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Wal-mart ordered to recognize union
On June 18, a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge ruled that a Wal-Mart store in Jacksonville, TX must reopen its meat-cutting department and recognize and bargain with the unionized butchers over the effects of the change to prepackaged meat. This order comes more than three years after the original union election.
“This is a historic decision — the first bargaining order issued against Wal-mart in the United States,” union leader Johnny Rodriguez said in a statement. “It is a victory for all Wal-Mart workers who are fighting for a voice at work.”
In 2000, seven of the ten butchers at the Jacksonville store voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union. The vote marked the only union success at a Wal-Mart store. Soon after, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced it was closing its meat-cutting departments across the country. Many of the butchers were reassigned as meat stockers.
Changing the way all of its stores sell meat shows the extent to which Wal-Mart will go to keep the union out of its stores,” says UFCW Executive Vice President Mike Leonard. “Anytime management concocts a scheme to ratchet down people’s livelihoods, it says a lot about the real nature of the company.”
In recent months, organized labor has escalated efforts to unionize Wal-Mart stores after five years of failing to even dent the world’s largest retailer’s armor. (AP, UFCW)

US job market worst since early ‘90s
Three out of four employers expect to cut jobs or hold off on hiring this summer, contributing to the worst employment market since the early 1990s, according to a new survey released June 17.
About two-thirds of employers said they don’t expect to hire any additional workers and nine percent plan to eliminate jobs during the July-to-September quarter, according to the survey by Manpower Inc.
Manpower, which is based in Glendale, Wis., and is the nation’s largest staffing company, has conducted the survey for 27 years.
“It’s a buyer’s market right now if you’re an employer,” said economist Patrick Anderson, principal of Anderson Economic Group in Lansing, MI. “Some of those who are getting a real shock are those who are emerging from college and don’t have strong work skills.”
Doug Thomas, operations manager of TemPro Staffing of Green Bay, WI., called the job outlook for light industrial semiskilled workers, “very, very weak.”
“More manufacturing is leaving than coming,” Thomas said.
Employment estimates across the United States are relatively consistent, with the South reporting slightly stronger hiring expectations and the Northeast expecting the slowest hiring pace for the third consecutive quarter. (AP)