Obama Election Watch

Wal-Mart has launched a nationwide campaign indoctrinating company managers on why an Obama presidency would harm the company’s employees. These charges could reach 1.4 million company employee voters as well as another million or more spouses and friends.
  There may be a temptation for the Obama campaign to lash out at Wal-Mart’s dismal record in providing employee benefits and living wages. OEW suggests that the Wal-Mart bashing be left to others.

Recently it was revealed that Wal-Mart held required-attendance meetings for thousands of store managers and supervisory staff.

The purpose of the meetings was to warn Wal-Mart employees that the election of Barack Obama would lead to greater pressures for unionization at the company’s more than 4,000 stores in the United States. As is usual when a company is fighting unionization, Wal-Mart raised the standard bogey that organized labor will force its workers to pay hefty union dues and get little or nothing in return. Wal-Mart also warns that employees may be required to go out on strike for indefinite periods when they would receive no compensation whatsoever.

Undoubtedly, these Wal-Mart managers are expected to relay this information on to store employees. The clear message is that an Obama victory would be bad for Wal-Mart and therefore bad for Wal-Mart employees.

In a first reaction, Obama supporters may play down this threat as merely affecting the employees of a single American company. Yet the potential damage to Obama’s prospects for winning the presidency is considerable. There are more than 1.4 million Wal-Mart employees spread throughout the United States. Many of these employees have spouses, relatives, and friends who will hear the false claims that are being disseminated by the company.

Of importance too is the fact that Wal-Mart stores and employees are heavily concentrated in rural areas where Obama’s support has been weak. There are large numbers of Wal-Mart stores in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Missouri.

The Obama campaign is incensed that Wal-Mart is telling its managers and employees how they should cast their votes. The first instinct for the Obama team may be to react by going on the offensive and bringing up Wal-Mart’s poor record in providing its employees a living wage and adequate health benefits.

Keep in mind that there is likely to be a backlash from Wal-Mart’s actions. Lots of Wal-Mart employees will resent that the company is treating them as dummies and telling them how to vote.

There are plenty of facts that could be used to show that Wal-Mart is a bad corporate citizen. Hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees earn substandard if not exploitive wages with little prospect for advancement. Wal-Mart was fined $11 million by the federal government in 2005 for using illegal immigrants as janitors in 60 stores in 21 states. Then there is the policy of Wal-Mart locking night workers in the building, under the premise of keeping the employees safe from robbers. In fact, published reports show that the lock-ins were held because management believed employees would loot the stores. Emergency exits at Wal-Mart were only to be used by locked-in employees in case of a fire, with the penalty of job loss if the policy was not followed. Most important is the fact that only about one half of Wal-Mart workers are covered by company health insurance. And for those who are covered, the Wal-Mart plan obliges employees to pay a high deductible.

But Obama must leave this battle to either surrogates, labor unions, or other employee rights advocates. Indeed, labor appears to be taking the lead calling for the Federal Election Commission to look into Wal-Mart’s actions.

It is better for Obama not to join the fray. Like it or not, Wal-Mart is an American institution. Wal-Mart stores are the place to shop for millions of working-class families who appreciate the store’s wide selection and everyday low prices. Unfortunately for Obama these are the same people whom he had difficulty attracting during the Democratic primaries. If he were to go on the offensive against the Wal-Mart corporation, Obama would risk alienating the large group of Wal-Mart customers that he is trying so hard to attract to his campaign.

Therefore, it is important for Obama to show restraint in responding to the efforts of Wal-Mart’s management to influence the votes of store managers and employees.

Obama should stick to the game plan of showing working-class families that his overall economic program would be good news for low- and middle-income workers compared to the program offered by John McCain. The key benefit proposed by Obama is raising the federal minimum wage, a plan that should appeal to many Wal-Mart workers. Obama’s plans for cutting taxes for low- and middle-income families, extending unemployment benefits, helping those who are at risk of losing their homes as a result of the mortgage crisis, providing energy rebates to help pay home heating costs, expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, and providing tax credits for child-care expenses also would benefit the vast majority of Wal-Mart employees.

It would be good politics for the Obama campaign to keep the focus on the U.S. economy and leave the Wal-Mart bashing to others.