Hear Obama on Wal-Mart Tonight

By Sean Corbett in News on Nov 15, 2006 10:23PM

Senator Obama and former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards will be on WakeUpWalMart.com conference calls this evening at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. respectively. Sign up here if you want to hear what your esteemed Senator thinks about unions and Wal-Mart. Chicagoist already signed up; they told us to call -888-801-1510 using pass-code 849485. According to WakeUpWalMart.com “Wal-Mart’s recent policy changes are the most anti-family, anti-worker changes in this company’s history.” The evening’s calls will detail what type of campaign the organization has in store for Wal-Mart this holiday season.

WakeUpWalMart.com was created in April of 2005 by the United Food and Commercial Workers union and currently has 285,832 members. That’s a large number of people with strong opinions about Wal-Mart, but the UFCW is also large union, with more than 1.4 million members. The UFCW is a member of “Change to Win” which also includes the SEIU, UNITE-HERE, and the Laborers, Farm Workers, and Carpenters unions; all-in-all they represent more than 6 million people.

Wal-Mart says it is ready to work with the Democratic Congress come January. In a very advantageous change of management, the new head of Communications and Government Relations at the company, Leslie Dach, is also a former Democratic Party strategist. He likely had a hand in the company encouraging its employees to participate in politics this season, as we mentioned last month. We don’t want to be conspiracy theorists, but Dach was hired in August … what if Wal-Mart knew Congress was going to go Democrat before it happened!?!