Wal-Mart fears a Dem win would help its workers unionize (updated)

Ezra Klein:

According to The Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart's store managers and department supervisors are forcing their employees into mandatory meetings where they "warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies — including Wal-Mart." This is then followed by a friendly soliloquy about union dues, forced strikes, and the jobs Wal-Mart would have to cut if anyone so much as dared breathe the letters "UFCW." As one worker who attended the meetings reported, "The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union.'" [...]

It's impossible to organize under circumstances where labor-friendly workers are fired, stores are closed to serve as an example to others, and where companies pay trivial fines eight years after the fact. Card check, by contrast, makes it possible to organize. And Wal-Mart is, predictably, terrified. But not because their workers wouldn't "have a vote." Rather, they're afraid because, finally, they would.

Update: dday at Digby's blog has more:

Big business is TERRIFIED by the prospect of a President Obama signing the Employee Free Choice Act [EFCA]. The combination of making it harder for management to harass and intimidate workers who want to bargain, and aggressive unions like SEIU ready to organize, means that union membership will finally start increasing again after decades of decline (it actually went up slightly this year). The labor movement is the greatest anti-poverty program in American history, but to the corporate profiteers, it means one less yacht in the harbor. Wal-Mart is among the groups who have put up hundreds of millions of dollars to stop the EFCA and demonize unions. Some of the ads are already up and running, using euphemistic shell-group names like "the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace." To economic royalist conservatives it's as important to stop this dead as it was to stop universal health care in the 1990s.