When Wal-Mart moved into Canada just over a decade ago, the American retailing behemoth arrived with a splash, buying 122 stores of Woolco, a foundering chain. It turned down the chance to buy ten further Woolco outlets, including what was reputedly the most profitable of them all, because their workers belonged to a labour union. Time has not tempered Wal-Mart's hatred of organised labour. On February 9th, the firm said that it would close the first of its stores anywhere in North America to unionise. Officially, the store, at Jonquiere, a town some 400km (250 miles) north-east of Montreal, is shutting for economic reasons. It was "struggling" and had never turned a profit, the company said.
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