Wal-Mart employees have received the benefits of a union.
Chinese Wal-Mart employees that is.
The thing is that the Chinese government insisted on it.
This one seemed to have gotten dropped from the mass media after being reported by the New York Times on Friday.
On Saturday, at a Wal-Mart store in a southern province, Fujian, 25 employees elected Ke Yunlong, 29, as the chairman of a seven-member trade union committee, the official New China News Agency reported. Earlier, 30 Wal-Mart employees had applied to local labor authorities to register a union.
Although Chinese unions are quite cooperative, and hardly likely to strike, they do uphold collective bargaining and other union principles, and act as a brake on arbitrary management action.
A Wal-Mart official grudgingly admitted that:
Some Wal-Mart employees in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Britain and Germany are union members.
When will the tide turn towards renewed respect for unions?
When will we have a government whose pro-union requirements Wal-Mart must comply with?