Occupy Wall Street has posted a set of internal Walmart documents used for training managers in the retailer's staunchly anti-union ways. Let's peek!

The documents were apparently leaked to Occupy by the online collective Anonymous, which declared a few days ago that it planned to go after Walmart for its labor practices. They consist of two PowerPoint decks—one that dismisses the OURWalmart pro-worker movement as merely an effort by the UFCW to raise money for itself, and another that is a "Walmart Labor Relations Salaried Manager Training Module." (You can compare these to similar anti-union propaganda documents and videos from Target.)

The company's primary argument is an old one: unions only want to organize workers in order to reap more dues. (The dues that workers would pay, by the way, are a big $5 per month.) This is a case of a corporation mistaking a union's motives for those of a corporation. It also conveniently elides Walmart's own motivation in arguing against unions so vociferously: Walmart wants to reap more profits, by paying workers as poorly as possible.

The union cannot guarantee associates any improvements in wages or working conditions... because Walmart will work tirelessly against such improvements. Walmart presents this, oddly, as an argument against unions, rather than an argument against Walmart.

The manager training document, which teaches store managers what to do if a worker should utter the horrific words "union," would sound right at home in a training manual for prison guards, or as text from Brave New World.

DUTY OF LOYALTY. All UNION talk must be REPORTED AT ONCE. The slideshow tells managers that it is illegal for them to threaten, interrogate, make promises to, or spy on workers. So how should Walmart managers talk about this union stuff? Like so:

Well, if a manager thinks so...

You can peruse the full set of documents here. Walmart workers need a union bad.