General Discussion

Walton took his cues from attorney John Tate, who as a young man in 1936 had been conked on the head while crossing a picket line at Reynolds Tobacco Company in his hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where his father was a manager. It was a licking he never forgot. “I hate unions with a passion,” he once said. An ardent conservative who construed his clashes with labor leaders as one aspect of a bigger fight for “freedom” being conducted by right- thinking Americans, Tate perfected the art of “union avoidance.” By the early 1970s, when Sam Walton procured his services, Tate’s bag of tricks included trying to keep workers happy by soliciting their input for improving the business and rewarding them with profit sharing.

But he also had his clients trot out hardball tactics whenever necessary: convening captive meetings where workers were force-fed anti-union propaganda, delaying elections, stalling negotiations, replacing strikers, and moving to decertify unions that had won the right to represent the rank-and-file.

When the Retail Clerks threatened to gain a foothold at two Missouri Walmarts in 1972, a company executive instructed the manager at one of them that if he caught any workers with union cards, he should fire them even if he had to bring on all new employees. When the Teamsters tried to organize a Walmart distribution center in Searcy, Arkansas, in 1982, Walton himself told the workers that he’d take away their profit sharing if they voted for the union.

…

Then he went even further. “He told us that if the union got in, the warehouse would be closed,” one of those in Searcy related. “He said people could vote any way they wanted, but he’d close her right up.” All of this was illegal, but that didn’t seem to give Walton any pause. The Teamsters lost the election, much to his delight. “Our good associates at our Searcy distribution center rejected the union by an overwhelming margin of three to one,” Walton wrote in Wal-Mart World. “Bless them all.”

https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-the-attempts-to-unionize-walmart/