Today's Wall Street Journal has a follow-up piece about recent allegations by organized labor groups that Wal-Mart has inappropriately been talking to its employees about workplace legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act.  Whether or not Wal-Mart has done anything wrong will utlimately be determined by the appropriate authorities.  In the meantime, however, we noted this interesting portion of the story about the alleged recorded comments of one HR manager:

In the hour-and-a-half meeting, held for managers in a Southern
state, the leader tells employees that their wages may be reduced to minimum
wage for up to three months before a contract is negotiated, that union
authorization cards violate workers' right to privacy by including their Social
Security numbers on them and that if a small unit within a store votes to
unionize, the entire store will be unionized.

"If you have 10 associates in a photo lab and six sign union
authorization cars, now the store is unionized," the meeting leader told
employees. "Six people can make a decision for 350 people," which is about the
average number of workers in a Walmart supercenter.

Of course, none of that is remotely correct.  One lesson to be learned here is that if an employer is going to put the time and effort into addressing particular legal issues, make sure that management is properly educated and trained on those issues.  Otherwise, one runs the risk of committing labor law violations by making statements like these.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a bad enough policy proposal as it is -- without adding the hyperbole and outright mischaracterizations quoted above.

More at WSJ's law blog, here.