Blank, who heads up WakeUpWalmart.com, did not have the press credentials required to get in. But as a hotel guest, he did have a right to use the property’s business center, just down the hall from the rooms where Wal-Mart was holding its press gaggle.
After a bit of discussion, Blank said he was allowed to pass through and make his way to the tiny business center, where he and a colleague frantically printed out materials for their union-sponsored campaign.
Borrowing tactics from the political world, of which he once was a part, Blank traveled from Washington to Rogers to counter Wal-Mart’s presentations to the news media with a message of a different kind.
As reporters waited for the retailer’s executives to begin their afternoon of speeches, Blank and his colleagues rounded up several television, newspaper and magazine journalists and invited them to the hotel’s main restaurant, where a young minister and a handful of current and former Wal-Mart employees went public with their grievances against the company.
“It’s just time to speak out,” said panelist Greg Pierce, who said he quit his job last week as a customer sales manager of a Wal-Mart store in Ocala, Fla., because he was only being scheduled to work 32 hours a week instead of the 40 hours he had been promised.
“They’re a $200 billion company and they could do more, but they won’t,” said Ollie Wells, who works at a Wal-Mart distribution center in Brooksville, Fla. The 37-year-old said he wants to keep his job to support his wife and the needs of their two autistic children, but he has been unhappy with the company’s working conditions and benefits plans.
Also on the panel were a Wal-Mart employee from a store in Maryland and a 70-year-old Dallas woman, Maria Lopez, who said she was working at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Lancaster but has been on medical leave since August because of a shoulder injury sustained in an on-the-job accident.
Lopez, a 12-year Wal-Mart veteran who was earning $10.93 an hour, said it took her months to get workers’ compensation.
“We wanted to do this as kind of a foil,” said Blank, who worked on campaigns for politicians including former presidential hopeful Howard Dean before being recruited by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to run WakeUpWalmart.com.
Reporters have learned to count on Blank to distribute commentary on nearly all major developments at Wal-Mart. When the retailer sends out news releases about management changes, benefits news or growth initiatives, Blank’s group often follows up with a response — usually critical of the company — within hours.
Blank said that more than 212,000 people have pledged their support to the campaign via the WakeUpWalmart.com site and petitions circulated in neighborhoods across the country.
In the first Wal-Mart-sponsored presentation of the day, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee praised his state’s biggest private employer for providing jobs to 1.3 million Americans and driving down prices for financially strapped consumers. The naysayers, he said, have ulterior motives.
“They’re people who are either competitors or they are people who have been trying to infiltrate Wal-Mart” to organize workers under a union banner, said Huckabee, who described himself as a loyal Wal-Mart shopper. The 130 million Americans who visit Wal-Mart every week, however, “are not mad at Wal-Mart,” he said. “The numbers would say some people kind of like it.”
Huckabee acknowledged that pressure from Wal-Mart opposition groups might have contributed to the company’s announcement this week that part-time workers soon will have a shorter waiting period for benefits eligibility and have the option to put their children on their coverage plans.
