HuffPo facilitates union agenda with worker’s tale of woe

Walmart took a chance on unemployed welfare recipient Girshriela Green when it hired her for a part-time job in the low-income Los Angeles neighborhood of Crenshaw. Now she’s out of work, in pain, on government assistance and being held up by as an example of Walmart bad behavior in an article that doubles as a union recruitment tool.

This much becomes obvious after the reading the piece on Huffington Post, which explains how hard Green had to work at Walmart before she was sidelined with an unspecified workplace injury which forced her to take a leave of absence. After the author recounts miserable working conditions at Walmart and poor treatment by superiors, the union appeal is revealed.

“One glimmer of hope for Green is a labor group conceived by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, called “OUR Walmart.” Because Walmart has proven nearly impossible to unionize, UFCW created OUR Walmart to fight for Walmart employees' rights, with unionizing still as an end goal,” according to the article written by Kathleen Miles, whose bio indicates she has worked as political action coordinator for the iron workers, field investigator for the National Labor Relations Board and a stint at NPR.

The piece is interesting, you can read it here, because it highlights the ongoing reputational challenges the company faces because store level jobs are hard and in a company the size of Walmart it isn’t hard to find disgruntled workers even if the percentage of them is low. Assuming everything Green says is true, Walmart doesn’t come off looking very good. The problem is there is no way to know whether any of it is true and every personal injury lawyer knows there is no way to disprove their client’s assertions of pain. As the article explained, “Green is currently represented by legal counsel, who helped her get another doctor when Walmart’s doctor said he would only look at her arm, not other parts of her body that were also in pain, according to Green. Her new doctor found that she had a severe neck injury, and while Walmart has paid for a major surgery that she needed, Green’s lawyer is currently trying to get the company to pay for a second surgery she needs on her arm, she said. The lawyer declined to speak with HuffPost or provide documents, citing “attorney client privilege” because the case is still open. Upon her lawyer’s advising, Green declined to share specific details of her injury due to the ongoing case.”

Probably haven’t heard the last of this case. Even if it does go away another similarly-situated individual will surface elsewhere thanks to challenging working conditions at Walmart and ongoing efforts by unions to portray the company as evil.