Monthly Archives: March 2016

On March 24, two former Walmart workers, Colby Harris and Marc Bowers, joined labor leaders at the Lancaster, Texas, Walmart Supercenter (store #471) to protest Walmart’s illegal actions against striking workers. The group was also protesting Walmart’s appeal of an administrative law judge of the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling that said Walmart unlawfully retaliated against workers for participating in strikes. Both workers urged Walmart to drop its appeal.

The administrative law judge’s ruling states that Walmart must offer 16 former employees, including those in Texas, full reinstatement to their jobs along with back pay, and that Walmart must hold a meeting in 29 specific stores to inform employees of their right to strike and form a union.

Harris, a local Texas worker who Walmart fired for his participation in strikes in 2013, said, “I knew that Walmart firing me for speaking out was illegal, but to have a judge say it means everything. This ruling doesn’t just affect me and my former coworkers. It affects every Walmart worker who has been afraid to stand up for him or herself. This ruling is historic, and Walmart needs to adhere to it.”

Bowers, another Texas worker who was fired after striking, said, “I voiced my opinion about the injustices I was seeing at Walmart. That is something that is supposed to be protected by the law, and Walmart broke that law. Since I was illegally fired, I have struggled to find another full-time job. Walmart needs to do what is right, and what the judge says is right. They need to give me my job back and let other workers know that they are allowed to speak out.”

Mark York, executive secretary-treasurer of the Dallas AFL-CIO, also spoke at the action.

“I’ve personally stood with these brave Walmart workers in fighting for better treatment at work, and I will continue to stand with them as they fight for Walmart to abide by this ruling. The law is on their side. The Dallas community is on their side. Colby and Marc didn’t deserve to be fired for exercising their rights,” York said.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Tyson Foods workers who sought to band together in a single, class action lawsuit against Tyson Foods regarding overtime pay.

As our union family knows, work inside a pork processing plant can be grueling and dangerous. From slaughtering hogs, to trimming meat or preparing shipments, workers in all areas of the Tyson pork processing plant were being forced to spend unpaid time before and after their shifts donning and doffing protective gear.

To remedy this, the workers decided to band together and bring forth a class action lawsuit against Tyson Foods seeking overtime pay for the time they spent taking protective gear on and off, arguing that this unpaid time made them all spend more than 40 hours per week at work.

Tyson never kept records of the amount of time people spent putting protective gear on and then taking it off, so the workers tried to prove the amount of damages they were owed through representative proof – which came from expert witnesses’ statistical inferences from hundreds of videotaped observations of how long it took workers to get ready. The expert witnesses determined that an employee in the cut and retrim departments averaged 18 minutes per day and a kill department employee averaged 21.25 minutes per day.

Tyson objected to this representative proof, arguing that there was wide variation in how long the extra work took and that some workers took less time, implying not everyone in the suit was working more than 40 hours per week.

The Supreme Court sided with the workers and said that the statistical proof was sufficient enough and that a class action was properly certified because the question common to class members – whether time spent donning and doffing protective gear is work that should be compensated – dominates over any questions the company had about individual members.