To complete its acquisition of Massmart, a chain of retail stores in South Africa, Walmart struck a deal that must seem extraordinary to the company’s American employees. To win government approval of the acquisition, Walmart made concessions to a South African labor union, agreeing to avoid worker layoffs, honor existing union contracts, and use local suppliers.

The idea that Walmart negotiated with and made concessions to a labor union in South Africa may seem odd to workers in the United States, where Walmart has developed a reputation as one of the country’s most virulent opponents of organization efforts. In fact, Walmart’s workers are organized in many of the foreign countries in which it does business.

In Brazil, Argentina, China, the United Kingdom, and now South Africa, some Walmart employees are organized. In China, Walmart is required by law to recognize union membership, and in Mexico, 18 percent of its workers are organized. British labor leaders describe their dealings with Walmart as “honest,” and in Argentina, organized employees make as much as 40 percent more than employees at retailer’s major competitors. Walmart has a convenient response to why it lets workers organize in these countries, as the Washington Post reports:

“We have a local philosophy,” Wal-Mart International Chief Executive Doug McMillon recently told reporters. “It’s our intention to demonstrate that we are a great corporate citizen.”

In Brazil and Argentina, meanwhile, Walmart says it allows workers to unionize because “that’s what the associates want”:

“We recognize those rights,” said John Peter “J.P.” Suarez , senior vice president of international business development at Walmart. “In that market, that’s what the associates want, and that’s the prevailing practice.”

Apparently for Walmart, however, it matters not what workers want if those workers happen to be American.

Former Walmart Executive Vice President John Tate, who also served on its board, once said, “Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.” Walmart claims that view is Tate’s alone and is not representative of the company’s attitude toward unions, but its history of dealing with American unions seems to tell a different story.

The United Food and Commercial Workers has been trying to help organize Walmart employees for more than two decades. At each turn, it has been rebuffed by the company, which spent millions to oppose organization efforts. In 2000, when the meatcutting department at a Texas store organized, Walmart responded by announcing the phase-out of its meatcutting departments.

In 2008, Walmart spent millions more fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, lobbying against it in Washington and going so far as to summon “thousands of Wal-Mart sotre manages and department heads to mandatory meetings,” where it warned that voting for Barack Obama “would be tantamount to inviting unions in.”

Luckily for Walmart’s American employees, they have a useful ally in, of all places, South Africa. According to the Washington Post, the union that will represent Walmart workers in South Africa went to bat for the company’s American employees during its own negotiations. “You can’t say you violate the right to freedom of association because the culture in that country supports it,” Mduduzi Mbongwe, a South African union representative, said of Walmart’s approach to American unions. “We don’t accept such an argument.”

Our guest blogger is Nick Bunker, Special Assistant with the Economic Policy team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul (R) further revealed his anti-worker worldview when he stated his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act because some businesses might have to accept unions they don’t want. Paul’s statement is not surprising given his past comments on workplace issues. Unfortunately, ballot initiatives in four states are trying to implement Paul’s vision for a businesses veto over unions.

The initiatives, on the ballot in Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and Utah, claim to protect workers’ rights by amending the state constitution to guarantee the “right to a secret ballot” in elections for employee representation. Here is the language from the Arizona’s Prop. 113:

SECTION 36. THE RIGHT TO VOTE BY SECRET BALLOT FOR EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATION IS FUNDAMENTAL AND SHALL BE GUARANTEED WHERE LOCAL, STATE OR FEDERAL LAW PERMITS OR REQUIRES ELECTIONS, DESIGNATIONS OR AUTHORIZATIONS FOR EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATION.

In reality, these initiatives are not about protecting workers — if they were they would prevent management from intimidating workers from making a free choice whether to join a union. Instead, they are an attempt at preempting the strengthening of unions through the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that passed in the House in previous Congresses, but has failed to secure 60 votes in the Senate.

EFCA would allow workers to form a union if more than 50 percent of workers signed a card stating their support for the union. Card check unionization has been used in the past – by more than half a million workers since 2003, in fact – and unions have been formed at companies such as Cingular Wireless, Dow Jones, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Kaiser Permanente under the process.

Supporters of these initiatives claim they are only standing up for the rights of workers who would be intimidated by into voting for unionization under a card check voting system. Unfortunately for them, the record shows that management is much more likely to use coercion and intimidation, so much so that the process for joining a union is totally biased against workers. And contrary to the claims of business, majority sign up does not lead to union intimidation. A study of majority sign-up efforts at the University of Illinois found “not a single incident of union misconduct.”

Furthermore, the ability of these initiatives to preempt federal laws is even doubted by the legislative director of the National Right to Work Committee, an anti-union organization.

Behind these state ballot initiatives is the Save Our Secret Ballot campaign, a national 501(c)(4) organization that has funded efforts to put these initiatives on state ballots. The campaign has not and does not intend to disclose its donors. But if the campaign’s board is any indication, the group is funded by the usual corporate suspects. Save Our Secret Ballot’s Advisory Board includes past and present Republican elected officials and representatives of right wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Goldwater Institute. Read more

Kentucky Republican senate nominee Rand Paul has already made it quite clear that he doesn’t care much for worker’s rights, as he has called for drastically rolling back federal workers protections, including those for mine workers, and has a stated desire to “get OSHA out of our small businesses.” (OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.) During a debate yesterday, Paul made this stance even clearer, saying that he opposed the Employee Free Choice Act because, if it became law, businesses that don’t want to see their workers unionize might have to deal with a union anyway:

Let me interpret for ya. [Attorney General Jack Conway] is for the Employee Free Choice Act, which creates and allows unions to be formed and forced on businesses that don’t want to have unions. Jack is for it, I know it’s difficult to get that out of the answer.

Watch it:

So, in Paul’s mind, if management doesn’t want a union, then the business shouldn’t be unionized, regardless of what the workers want. Either that, or he thinks that EFCA will magically unionize workers who have no interest in being in a union. He’s either ignorant regarding how the bill would work, or in the more likely scenario, he would empower management with veto power over workers who want to form a union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, or safety standards.

Back in reality, EFCA would simply authorize workers to automatically form a union by signing cards signaling their favor for such a move. Workers are already allowed to form unions in this manner, and have been doing so without controversy for years. In fact, since 2003, more than half a million workers have been organized by majority sign-up, including those at Cingular Wireless, Dow Jones, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Kaiser Permanente.

The only catch is that, in order for this process to proceed, the employer has to give its okay. Even if a vast majority of workers indicate that they want to join a union, the employer can demand an election, giving itself ample time to intimidate or even fire pro-union workers and bring in union-busting consulting firms that specialize in winning unionization elections for the management. (75 percent of employers facing union drives hire anti-union consultants.) EFCA would simply remove this management veto over majority sign-up campaigns.

So does Paul favor unionization only if the employer gives its okay? That would fit into his anti-worker worldview, which, if it actually came to pass, would allow businesses to run roughshod over their employees, with no way for workers to come together and demand a better, safer workplace.

Back in April, the Arizona legislature passed its controversial immigration law, SB-1070, that has brought the state a deserved amount of scorn. But that is not the only pernicious work being undertaken by the Arizona state government.

This week, Republicans in the Arizona legislature are scrambling to repair the language of an anti-union ballot initiative that they hope to put before voters in November, after a judge tossed out their previous version. The initiative is meant to pre-but passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — which would grant workers the right to immediate union recognition if a majority sign cards indicating that they support the union — by outlawing unionization not done by “secret ballot.”

But the initiative’s proponents tried to bury their intent by applying their secret ballot standard to all elections, including those for federal and state political offices. A Superior Court Judge was not amused by the move, which violated “a prohibition against constitutional amendments dealing with more than one issue”:

Courts generally have said the purpose of that ban is to prevent “logrolling,” where voters who want one provision are essentially compelled to approve something else they do not want. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Robert Oberbillig said the legal problems appear to go beyond that. He said elections for public office already are by secret ballot. And Oberbillig questioned whether that provision wasn’t included as an inducement to get voters to approve the more controversial union measure.

The Arizona GOP is now back at work, drafting a version of the language that it feels will pass a judge’s muster.

But this whole effort is silly for a couple of reasons. The first is that the states are usually not allowed to circumvent a process that has been explicitly laid out by the federal government. Even the attorney representing those pushing the initiative “acknowledged that the provisions of federal law generally preempt state regulations and even constitutional provisions.”

The second is that workers are already allowed to form unions without a formal election, and have been doing so without controversy for years. In fact, since 2003, more than half a million workers have been organized by majority sign-up, including those at Cingular Wireless, Dow Jones, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Kaiser Permanente. The only catch is that, in order for this process to proceed, the employer has to give its okay. Even if a vast majority of workers indicate that they want to join a union, the employer can demand an election, giving itself ample time to intimidate or even fire pro-union workers.

A joint study by Rutgers University, Cornell University, and the Universities of Oregon and Illinois, which examined data from union campaigns in four states, shows that “the majority sign-up provision was used extensively without hint of union or employer abuse,” and that “contrary to business claims…there was not a single confirmed incident of union misconduct.”

Yesterday, President Barack Obama said that “we are going to keep on fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.” It’d be really great if that were so, Arizona’s suspect attempt to nullify it notwithstanding.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) like to portray themselves as the great defenders of democracy, protecting the “secret ballot” for workers everywhere. “There are sacred principles that epitomize American democracy,” wrote Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the ranking member on the House Ed. and Labor committee, while attacking EFCA. “They have private ballots in America, but not in other countries where there are tyrannies and socialism,” agreed Mark McKinnon of the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI).

But now that the National Mediation Board (NMB) — which oversees labor-management relations for the airline and railroad industries under the Railway Labor Act (RLA) — wants to issue a rule change making unionization elections in those two industries more democratic, Kline and WFI are singing a different tune.

Currently, under the RLA, employees who choose not to vote in a union election are counted as “no” votes, while under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), employees who don’t vote simply aren’t counted at all. So, in practice, this means that employees under RLA must get a majority of employees to vote affirmatively, while those under NLRA must get a majority of voting members to do so, just like in an election for a political office.

The NMB wants to change the RLA’s rules, to equalize the two processes. Kline and WFI reacted like this:

Republican Reps. John Kline (Minn.) and John Mica (Fla.) issued a release that called it a radical proposal that adds “to a troubling perception that federal agencies have embraced a culture of union favoritism.” [...] The Workforce Fairness Institute issued a press release titled “Forced Unionization” in response to the proposed rule change, and criticized the NMB for providing a “bailout” to the AFL-CIO.

The NMB has opened its proposed change up to a 60-day comment period, and with their respective responses, Kline and WFI reveal that their opposition has nothing to do with democracy. It’s about preventing unions from gaining more members, at all costs. After all, in what other election do people who don’t vote get counted for one side or the other?

Much like the push in Congress to bring truck drivers for FedEx under the NLRA, this rule change would eliminate an odd inequity in the system that is the product of the antiquated RLA, which was written in 1934. There is no reason to have the deck stacked against railway and airline workers, simply because they are pulled under an older law. But to Kline and WFI, it seems, whichever rules make it harder to form a union are those that epitomize democracy.

A few weeks ago, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) said that he’s still vying for a vote on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) this fall. “I’m pushing for it,” he said. “I think it’s something that we have to do.”

Harkin is one of a handful of negotiators trying to craft a compromise version of EFCA that will prove palatable to a group of centrist Democrats, among them Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). But speaking before the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce today, Lincoln “received a round of applause” for saying that business and labor — not Congress — should be crafting the legislation. From the Associated Press:

Sen. Blanche Lincoln says business and labor groups, not lawmakers, should be the ones to work out a compromise on a union organizing bill. Lincoln said that she still opposes the Employee Free Choice Act and doesn’t think the legislation should be considered while lawmakers are dealing with health care and other issues…Lincoln said any compromise would need to come from business and labor groups.

Big Business and its ally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have derided EFCA, calling it “a firestorm bordering on Armageddon,” saying that retailers who don’t oppose EFCA “should be shot,” and telling workers that unionizing means their benefits will be “thrown out the window.” With her approach, Lincoln is not only abdicating her responsibilities as a lawmaker to those special interests, but she is basically giving the business community a veto over any legislation that other lawmakers might craft.

And unfortunately, a stalemate over EFCA would be just fine with the business community, because under our current system for forming a union, employers hold all the cards. For example, they are able to force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union messaging, or compel employees to participate in anti-union discussions with their own supervisors. Employers threaten to close plants in 57 percent of union organizing drives, threaten to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent, and ultimately fire pro-union workers 34 percent of the time, while facing penalties that do nothing to deter such behavior, illegal as it is.

Meanwhile, unionized workers in Arkansas make an average of $1.26 per hour more than their non-unionized counterparts, a 7.7 percent increase. If Arkansas were to see unionization merely climb back to 1983 levels, workers there would earn an estimated $166 million more in wages and salaries per year. And consider this: “If Arkansas’ workers were rewarded for 100 percent of their increases in labor productivity between 1980 and 2008…average wages would be $23.29 per hour — 42.4 percent higher than the average real wage in 2008.”

Last month, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that EFCA was unnecessary “because we have very enlightened management in this country.” Is that how Lincoln sees it as well, despite the myriad benefits that EFCA could bring to workers in her state?

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised that no Republicans will vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), should it come to the Senate floor. In order for the bill to pass “the Democratic members will have to do it,” he said.

In a speech before the business organization Commerce Lexington, McConnell explained that the reason for such uncompromising opposition is that workers don’t actually want to join unions due to the “very enlightened management in this country now”:

McConnell said the AFL-CIO wants the measure approved because “private sector union membership has declined from a high of 35 percent in the 1950s to 7.5 percent now.” That has happened “because we have very enlightened management in this country now, treating employees better and employees have decided they don’t want to pay the dues.”

McConnell has already made his personal opinion that EFCA will “Europeanize America” well known, and with this rhetoric, he has officially aligned the entire Republican position on EFCA with that of the Chamber of Commerce (which has said that EFCA is a “no-compromise” piece of legislation). But if McConnell truly thinks that the reason more workers aren’t joining unions is because of “enlightened management,” he hasn’t been paying any attention to the reality of working and organizing in America.

For starters, an AFL-CIO survey found that there are 60 million American workers who say that they would join a union if they could. The reason that they can’t is because employers threaten to close plants in 57 percent of union organizing drives and threaten to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent, while ultimately firing pro-union workers 34 percent of the time.

As Kate Bronfenbrenner, Director of Labor Education Research at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations pointed out, over the last 20 years “employer opposition [to unionization] has intensified…and the nature of campaigns has changed so that the focus is on more coercive and punitive tactics designed to intensely monitor and punish union activity.”

And in addition to anti-union campaigns, management in this country is engaged in a whole host of other labor violations. Yesterday, a new survey came out in which 68 percent of low-income workers reported being subject to a pay violation in the previous work week alone. This isn’t meant to paint the entire business community with a broad stroke — as there are surely plenty of companies that don’t engage in this sort of behavior — but the problem is far more widespread than McConnell and the rest of the Republican party are evidently willing to concede. And just like with health care reform, the GOP has already decided that it’s not interested in discussing a solution.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

Over at ThinkProgress, Lee Fang lays out how America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) has enlisted the corporate consulting firm Democracy Data & Communications (DDC) to host its “grassroots” lobbying campaign against the public option. As Fang points out, “DDC has made a name for itself as one of the most effective stealth lobbying firms.”

Earlier this summer, DDC was caught using a front group called ‘Citizens for a Safe Alexandria’ to attack the Obama administration for seeking to prosecute Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Alexandria, VA. DDC also helped to orchestrate “grassroots” support for President Bush’s push to privatize Social Security. And the group is evidently not through helping advocates of anti-worker policies.

Case in point, according to a list of DDC-hosted domains obtained by ThinkProgress, DDC is hosting the website EFCA-info.org, which is chock-full of misinformation regarding the Employee Free Choice Act (in multiple languages, no less). Though EFCA-info purports to be “a website dedicated to providing visitors with factual and up-to-date information regarding the Employee Free Choice Act,” it spreads various falsehoods about EFCA eliminating the secret ballot or destroying small businesses. And it’s no surprise that the site has this slant, once you look at who keeps it going.

The site is supported by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and the HR Policy Association, along with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the National Black Chamber of Commerce. The IWF, according to SourceWatch, “is an anti-feminist organization predominately funded by conservative U.S. foundations.” IWF is funded by Koch Industries, which also funds Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and FreedomWorks, both of which were instrumental in organizing the anti-Obama tea party protests. [See response from Koch Industries below]

In fact, from 2003 to 2008, the IWF and AFP operated out of the same office space and had the same president — Nancy Pfotenhauer, a consistent member of the Koch Industries family and former spokeswoman for Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign. Currently, the IWF is headed by Michelle Bernard, who earlier this month appeared on MSNBC to declare that “quite honestly, a lot of labor unions are what holds America back and keeps us from being as good as we can be.”

This circle of groups — funded by Koch’s petro-dollars — are trying to derail reform on a variety of fronts, under the guise of grassroots lobbying. And they’re doing it with the aid of DDC’s servers.

In the last few days, the Economic Freedom Alliance (EFA) has created a website and placed billboards in Indiana pressuring Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) to vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFA, which is composed of a variety of business organizations located in the Midwest, claims that its purpose is to make Congress “feel the pressure from our central message about the harmful effect that radical organized labor proposals in Congress will have on job creation in the Midwest”:

[T]he absence of a hard-hitting, district-focused campaign leaves a serious gap in that overall effort. EFA is not encumbered by the need for political correctness and hence its response can be better positioned to fill the critical messaging void in overall Card Check opposition campaign.

Evidently, EFA is also not encumbered by a need to adhere to the facts, as its website is claiming that the Employee Free Choice Act will “cost the U.S. economy 600,000 jobs in 2010,” which is a statistic taken from a thoroughly discredited study by business sponsored scholar Anne Layne-Farrar. As the Institute for Southern Studies put it, “even as a piece of business research-for-hire, Layne-Farrar’s study is shockingly weak — based on a thin set of old and irrelevant data that doesn’t even bear out her own conclusions.”

But EFA’s disclosure and expenditure form provides some insight into why it’s comfortable parading out false talking points. After all, the EFA has paid $100,000 in consulting fees to Karl Rove and Co this year.

This $20,000 fee was paid every month this year, February through June. And given Rove’s penchant for falsehoods, it’s no surprise that EFA has gone down the same road. EFA has also given $5000 to astroturf group Americans for Prosperity to “reimburse for event expense” (with Prosperity misspelled as “Properity” on the disclosure form).

The Associated Press reported that opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), feeling that they have dispensed with majority sign-up, are starting to “intensify their attack on another major provision [of the bill]: Binding arbitration if a new union and management can’t agree on a first contract within 120 days.”

A popular narrative from these opponents is that majority sign-up was actually just a red herring, meant to distract everyone from the arbitration provision that labor really wanted. “We suspected from the beginning that the binding arbitration was packaged with the elimination of the secret ballot in order to create a straw man they could take down later,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). In that vein, the Chamber of Commerce had this to say about EFCA’s arbitration provision:

“Card check is the political poison in the bill, but forced arbitration is the real poison,” said Steven Law, general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If arbitration truly is poisonous, then the Chamber must have built up quite an immunity over the years. After all, it has consistently favored binding arbitration, when such arbitration helps it avoid litigation in consumer disputes. Here’s some of the Chamber’s prior rhetoric:

– Lisa A. Rickard, president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, wrote that the findings of an arbitration study “prove that arbitration continues to provide consumers with fair, inexpensive, and unbiased access to justice across the broadest spectrum of consumer disputes.” [3/11/09]

– The data is increasingly clear: for most consumers, arbitration is a better way to resolve disputes than being forced into court. [Chamber Press release, 7/15/08]

– Virtually any type of dispute between private individuals or entities can be addressed by arbitration, including, for example, contract, real estate, employment, and tort disputes. [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, “Issues Resource Center”]

Overall, U.S. companies include mandatory arbitration clauses in 75 percent of consumer agreements. The Chamber seems to have no problem with that, but when arbitration translates into workers getting a fair shot at a contract, it’s suddenly poisonous.

Arbitration is a necessary part of EFCA because, all too often, employees vote to form a union, but can’t get a first contract due to their employer’s delay tactics. More than half of new unions still have no contract one year after they are certified, and 37 percent have no contract after two years. A full quarter of new unions wait more than three years to receive a first contract.