WakeUpWalmart.com Plays the Jesse Jackson Card
WakeUpWalmart.com has the Reverend Jesse Jackson on their side now. Their web site has a feature page that states, “Leaders of faith representing over 1.3 million Americans have joined WakeUpWalMart.com…” The disturbing thing is that WakeUpWalmart.com has listed a copy of a letter that was reported to have been sent to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott quoting scripture. It was not enough that they built their latest TV ad starting with a picture of what appears to be an open Bible and then go on to quote Luke 6:31 before addressing people of faith about shopping at Wal-Mart. WakeUpWalmart.com continues to prey on the emotions of American Chrstians to further their selfish cause. I quote the letter to the Wal-Mart from the WakeUpWalmart.com web site:
“The prophet Moses in Deuteronomy 25:13-15 teaches ‘Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy … lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin unto thee.’”
I have read Deuteronomy 25:13-15 in about a dozen different translations thanks to BibleGateway.com and my personal library of Bibles and other study materials. Here is one example:
“In all your transactions you must use accurate scales and honest measurements, so that you will have a long, good life in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Deuteronomy 25:13-15 TLB
I am certainly not a theologian, but I am not receiving anything near what these leaders of faith statement says when I read that scripture. I believe that this is another case of scripture being taken out of context. At least the letter that was supposedly written by a group of Baptist leaders of faith stripped out the scripture reference. You can read their version of the letter to Lee Scott in the comments of a blog post on WakeUpWalmart.com.
I found a post by La Shawn Barber where she went ballistic on Jesse Jackson for taking scripture way out of context in a posting titled Jesus was Liberal. That posting was done by La Shawn Barber back in August of 2004 and is well worth the time it takes to read it. I know that La Shawn Barber is not a big Wal-mart fan anymore after reading a post she did last month about a Wal-Mart immigration issue. The point of my story today is not to promote Wal-Mart, but to expose WakeUpWalmart.com for what I believe it is, and that is evil. They are using scripture to support their evil and greedy cause. I will use a bit of scripture to support my cause.
“Take no part in the worthless pleasures of evil and darkness, but instead, rebuke and expose them.” Ephesians 5: 11-12 TLB
Is mine out of context? I am not an Ephesian, but I try to read Paul’s letters as if he were writing to me.
The WakeUpWalmart.com web site does not add to their count of supports the 1.3 Million Americans who these leaders of faith supposedly represent. It has been four days since I reported that WakeUpWalmart.com was claiming to have 150,517 supports. This evening that number has eased up to 151.418. That is an average of approximately 225 new supporters per day since my last report. That is a slow growth given the WakeUpWalmart.com web site has been registered since 21 March 2005 and had seen an average of about 560 new supporters per day between 21 March and 13 December.
The root motivation of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers International Union) via the WakeUpWalmart.com web site may be buried in point eight of their facts page. This fact points out the anti-union stance by Wal-Mart. You can read Wal-Mart’s side of the Wal-Mart Union as well. Ultimately it is up to the employees to decide whether they go union or not. It would be best for Walmart employees to continue to save their wages and not bother paying the UFCW any dues to do the fighting for them.
My experiences with a union left a bad taste in my mouth even though I never actually had to strike. Fortunately I left that union job before they went on strike for several months. Why do I feel fortunate? I will do the math on that one for you. Let’s say I was grossing $40K on that union job. A three month strike would cost me as much as $10K in lost gross wages if I was not able to find other work during the strike. Never mind the tiny stipend you get from your local union while on strike because it will barely buy a week’s groceries. Now let’s say the strike was over an issue that was worth approximately 10% of my gross income. That is a gain of $4k per year worth of benefits if the strike is successfully. That means I would have needed to work another 2.5 years just get back what I lost while on strike if the total 10% example came in pure cash compensation. What kind a deal is that when a contract is only three years and you are likely to repeat it all over again six months after recovering from the last strike if the last strike was only three months long and was successful? I do not wish that situation on anyone.
I hope you will pass a link to this story along to any of your friends who might attend one of the churches represented by these leaders of faith referred to on WakeUpWalmart.com. They are feeding an effort that I believe is rooted in evil. I do not believe that the intentions of WakeUpWalmart.com are anything other than greed and anger because the UFCW can not get their hand in the pockets of the 1.3 Million Wal-Mart employees in the US.
How much is all of this worth to a union who can get upwards of 1 million new members? Let’s do some conservative math to answer that question. Let’s say that a union charges each new member $25 per month in dues. That would be $25 MILLION per month in dues pouring into the UFCW. That is probably a realistic number given this example of how dues are collected in one local UFCW in Canada. The local in Canada reports that they collect one half hours pay every week plus one dollar per month per employee. That would be just about $25 per employee per month based on an average of $8 per hour in wages for Wal-Mart employees per WakeUpWalmart.com’s own reports. That would be $300 million dollars per year in increase cash flow for the USCW based on my numbers.
Statistics show (from the years of the Clinton administration) that unions are not necessarily the the best thing for workers. A brief from 1998 found on the NILRR (NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR LABOR RELATIONS RESEARCH) web site says that Right-To-Work states have better numbers that forced union states. You can check out Answer.com to learn more about the term Right-To-Work.
I will leave you with one more interesting statistic. The UFCW Union has a reported 1.4 million members already, but they have only been able to round up support from just over 150,000 people to support the WakeUpWalmart.com cause.
The link to this article is:
http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2005/12/18/139/
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December 19th, 2005 at 9:34 am
Jackson Joines WakeUpWalMart Campaign
Hank Osborne writes at The Land of Ozz but he has the reality of what is behind the labor union campaign against Wal-Mart.
December 19th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
Hello from a Walmart Associate. I am a sales associate at store 1011. I have been at this particular Walmart for a little over 3 months. I have always been treated fairly, never been asked to work off the clock, I always get my breaks and my lunch.
The managers (from the head store manager down) at my store are good people. Do they always make the right decisions? No, but then agian neither do I.
As for a union. I have never been apart of one myself but my husband has and they bite. In experiences that I have watched with my husband the strongest group gets what they want and everyone else gets left out. So then we will have yet another problem. Lets see the department managers would want their own, CSMs another group, sales in another, deli and bakery would probably go together, and don’t forget the over night people.
Don’t get me wrong. Walmart isn’t perfect but the only man who ever walked the face of the earth that was without fault is Jesus.
Adrienne
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:51 am
I’m not a fan of unions. I worked for 3 years in a “union shop” (on the “management” side of the fence), and my husband worked in a warehouse for 10 years with a union and was forced to be part of it. I saw in my company fairly good union/management relations that were strained every once in a while by union agitators. My husband saw really poor union/mangement relations where the management really did seek to strong arm the individual employee so the union was instrumental in helping to protect employees. While my husband wished on one hand that there wasn’t a union because he felt that there was abuse of power in the union infrastructure, he also regularly pointed out the difference in wages between companies like his who were unionized, and other very similar companies that were not–the unionized companies have much higher wages in that field.
I think you have misrepresented unions a bit–mostly in your “strike” calculations.
You assume a 3 month strike. How long is the average strike? Certainly no where near to 3 months long! In 10 years in a union my husband only striked once, and it was just for a few days.
As for Walmart’s sugar coated statement about how employees are happy and are best served by their close relationships with management…have you actually talked to a cross section of Walmart employees lately? I don’t know very many who are happy with management.
When I worked as a Safety Specialist for a large company that *was* genuinely concerned with employee safety, I was shocked by examples I read in the trade literature about safety problems at Walmart. But after reading them, it didn’t surprise me when I started to run into people who had been injured on the job at Walmart, but were threatened with termination if they reported the injuries. A union would provide employees back up and grievance process in situations like this. Unions *aren’t* just about paychecks…they really can help with overall quality of the workplace in some situations. Perhaps Walmart is one of them.