The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union recently conducted a series of protests against Wal-Mart organized through its in-house “worker center,” OUR Walmart. Concurrently to that, the UFCW conducts standard union anti-corporate campaigns to try to unionize or intimidate the world’s largest retailer.

One such tactic is stalling city approval processes for Wal-Mart stores, and the Reno Gazette-Journal reports that somebody is doing just that in Sparks, Nevada. Michael Russow has sued to stop the approval granted by the city for a new Wal-Mart. And who is Mr. Russow? The Gazette-Journal, citing CUF’s comprehensive database of union federal disclosures, thinks it knows:

The Center for Union Facts website lists Russow as an assistant to a regional director for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has supported protests against Walmart in the past and has tried to unionize some company workers, according to Associated Press and Gazette-Journal reports.

The newspaper then asked Reno’s Russow if he was the same Michael Russow. Russow’s response is almost straight from a spy novel’s “can neither confirm nor deny” phrasing:

Russow wouldn’t confirm whether he worked for the union Thursday.

 

“The issue is not what I do or what I’ve done,” he said. “The story is that this Walmart is not good for our community.”

Uh huh. That isn’t a denial, and knowing that the UFCW has gone all the way into the grey area of labor law to try to organize Wal-Mart employees, we know where the preponderance of the evidence lies.