Leveling the playing field [View All]

“We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.”

— former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott

The above quote, spoken last October by the man who was then the leader of the world’s largest retailer, provides a succinct context for the high-stakes fear-based campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Beneath Scott’s bravado lies fear — a fear that if the playing field is leveled to give workers an equal footing, Wal-Mart could see its 1.4-million American work force unionize to receive higher wages, health-care benefits and pensions commensurate with the Bentonville, Ark.-based company’s 2008 earnings of $12.73 billion on $374.53 billion in sales.

But the rest of us need not embrace Wal-Mart’s strong anti-union stance and its defense of an economic status quo in which the income of the median working-age household fell by $2,000 between 2000 and 2007. Fear should not guide the debate.

The bill, which has 233 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives, where it passed in March 2007, remains stalled in the Senate. Maine’s two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, are expected to be key votes when the Senate takes up the measure this summer (S. 560 / H.R.1490).

http://www.timesrecord.com/articles/2009/05/15/opinion/editorials/doc4a0c5e6f3006d741993242.txt