There’s a great story in today’s Wall Street Journal describing how Wal-Mart, terrified of how a President Obama might make it easier for workers to join together in unions, is pressuring its employees to vote for John McCain:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies — including Wal-Mart.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized…

“The meeting leader said, ‘I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won’t have a vote on whether you want a union,’” said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. “I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote,” she said.

What is striking such fear into the heart of Bentonville? It’s the Employee Free Choice Act — a bill that would take away Wal-Mart’s freedom to bully and threaten its workers at will to keep them from joining together. It would give those workers the power to join together if they want to without fearing retaliation from the company. Clearly, that’s a prospect that Wal-Mart’s management is uncomfortable with.

And they’re not the only ones. As I write this, big business is mobilizing an enormous campaign with one and only one purpose: to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act. How serious are they? They are ready to spend $100 million to make this happen.

Why? Because it would give workers the power to control their own destinies. That’s a prospect that they believe simply cannot be permitted. And they’re willing to spend whatever it takes — and do whatever it takes, even if that brings them to the very edge of the law — to keep that power out of your hands.

At the most basic level, that’s what Wal-Mart is so terrified of: you.

They’re terrified that if you have the power to decide your own fate — to reverse decades of inequality and start bringing the benefits of your productivity home to your own family, rather than having it go to send some Wal-Mart executive’s kid to boarding school — you’ll use it. And that would put an end to an era that has been extraordinarily profitable for those fortunate few at the top.

So they’re going to come out swinging. They’re going to do everything they can to keep that power out of your hands. They’re going to tell our leaders that you can’t be trusted with it. They’re going to tell our media that you aren’t smart enough to use it wisely. They’re going to tell you that power is complicated and scary and that you’d be better off trusting them to do the right thing by you.

They’re going to say whatever they have to say to keep you from having the power to stand up for your rights.

Because the Employee Free Choice Act would put the power to decide your future where it belongs: in your hands.

Postscript: There’s some great discussion going on around the Web about this today. Here’s a few links:

• Matt Yglesias — Getting Away With It:

Union organizers have no effective legal recourse to violations of labor law and employers have no incentive to actually follow the law. And since employees know the laws won’t be enforced if broken, employers only relatively rarely need to actually break the law in order to get the correct intimidating threat. Like the mafia, a company like Wal-Mart only needs to be seen to break a few kneecaps and get away with it for there to be an adequate intimidation effect to de facto deny a vast workforce its rights.

• Ezra Klein — Wal-Mart fears the vote:

It’s impossible to organize under circumstances where labor-friendly workers are fired, stores are closed to serve as an example to others, and where companies pay trivial fines eight years after the fact. Card check, by contrast, makes it possible to organize. And Wal-Mart is, predictably, terrified. But not because their workers wouldn’t “have a vote.” Rather, they’re afraid because, finally, they would.

• Daily Kos diarist truthtolies— Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win:

While Lee Scott and the Waltons live in huge mansions and travel with bodyguards, paid for by the labor of their employees, these folks have the audacity to “fear” their employees into voting AGAINST their own pocketbook.

This is the same company that encourages its underpaid workers to seek out gov’t assistance.

This company is as tolitarian as any country could be.

• Mark Thoma — Wal-Mart Is Afraid Democrats Will Help Workers:

Just when you think Wal-Mart is getting a little better, you realize it’s the same old union-busting firm it always was.

Seen any other good write-ups? Share them in the comments!