Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is reopening a Pico Rivera store and four others across the country after shutting them down five months ago for what the company said were plumbing repairs.
The Bentonville, Arkansas, company said it would begin hiring for these stores this month and was communicating with employees affected by the store closures in April to encourage them to reapply, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. The stores will reopen in late October or early November.
The closures affected about 2,200 workers. Wal-Mart said nearly 75 percent of the workers who wanted to transfer to another store got an offer to do so.
“We are moving forward with the process to reopen all five stores,” Wal- Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez said in a statement cited by The Times. “While we continue to conduct plumbing repairs and store upgrades, our goal is to begin serving customers by late October or early November.”
The five stores, which include locations in Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, are at the center of a pending complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, The Times reported. The complaint was made on behalf of Our Wal-Mart, a group of employees fighting for higher wages.
In the filing, the union alleges that the Pico Rivera store closure in April was intended to punish workers who took part in a strike against the retailer in 2012 and who have aggressively campaigned for higher wages, according to The Times.
The complaint also contends that the four other stores were closed to mask the retaliatory move against the Pico Rivera workers, many of whom received only hours of notice, The Times reported.
—City News Service