Wal-Mart spares no effort to defeat unionization bid.

As a supervisor of the cashiers in Wal-Mart store number 589 in Hillview, Ky., Brent Rummage, 27, was required to report to his manager any mention of labor unions. He did so until his mother, who worked in the women's clothing department, ventured that unions weren't as bad as Wal-Mart said.

"I wasn't going to report my mother," he remembered.

Rummage, a former youth minister in the Church of God of Prophecy, had worked hard to keep unions out of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest company with $244.5 billion in sales.

He barged in when workers talked among themselves--a sign of union activity, according to his bosses. He'd learned the tactic via training in a mall conference room across the Ohio River in Clarksville, Ind. After the session, "I thought, 'What are these guys going to do, rob us?'" Rummage asked.

Far worse, from Wal-Mart's perspective: The United Food and Commercial Workers union is trying to organize Wal-Mart stores, which has 1.5 million non-union workers worldwide, so the workers can bargain in groups for higher wages and benefits. Success by the UFCW would upend Wal-Mart's business strategy, which is to cut costs so it can cut prices.

The clash with the union comes as Wal-Mart pushes for a more substantial presence in the grocery business, which employs more than half of the union's 1.4 million members.

Wal-Mart is muscling into food with supercenters: 170,000-square-foot mega-stores that sell everything from leaf blowers to lettuce by putting a supermarket and a regular Wal-Mart discount store under the same roof. The push has been especially strong in California, where the chain wants to add as many as 40 supercenters, including some locally.

Nixing union wages

The prospect of such an incursion has created a furor among the major supermarket chains, which cite Wal-Mart's expansion efforts as the basis for its tough negotiating position in the nearly four-month long Southern California walkout. It's also behind proposed ordinances for the city of Los Angeles that would severely restrict placement of the supercenter stores.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said paying union wages would mean the end of Wal-Mart as customers know it. In the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2003, the company made less than $6,000 in profit per employee, an amount that would vanish if salaries rose, she said.

"Being the low-cost leader is the core of our business model," Williams said. "Changing that model would make our business less successful, our jobs less secure."

The Wal-Mart-union battle heated up in 1999, when the UFCW started a 12-person team for recruiting Wal-Mart workers to unionize their stores. Six members are Wal-Mart veterans.

Rummage is one of the team's success stories. After a promotion to the accounting office in a new supercenter in Fern Creek, Ky., he got into Wal-Mart's management training program this past April. The move put him on track to run his own supercenter, a job that can pay more than $200,000 a year.

Rummage said much of his training dealt with keeping the union from organizing associates, as employees are called. Over lunch in the back room of Jolly Mon's, a local Jamaican restaurant, a store manager told trainees how to spot "salts"--union organizers on the payroll who organize from inside. One clue: They're always dissatisfied.

"They said our jobs would be on the line if we let the union in," said Rummage, who is now trying to organize Wal-Mart workers.

The union has yet to unionize a store. To do that, it must get 30 percent of workers in a store to sign authorizations. Then the National Labor Relations Board holds an election. If most vote in favor, the union wins the right to negotiate a contract, which workers must approve.

The only Wal-Mart employees who have ever agreed to unionize were 10 butchers at a store in Jacksonville, Texas. They voted 7 to 3 in favor on Feb. 14, 2000. Two weeks later, Wal-Mart switched to prepackaged meat and sent the butchers to other departments, said Maurice Miller, 49, a leader of the union drive. Only one remains at the store, he said.

"It's going to take years to produce results," said Al Zack, second in command of the UFCW's Wal-Mart team.

'Unresolved people issues'

Wal-Mart is so concerned about the union that it assigns a Union Probability Index, or U.P.I., to each store based on an anonymous survey of employees, said Stan Fortune, 47, a 17-year Wal-Mart veteran who now works for the UFCW's Wal-Mart team.

Company spokeswoman Williams said U.P.I. actually stands for Unresolved People Issues.

If the U.P.I. gets high enough, Wal-Mart sends in a special team to root out the union, Fortune said. He said he spent three months on a similar assignment in Las Vegas in 1997.

Williams said Wal-Mart has an "HR team" of about 10 people that flies around the country to teach employees about labor law and how to abide by it.

Jon Lehman, a former store manager who is with the union now, said Wal-Mart has a 60-by-60 foot room at its headquarters in which two dozen people with headsets monitor calls and e-mails from stores to see whether anyone is talking about union organizing.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark said the company monitors calls only in stores at risk for bomb threats.

The chance to climb the corporate ladder at Wal-Mart is real, said Larry Mahoney, who joined Wal-Mart in 1990. Now, he runs eight Wal-Mart distribution centers in the southeastern U.S. "There's so much opportunity here," Mahoney said.

He used to manage a nearby center that this one replaced. Walking through in his black blazer and gray dress pants, he's welcomed like a returning hero. Workers rib him about his fancy clothes. With a union, he said he wouldn't have such rapport with workers. "Third-party intervention clouds the issues," he said.

People like Mahoney are among Wal-Mart's best defenses against the union. Still, with committed company men like Lehman and Rummage switching sides, Wal-Mart isn't taking any chances. At stake is the engine of its growth: low prices.