has weathered the current economic crisis comparatively well. In today's global economy, you can no longer just look at its domestic operations alone. You have to go to places like Canada and especially China to get the real picture.

- Finally, let's look at efforts to help the jobless. My good friend Chris Marston, a veteran AFL-CIO organizer and activist now in the trenches in Louisiana to get political leaders there to back national health care reform, tipped me off to efforts in Mississippi to "advocate against (Gov.) Haley Barbour's opposition to the extension of unemployment benefits for Mississippi's unemployed." With the state's jobless rate at more than 9 percent, Martha Bergmark of the Mississippi Center for Justice is at the forefront of that campaign.

Of course, joblessness is a national issue. President Obama, after first making sure Wall Street was safe and sound, is now talking jobs, jobs, jobs. It's about time. The Huffington Post "Real Misery Index" reports that 32.2 percent of the nation has experienced either job loss, home loss, health care loss, bankruptcy, credit card defaultment, or a combination thereof.

According to the New York Times and to the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, N.C., 36 million people are on food stamps, and a disproportionate number of them are in the South. Black poverty is a shameful given even in the post-civil rights South, but what about white poverty? The institute reports that Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia account for 52 percent of the nation's 100 counties with the highest percentage of whites on food stamps. West Virginia has the highest rate in the nation, with 17 percent of its whites on food stamps.

A new roundup is on the way

Expect a new roundup of labor-related activity in the South in coming days. A quick peek has turned up a couple of interesting situations:

- A standoff between coal miners and environmentalists in West Virginia over fast-track permits allowing coal companies to blow the tops off mountains in search of ore. The miners want the jobs, and the environmentalists are saying there are better, safer ways to mine. The standoff has become physical at times.

- A recent report by National Public Radio highlighted the long, ongoing fight for union representation at the Case Farms poultry operation in Morganton, N.C. It's a fight that pits Mayan workers from Latin America against die-hard, anti-union Southern managers.

There'll be more on these and other stories. Stay tuned.

Homelessness, a growing problem even in the Little Easy

Following is my latest column for Mississippi newspapers. It deals with homelessness in a town that is considered a mecca of prosperity in the nation's poorest state, a state where you find poverty as high as 49.3 percent of the population (in Issaquena County, in the Delta region just north of Vicksburg) and where the governor has threatened to close 10 mental health facilities. Experts say many of the homeless suffer from mental disabilities. Many others are laid-off workers, the jobless poor who populate the lowest rung of our economy. Some, as you'll see, are former convicts. In the accompanying photograph you see Lena Wiley, a local champion of the homeless who heads the Interfaith Compassion Ministry.

OXFORD, Miss. – He’s a convicted felon who served two long terms in Parchman State Penitentiary for selling cocaine, a total of 15 years behind bars, and he came out the last time bound and determined that the rest of his life was going to be different.

“At Parchman, you’ve got rapists, killers, robbers. My cellmate was a guy who had two life sentences, 200 years. He’d cut his girlfriend’s head off.”

The bespectacled, 55-year-old Oxford native speaks matter-of-factly as we talk quietly in a local shop whose good-hearted owner/manager offered him a job. He doesn’t want his name in the papers. He tells how when he turned in his prison stripes, he joined another group of marginalized citizens in these hard economic times: the homeless.

“The people I used to stay with had moved out of town,” he recalls, “and I didn’t want to be around my so-called friends from when I was selling drugs. They never sent me as much as a postcard when I was in prison. I was really feeling depressed.”

So he drifted, one of the growing number of homeless in pretty, pristine Oxford, the boomtown they call the Little Easy, a place so picture-book perfect that an out-of-town guest once asked me, “Where are the poor people?” Yet he himself knows people here living in old cars. A local newspaper has told of a family living in a tent near Sardis Lake.

Eventually, a few good hearts reached out to help the former inmate. He got assistance from the local, church-funded Interfaith Compassion Ministry (ICM), led by the indefatigable Lena Wiley and the only agency in Oxford that still regularly helps the homeless. A church in nearby Water Valley arranged for a temporary home, and people like the shop owner/manager offered him work.

“I feel good right now,” he says. “They gave me a place where I could gather my thoughts, and if it weren’t for them, I’d still be out there selling drugs.”

Homelessness may begin to rival football, Faulkner, and the best boutique buys as a topic of conversation in Oxford’s cafes and coffee shops. A local task force devoted to the issue reports that some 110 families had no roofs over their heads in the city and surrounding Lafayette County during the first seven months of 2009. It found 80 cases of homeless children in Oxford city schools and 172 cases in the county school system.

Between August and mid-November, the task force found 49 homeless families, including 11 children. Forty percent of homeless cases are due to foreclosures, evictions or situations where the families were in uninhabitable structures. Less than 20 percent were transients. The homeless include the mentally ill, victims of house fires, laid-off workers, substance abusers, and former prison inmates. A recent national report showed an estimated one in four homeless are military veterans.

“We do have a problem with homelessness in our community,” task force chair Jean Shaw told the town board of aldermen at a recent meeting, “and the problem is growing.”

Oxford and Lafayette County simply have no room at the inn—or any shelter—for the homeless other than what is temporarily provided by one of the city’s oldest mainstays, the red-roofed, downtown-located Ole Miss Motel.

The motel, fabled in movies and local legend, provides the homeless a shelter for a few nights at a 10-to-15 percent discount off its $40-to-$55-per-night rooms. The ICM pays for the lodging out of donations from local churches. St. John’s Catholic Church recently helped pay off half of a $10,000 bill that the ICM owed.

The motel’s owner and manager, Jack Contractor, a native of India, says he has long had a sympathy for the poor and needy. “I saw a lot of homeless kids in India growing up on the streets. I feel sorry for them. My wife is from Zambia. She saw them, too. If it weren’t for (ICM’s) Lena Wiley, I don’t know what they (the homeless) would do.”

The task force officially disbanded this month but called on the city and county to work with ICM and help fund efforts to relieve a problem that’s bound to grow as winter sets in. Local officials say they’re studying the issue.

Lena Wiley doesn’t have to study the issue. She sees it everyday. “We recently found seven people living in a two-room trailer. It’s a sad situation. It’s not livable. I try not to do a quick fix for the homeless. I try to find a long-term solution. I get a lot of calls.”

Pro-union rulings and lawsuits, anti-union companies in Tennessee and South Carolina, a labor hero wins a much-deserved award, and bus drivers strike

A round-up of recent labor activity in the South shows that a national board ruling may aid workers in organizing at airlines and railroads, FedEx is still fighting efforts to reclassify its drivers as employees and thus make them eligible to join unions, the Boeing Co. plans to open a plant for the 787 jetliner in North Charleston and avoid union labor costs, longtime labor activist Bill Chandler of Mississippi wins a national award for his long fight for social justice, and Mississippi school bus drivers win an agreement after a two-day strike.

The National Mediation Board recently agreed to change a 75-year-old rule that counted a non-vote in a union election as a "no" vote. Under the new rule, only the votes cast are counted, and a majority of "yes" votes mean the union won the election. Hey, what took 75 years to figure that one out? The anti-union camp fears the new ruling--which covers all companies under the Railway Labor Act--could affect outfits like Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and Memphis-based FedEx.

FedEx is digging in its heels to fight efforts to label its drivers employees rather than independent contractors and thus expose them to possible unionization. The attorney generals in Montana, New York and New Jersey are pursuing legal suits against the company. Meanwhile, the Teamsters are waiting in the wings, and unionized UPS is hoping to be able to say, "Welcome to our world. Be a part of it."

In a valiant, historic victory nine years ago, Charleston, South Carolina, longshoremen (members of International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 and other unions) defeated a state-backed, battle-clad army of cops and patrolmen as well as an ol' mossback, retrograde, would-be-Strom attorney general named Charlie Condon in preventing a Danish shipping line from hiring non-union dockworkers. Yet anti-unionism is still strong in the cradle of the Confederacy. It's apparently why Boeing wants to open a new assembly line for its 787 jetliner there. North Charleston defeated Everett, Wash., to get the plant despite the company's longstanding ties to the state of Washington.

Bill Chandler, whose long labor career reaches back to even beyond his days working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in California, has been named a 2009 Purpose Prize Fellow for his years-long fight on behalf of immigrant workers in the Deep South. The 68-year-old Chandler is executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), an organization he also helped found. MIRA is a tireless champion of immigrants--whether they have their proper documentation or not. The prize honors social entrepreneurs over 60. Each recipient receives up to $100,000.

By the way, Chandler's organization, MIRA, will join with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for their 4th annual "Unity Conference" in Jackson, Miss., December 3-5. The conference is titled "Building Bridges Through Diversity: One Goal, One Vision, United Power". MIRA has fought the good fight for years, helping immigrants get their just wages from employers who'd just as soon let them work for nothing, helping the helpless recover from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and the crooks and shysters who came in its aftermath.

Dozens of school bus drivers in Hinds County (Jackson area), Mississippi, went on a two-day strike for better wages and benefits in late October that resulted in an agreement between Teamsters Local 891 and the Ohio-based First Student company. After media coverage that typically focused on the `disruption' caused by the strike and the `demands' of the bus drivers rather than the issues that led to the strike, the parties resolved their dispute in a compromise from both sides, local union leader Willie Smith said.