The road to unionized Wal-Mart runs thru obscure towns where workers are abused in hidden warehouses

[Emit]

Holding Wal-Mart Accountable

The road to unionized Wal-Mart runs through obscure towns where workers are abused in hidden warehouses.

Harold Meyerson | September 6, 2010

Nobody, it seems, is responsible for the conditions of work in the warehouses of Fontana -- even though warehouse work is mainly what Fontana has to offer. The Los Angeles exurb is part of California's Inland Empire, which boasts the world's largest concentration of warehouses, to which thousands of trucks make a daily 70-mile trek from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, carrying Asian-made goods for market. Thousands more trucks depart daily from Fontana, carrying those goods, re-sorted and repackaged, to Wal-Marts, Targets, Loews, and Home Depots up to a thousand miles away. Close to 90,000 people work in those warehouses. But no one is responsible for the conditions of their work.

~snip~

The warehouses, in fact, are part of an elaborate system enabling Wal-Mart and its competitors to keep their prices low and their revenues high by depressing wages and labor costs all along their supply chains -- and to protect outfits like Wal-Mart from responsibility for working conditions. The giant retailers that have come to dominate much of the American economy don't own many of the hundreds of warehouses in Fontana or anyplace else.

In Fontana, the warehouses are owned by local commercial realtors and operated by logistics companies. But the logistics companies don't formally employ a majority of the warehouse workers, either. Rather, the workers are employed by some of the region's 270 temp agencies. ...

Thus are the goods moved with dispatch, while workers receive low pay, no benefits, can't readily join a union, and can be let go at a moment's notice. Theirs is a situation that the workers themselves -- almost entirely Hispanic, largely immigrant, and between a quarter to 40 percent of them, in the assessment of one union organizer, undocumented -- cannot easily remedy. And theirs is a situation for which their real employers -- the Targets, the Sears, and above all the Wal-Marts -- can and do deny all responsibility.

~snip~

... So while unionists and other worker advocates are asking President Barack Obama's Department of Labor and Middle Class Task Force to remedy misclassification violations at major employers, it's tricky to apply that remedy to warehouse workers unless they can be shown to be permanent workers misclassified as temps. Neither can the government deny contracts to the middlemen -- the logistics firms or employment agencies -- for these companies don't have government contracts.

Instead, the unions are asking the government for two things: First, to enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) rigorously inside the warehouses, tallying and fining them for violations of minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws. And second, to hold accountable not the temp agencies or the logistics companies or the local real-estate companies but, rather, the big-box retailers -- the companies that structured and benefit from this byzantine system.

~snip~

Going after the top of the chain to improve working conditions should fit comfortably within President Obama's stated economic goals, paramount among which is reversing the long-term decline of jobs and worker compensation in America. ...

~snip~

In taking on the Wal-Marts and FedExes, of course, the administration would be challenging some of the most powerful institutions in the land. Then again, in the America that Obama has pledged to rebuild, someone should always be responsible for the conditions of work.

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=holding_wal_mart_accountable

[hunter]

1. Excellent.

The economics of these "temp" agencies doesn't make any sense until you recognize their actual purpose: to suppress unions.

[me b zola]

2. K&R