- Canada's Supreme Court ruled today that Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) must compensate former workers at a Quebec store that was closed after they voted to become the first Wal-Mart store in North America to unionize.
- WMT says it closed the store for business reasons, but the Court agreed with an arbitrator's earlier ruling that said the move constituted a unilateral change in worker conditions during bargaining and thus violated Quebec's labor laws.
- The decision likely will have little impact on WMT or Canada's retail industry; the United Food and Commercial Workers union has made nearly two dozen attempts to organize WMT workers since the retailer's arrival in Canada in the mid-1990s, and none have succeeded.