The National Parents Union front for the Walton family’s dive into the Democratic Party’s primaries decided to adopt the name union, though it is not only not a union but is virulently anti-union—a posture that surely satisfies the WalMart heirs.
A union is “An organization of workers, formed for the purpose of negotiating with employers on matters of wages, seniority, working conditions and the like.” (Black’s Law Dictionary). That isn’t what NPU is about. It is animated by hostility toward labor unions. When it pitched NPU to the Waltons one of its rationales was:
Anti-unionism is catnip to the Waltons. If they cared about families Wal-Mart could offer parents a livable wage and benefits. Instead in California alone “researchers at UC Berkeley found that Wal-Mart wages—about 31 percent below those in large retail establishments as a whole—made it necessary for tens of thousands of company employees to rely on public ‘safety net’ programs, such as food stamps, Medicare, CHIPS, and subsidized housing, to make ends meet.” (Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution). If you ever wish to shrug off the scandal that contributions to political fronts like National Parents Union are tax deductible for America’s richest family, pause to consider that your taxes also support all those who can’t get by working at Wal-Mart.
What the Waltons care about is taxes. Tax revenues going from their pockets to support public schools is what this is about. Taxes, taxes, taxes.
Thomas Jessen Adams has described Wal-Mart’s workplace practices as founded on “a vociferous anti-unionism, embedded gender discrimination, compulsive cost cutting, and near comprehensive control over workers and the workplace.” Ellen Israel Rosen writes of how Wal-Mart has disciplined employees by shaming them and has engaged in calculated bias targeted at women. Nelson Lichtenstein writes that the company has cratered wages, encouraged job insecurity, and engaged in pervasive secret surveillance of employees. (Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution).
But good Lord, those teacher strikes! According to Diane Ravitch, the average teacher in the United States makes about $60,000. The teachers who won their strike in deep red West Virginia had not had a raise in eight years. In Florida on Monday thousands of teachers took a personal day to protest for better working conditions a day before the conservative Florida legislature opened its new session. According to the Florida Education Association “Florida ranks among the bottom 10 states in funding for students, and state education funding hasn’t climbed above pre-recession levels from a decade ago.” The average teacher’s salary is in the mid-$40s and “many school staff earn a wage below the federal poverty line.” CNN reports that most of the requested funding for schools would go not to paychecks but to school funding for programs like music, art, and drama. The New York Times wrote of last year’s Chicago teachers’ strike “Teachers in Chicago drew attention to matters far beyond salary to broad issues of social justice, casting their fight as a battle for equity among the city’s poor and rich families, for safety for immigrants and for affordable housing in an ever more expensive city.”
Damn greedy unionists! This is what has the NPU leadership’s knickers in a twist.
What concerns the Waltons is that not only public workers but private workers—their workers!—might recognize that working people have a right to decent wages, fair treatment, promotion, good careers, health care, pensions, freedom from gender discrimination, and to be treated with dignity. (Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution; Lafer, The One Percent Solution).
The union name gets some attention as does the involvement of former SEIU head Andy Stern. He has since gone on to work for privatizing underwriter Eli Broad. But he did have one interesting piece of advice for NPU leaders:
NPU isn’t going to take that advice. But then, neither is it a union. Sounds like there is already dissension in the ranks. Stern’s advice would “disrupt” NPU’s Walton-approved battle plan.
Imagine Alice Walton’s response when some poor underling came in and told her “Hey, those folks in Boston want to start a union!”
Come to think of it, they’d be among the few Americans on the Waltons’ payroll allowed to join a union.
“Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union.”—Union Maid, Woody Guthrie
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not parenting.]