Paranoia: Walmart Desperate to Keep Further Documents Revealing Employee Surveillance Tactics From Being Made Public

(Gawker) - Last month, Bloomberg Businessweek published a big story on how Walmart tracks its employees to most effectively anticipate dissent and undermine potential organizers. The piece draws largely on documents produced in the course of discovery for a case before the National Labor Relations Board. (Walmart is accused of illegally firing labor activists.) Now, Walmart alleges, labor group OUR Walmart “intentionally disclosed documents marked and designated confidential.” The documents, according to Walmart, were protected by judicial order.

In its initial story, Bloomberg reported that OUR Walmart had provided the documents, which included “more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs, as well as testimony from its head of labor relations at the time,” only “after the judge concluded the case in mid-October.”

Walmart filed a motion against OUR Walmart and the United Food and Commercial Workers union, with which OUR Walmart was until recently affiliated, on December 9th asking the NLRB not only to enter a “cease-and-decist” order but also, “absent some exculpatory explanation,” order the labor group to return the documents. According to Bloomberg, Walmart is also asking that the NLRB prevent OUR Walmart from “using, referencing, or relying on” the documents in future cases.

“We couldn’t imagine that Walmart would be happy about light being shined on these kind of tactics they’re using against their employees,” said OUR Walmart co-director Dan Schlademan. Whatever documents were marked confidential were marked so for the managers to whom they were originally addressed, he added.

“Walmart is trying to bully its way to bar any future documents” from being disclosed, Schlademan said. (Full Story)