“If You Vote Quimby You Will Lose Your Job”: Wal-Mart Brings Banana Republicanism Back Home

Bringing the maquiadora model to the other side of the Rio Grande

FUD: (1) fear, uncertainty and doubt; (2) faulty use of detail; (3) a brand name for hot dogs, sausages, and cold cuts produced by the Mexican company Sigma Alimentos, which itself is part of the ALFA industrial conglomerate.

Wal-Mart teme que vitória democrata favoreça sindicatos nos EUA, diz jornal (G1/Globo, EFE): A story widely picked up in Brazil this weekend — alongside the ongoing conversion of the U.S. dollar into the West Texas peso — is that Wal-Mart reportedly admits warning its employees that voting for Barack Obama could cost them their jobs.

The tactic is remarkably similar to that used by the company in Mexico, where the big box retail latifundio campaigned openly in its stores for a specific candidate in 2006, in violation of Mexican law.

It got big favors in return, too, including a retail banking license that not even the crony capitalists of Bush II could push through. See

• “Fiery Leftist” Watch
• Wal-Mart: Astroturf Wholesaler, Borked on Banking, Bows to “Manufactured Outrage”
• Mexican Banking After Wal-Mart: ABM Man Calls Default Risk, Gouging “The Cost of Financial Democracy”
• Mexico Adelante: More on Wal-Mart’s Banana-Republican Bank
• Wal-Mart War On Shareholders: Bloomie’s Homies Storm the SEC

“If you vote Quimby, you could lose your job” is also strikingly similar to FUD tactics used by the U.S. State Department — and Susan “Mrs. International Republican Institute” Schwab, the savior of the Doha Round, in particular — in Venezuela and Costa Rica. See, for example,

• Costa Rica: Schwab Rewrites History
• “Four Flavors of Fear”: Excerpts from the Casas Memo
• Costa Rica: “FUD Mud Slung at Schwab Job”
• “Venezuela 2007 is Chile 1988″
• “Venezuela 2007 is Chile 1973″
• Fracas in Caracas: Messing With the Press?

You see the tactic in use in Brazil as well:

• Brazil: “Vote Quimby or You Will Lose Your Job”

File under “the banana-republicanization of American political life,” and see also

• Meet Señor Aguirre: Rob Allyn the Guatemalan
• Dicking Democracy, Down South American Way

O Wal-Mart, a maior rede de lojas no varejo do mundo, teme que uma vitória dos democratas nas eleições presidenciais e legislativas dos Estados Unidos em novembro favoreça a organização dos trabalhadores em sindicatos, afirmou nesta sexta-feira (1) o “The Wall Street Journal”.

Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retail chain, is afraid a Democratic victory in the U.S. national elections in November will favor union organizing, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

That is Globo’s softball take on the story, at any rate.

The Estadão, which buried the story on an inside page, at least had the honesty to hit closer to the heart of it: Wal-Mart got its mid-level managers together and told them to inundate the workforce with fear, uncertainty and doubt, using the familiar formula: “If you vote Quimby, you will lose your job.”

A empresa se opõe à organização gremial dos quase 2,1 milhões de funcionários em 980 lojas nos Estados Unidos e aproximadamente 2.890 em outros 14 países.

The company opposes union organization of its nearly 2.1 million employees at 980 stores in the U.S., and 2,890 in another 14 countries.

The logo of Mexico's Fud-brand wieners. Source: Wikipedia. Wikipedia's source? Who knows?

O jornal citou como fonte da informação gerentes de lojas e chefes de departamentos do Wal-Mart que “foram convocados a reuniões obrigatórias nas quais a companhia afirmou que será forçada a cortar postos de trabalho se os funcionários se organizarem em grêmios”.

The W$J cited Wal-Mart store managers and department heads who “were summoned to compulsory meetings in which the company stated it would be forced to cut jobs if workers organized unions.”

A firma teria informado aos gerentes e chefes que “os trabalhadores que se organizarem em grêmio terão que pagar enormes cotas sindicais para obter nada em troca, e que pode ser que tenham que ir à greve sem compensação”.

The firm reportedly told store managers and department heads that “workers who organized unions will have to pay enormous union dues in exchange for nothing, and could be forced to strike without pay.”

Again, other Brazilian news outlets place the emphasis, not on Wal-Mart’s opposition to union organization per se — this is hardly news — but on the “Vote Obama and lose your job” nexus, which is actually newsworthy, because sleazy in the extreme and the latest instance of a continuing pattern of conduct.

Here in Brazil, for example, the papers are currently shocked! shocked! to discover the existence of “electoral corrals” in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. Imagine it: Brazil suddenly discovers that is suffers from machine politics! Stop the presses! See, for example,

• Parapolitical Rio de Janeiro: “Vote Batgirl Or Die”

We have a history of this ourselves, back in the USSA, but pre-Bush, it seemed like it had been a long time since it had manifested itself in such a visibly hamfisted way — outside of mini-banana republics like Texas and Ohio and Florida, that is ….