Is Wal-Mart doing plumbing or punishment?
It’s certainly possible that Wal-Mart is temporarily closing five stores, including one in Pico Rivera, “due to ongoing plumbing issues that will require extensive repairs,” as it claims.
It’s possible that the Pico Rivera closure, which will cost the jobs of more than 500 employees and will last six months to a year, isn’t part of an effort to punish workers who have been at “the center of concerted action by Associates to improve the wages and working conditions of all Walmart Associates around the country,” as the workers asserted in a complaint filed Monday with the National Labor Relations Board.
If so, however, there wouldn’t be so many questions about Wal-Mart’s repair plans. Why hasn’t the giant retailer applied for building permits for the work? Not at Pico Rivera, nor at any of the other four stores — two in Texas and one each in Florida and Oklahoma, according to a Tampa, Fla., TV station. Why, of the list of 50 “plumbing issues” Wal-Mart provided to The Times dating to July 2014 for the Pico Rivera store, were half identified as “non-emergency” problems such as leaky urinals and broken toilet handles?
Why weren’t problems fixed when the store underwent a recent $500,000 refurbishment — during which it didn’t have to be closed — that included the restrooms and the grocery department, according to papers on file with the Pico Rivera building department?
Or, if the plumbing problems were so severe that the building has to be completely closed until Christmas and possibly beyond, why didn’t Wal-Mart say anything about it until April 13? On that day, according to Venanzi Luna, an employee at the Pico Rivera store, managers called workers to a meeting at 1 p.m. to inform them the location would be
closed as of 7 p.m.
The other stores were closed with similar suddenness. No advance warning to customers, to the communities or to the employees.
In February, Wal-Mart made a high-profile bid to turn around its reputation for scandalously poor wages and working conditions for many of its 1.4 million U.S. workers. The company said it would raise minimum starting pay to $9 an hour beginning next month and $10 an hour in February 2016.
But its handling of the store closings, which will affect 2,200 workers overall, supports speculation that the February wage initiative was just for show — that Wal-Mart’s solicitude for its immense workforce is barely skin-deep.
Luna, 36, who is a leader in the movement for better pay and conditions for employees, says the Pico Rivera staff members were told that they could apply for positions at other area stores.
There were no guarantees that any jobs would be available. The workers were told that once the Pico Rivera store reopened, they would have to reapply, and that regardless of their job level and pay on the shutdown date, it might be at minimum wage.
“That’s standard for our [human resources] procedures,” Wal-Mart spokesman Brian Nick told me. The workers are entitled to 60 days of severance, he said. But that’s not by WalMart’s choice; it’s mandated by federal and California laws, which say that workers must be given 60 days’ advance notice of a mass layoff or be paid for that period.
The Pico Rivera workers assert in their NLRB complaint that the four other store closings are a smokescreen to conceal that they’re the company’s real target. Pico Rivera has been a hotbed of Wal-Mart employee activism through the nationwide group OUR Walmart (an acronym for Organization United for Respect). “This unprecedented ‘closure’ to fix ‘plumbing’ is part of Walmart’s overall national strategy to punish Associates who stand up and speak out for better working conditions,” they said in the complaint.
The Pico Rivera store was the site of the first OUR Wal-Mart strike in 2012 and remained a center of vocal activism on “issues of scheduling, pay, benefits, part time work, unfair treatment and discrimination throughout the country,” the group notes. They’re asking the NLRB to order Wal-Mart to find jobs for the 2,200 laid-off workers without loss of pay, or to reinstate them at their old stores.
The organization Making Change at Walmart, which is associated with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, observes further that Wal-Mart has been accused of anti-union maneuvers in the past.
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled last year that the company had illegally closed a Quebec store in 2005 after the workers had filed to unionize; the company denied the shutdown was related to the union campaign. In 2000, after meat cutters at a Texas supercenter voted to join the UFCW, the company announced it would close meat-cutting operations in 180 stores and switch to prepackaged meats, a move that “shows the extent to which Wal-Mart will go to keep the union out of its stores,” the UFCW said.
Wal-Mart’s Nick says the recent closings were abrupt so that the work could get underway promptly. Yet city records show the company hasn’t even applied for permits.
The five closed stores had the largest number of repair work orders in the company, Nick said. In January, the Pico Rivera store’s deli department was downgraded from an A to B by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health because it had no hot water, says Luna, who had worked at the store for eight years and was earning $14.40 an hour as a deli worker. She says that problem resulted from a malfunctioning water heater — not the plumbing. The downgrade happened, she said, because store managers weren’t on site to get the heater fixed before the county’s deadline.
As for the recent remodeling, much of which the city inspected and approved in December, Nick said, “that’s why the recurring plumbing reports are particularly problematic.”
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