The National Labor Relations Board will hear a case today concerning Wal-Mart auto shop workers who have expressed interest in forming a union. Nine of 17 workers at the Wal-Mart Supercenter Tire and Lube Express in Loveland, Colorado submitted cards to the board. The attempt at organizing a small part of the store indicates a new strategy by the United Food and Commercial Workers in getting through the anti-union wall of the world's largest retail chain. The union insists that the auto shop is separate from the rest of the store and can therefore organize. When meat cutters at a Wal-Mart store in Texas won union certification in 2000, the company reacted by closing all of it's meat cutting departments countrywide. The only officially unionized Wal- Mart is in Quebec, a store that the chain has since threatened to close. In addition, the store recently bowed to pressure in China to allow that countries Communist Party sponsored union into stores in that country.