angry smileyWal-Mart is threatening to fire pro-union workers at its store in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, according to a complaint filed today with the National Labor Relations Board. The charges, filed by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, allege that starting on June 11 corporate representatives began telling employees that they could easily acquire a list of union backers and that those people would lose their jobs.

Local 789 is part of a nationwide effort by the UFCW to organize workers at the country’s largest employer. The campaign, targeting more than 100 stores in 17 states, was prompted in part by the presence of a more labor-friendly administration in Washington, D.C., and to generate momentum for passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

Wal-Mart is arguably the country’s most notoriously anti-union company. In the past it has taken dramatic steps to keep collective bargaining agreements out of its shops. After workers in Canada voted to authorize a union in 2004, for instance, the company responded by closing the store.

According to Doug Mork, organizing director for Local 789, Wal-Mart has been engaging in standard, anti-union behavior since the campaign’s inception earlier this year. But in the second week of June a team of corporate representatives was dispatched to the Twin Cities from the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to help smother any organizing momentum.

“They really turned up the heat inside the stores and really started to hammer folks,” Mork said.

He believes the dialed-up efforts are a reflection of Local 789’s recent successes in convincing workers that union representation is the correct choice. Employees at eight Wal-Mart stores in the Twin Cities have so far signed off on cards indicating that they want to organize, according to the union.

“We’ve seen considerable and steady forward progress,” Mork said, “not only in our core, active stores from the beginning, but now just in the last few weeks we’ve had a couple of new stores break lose and start to get more active.”

According to Martin Ostheus, regional director for the National Labor Relations Board, an investigator has been assigned to scrutinize the allegations against Wal-Mart. Ostheus expects a ruling on whether the charges have merit to be made by mid-August. There are no other complaints against Wal-Mart currently pending with the NLRB’s Minneapolis office.

Daphne Moore, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, says that the company is looking into the allegations. “We’re just learning about the filing,” she says. “We’ll review it and respond after that review. Generally we provide our managers with training on how to comply with labor laws and we also make sure that our associates know their rights.”

Moore also questions the union’s claim of growing worker support for unionization. “We have noticed that the UFCW has been working harder in its attempts to get Wal-Mart associates to sign union cards, but we don’t think our associates have any reason to be more interested than before.”

Mork believes Local 789’s efforts will eventually result in elections in Wal-Mart stores to decide whether workers want to have union representation, but he declines to predict when that might transpire. Up until then, he expects the retailing behemoth to continue to fight such efforts vigorously.

“In the past obviously Wal-Mart’s been tremendously effective in scaring the hell out of people and getting them to back down,” he said.