"How Walmart Keeps an Eye on Its Massive Workforce", 24 Nov 2015

In the autumn of 2012, when Walmart first heard about the possibility of a strike on Black Friday, executives mobilized with the efficiency that had built a retail empire...[with] representatives from global security, labor relations, and media relations... [B]illions in sales...were threatened. The company’s public image...could be harmed. But more than all that: Any attempt to organize its 1 million hourly workers at its more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. was an existential danger. Operating free of unions was...essential to Walmart’s business... OUR Walmart, a group of employees backed and funded by a union, was asking for more full-time jobs with higher wages and predictable schedules... Walmart publicly dismissed OUR Walmart as the insignificant creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) union... 

Internally, however, Walmart considered the group enough of a threat that it hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin...[and watched] employees...across the company...; the briefest conversations were reported to...its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.  The details of Walmart’s efforts...are described in more than 1,000 pages of...documents...produced in discovery ahead of a National Labor Relations Board hearing into OUR Walmart’s allegations of retaliation against employees who joined protests in June 2013... A decision may come in early 2016.

Walmart...[sent] a statement...: “We are firmly committed to the safety and security of our 2.2 million associates as well as the 260 million customers we serve each week... Unfortunately, there are occasions when outside groups attempt to deliberately disrupt our business and on behalf of our customers and associates we take action accordingly.”