Spying, training to fight the union By Bloomberg News
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, says Stan Fortune, 47, a 17-year Wal-Mart veteran who now works for the UFCW's Wal-Mart team.
Williams says 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 says. He spent three months on a similar assignment in Las Vegas in 1997, he says.
Williams says that Wal-Mart has an 'HR team' of about 10 people that flies around the country. Its purpose is to teach employees about labor law and how to abide by it, she says.
Jon Lehman, a former store manager who's with the union now, says Wal-Mart has a 60-foot-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.