The New York Times has an interesting article that describes how many Wal-Mart employees have taken the initiative, after repeated failed attempts to form a union, to form their own voluntary worker associations to fight back against Wal-Mart’s exploitative practices of reducing employee hours so that they lower their labor costs and so that their employees no longer qualify for health insurance:

The group is urging the State of Florida to grant unemployment benefits to workers whose hours have been cut back by Wal-Mart. It is arguing that workers who quit Wal-Mart because the reduced hours meant they were not earning enough to live on deserve jobless benefits. It also wants supplemental jobless benefits for workers with reduced hours who remain at Wal-Mart. . . .

The association is the latest attempt by labor and community groups to squeeze at Wal-Mart’s pressure points. In the past month, the food and commercial workers have led an effort, joined by the nation’s two big teachers unions, urging consumers not to purchase school supplies at Wal-Mart. . . .

Mr. McDonough said his union hoped that Wal-Mart workers would grow so emboldened and that community support would grow so strong that unions could succeed at organizing some Wal-Marts in a few years. The new association is not urging shoppers to boycott Wal-Mart.

It’s an encouraging development, I guess. Wal-Mart has been ruthless in preventing unionization in their stores up to this point, so we’ll have to wait and see how successful these new but different attempts are. But it’s good to see that Wal-Mart employees are taking the initiative to organize themselves this time, rather than rely on external organizations trying to do it for them.