Local Wal-Mart workers achieved a significant legal victory yesterday when it was announced that a Dakota County District Court judge awarded them $6.5 million in damages. The ruling highlighted some two million instances of wrongdoing and could ultimately cost the world’s largest retailer up to $2 billion in damages. Judge Robert King, Jr., concluded that Wal-Mart routinely shorted its workers on rest and meal breaks and allowed employees to work off the clock.

 

But will the critical ruling — which comes seven years after the lawsuit was filed and is likely to be appealed — ultimately bolster efforts to unionize the company’s workers? Wal-Mart has been fanatical in its efforts to beat back previous organizing efforts. In 2000, after the meat-cutting department at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jacksonville, Tex., voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the company responded by eliminating all such departments across the country. The retailer now only sells prepackaged meats. Three years ago, after workers at a Jonquiere, Quebec, store voted to unionize, Wal-Mart opted to close the outlet rather than bargain a contract.

According to Bernie Hesse, an organizer with UFCW Local 789, there are currently no credible efforts underway to organize local Wal-Mart workers. "It’s not even seen as an option for a worker," he says. "We’re at the point where it’s irrelevancy."

UFCW has sent the word down from on high that organizers shouldn’t waste their time trying to recruit workers for union campaigns. "We engage the workers," Hesse says. "We try to inform them of what their rights are. But in no way, shape or form is it to resemble an organizing campaign."

Instead, UFCW has been focused on a marketing campaign, Wake Up Wal-Mart, designed to shame the corporation into more responsible behavior, gum up its expansion plans and bloody its bottom line. Hesse says he called the union’s national headquarters yesterday to discuss the court decision and to lobby for more active engagement of workers.

"Here’s a real chance for us to run with this thing," he says. "I’m tired of standing out in front of a Wal-Mart doing stuff that maybe makes for a nice little sound-bite on occasion, but it’s not changing people’s lives."