Chairman Miller Statement on Human Rights Watch Report on Wal-Mart

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, issued the following statement today in response to a report from Human Rights Watch on Wal-Mart's efforts to prevent its workers from exercising their rights to form unions and bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

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As the Human Rights Watch report lays out in painstaking detail, Wal-Mart has gotten very good at trampling all over its employees' rights to form unions and bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. Wal-Mart workers who try to exercise their basic right to form a union are threatened, harassed, demoted, reassigned, and fired. Wal-Mart even maintains its own anti-union SWAT team, ready to swoop into any store as soon as managers see signs of organizing activity.

Wal-Mart's tactics demonstrate clearly that the system for forming unions and bargaining is badly broken. Workers are routinely denied the right to determine for themselves whether to form a union. In 2005 alone, over 30,000 workers received back pay from employers that illegally fired or otherwise discriminated against them for their union activities. This has got to change.

In March, the House passed the Employee Free Choice Act. Senator Edward Kennedy has introduced the legislation in the Senate and is pushing to get it passed there. The Employee Free Choice Act would restore workers' rights to form unions and bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. It says that when a majority of workers sign cards saying they want a union, they get one - period. It also stiffens penalties against employers that break the law.

This Human Rights Watch report makes it very clear why it's so important that workers be able to choose for themselves whether to form a union. Wal-Mart's treatment of its workers has been, in many cases, abhorrent. The company has routinely violated overtime laws; it has violated child labor laws; it has discriminated against women employees, and it continues to pay low wages and benefits.

The average full-time wage at Wal-Mart is $10.51 per hour. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO, earned $6.3 million in salary, bonuses, and perks in 2006; he earned much more than that in stock awards. This disparity symbolizes the growing economic inequality in our country as a whole.

Without a union, Wal-Mart employees have had little ability to seek improvements in the way the company treats them. If we want to make sure that all American workers get their fair share of the benefits of their productivity, then one of the best things we can do is to restore workers' rights to join together to bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tom Kiley / Rachel Racusen
2181 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
202-226-0853