Josh Eidelson talking:
these were the largest protests we’ve seen against Wal-Mart, in that you had 1,500 stores involved; you had somewhat over a hundred people arrested; you had, certainly, once again, Wal-Mart put in an uncomfortable spotlight on what should be the happiest day of the year for the retailer. What isn’t clear is whether there were any more Wal-Mart employees involved than one year ago. And organizers made a strategic shift from last year focusing on strikes to this year putting in the spotlight civil disobedience. Many of the people in those civil disobediences were not Wal-Mart employees. And so, the fact that it’s not clear we saw any more than the 400-some workers who went on strike in 2012 involved in protest in 2013, I think, speaks to the challenges of organizing at Wal-Mart, particularly in the aftermath of the firing of 23 strikers by Wal-Mart in the period coming after a trip to Arkansas this summer.
the National Labor Relations Board has announced that it’s ready to issue a complaint, roughly the equivalent of an indictment, against Wal-Mart for a number of allegations involving the company’s efforts to restrain people from going on strike. This includes everything from comments made to CNN by David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesperson who has since been promoted to vice president, who said that, “Depending on the circumstances, there could be consequences if you don’t come to work,” to firings, other forms of retaliation, alleged retaliation, various kinds of discipline against workers who stood up. And these allegations have been made throughout the campaign. The alleged retaliation intensified earlier this year after this several-day trip to Arkansas, this protest at the shareholder convention. And in conversations with workers, those actions have had a real effect. And so, there is hope expressed, both by employees and by activists, that the labor board moving forward with these allegations will embolden workers to stand up to this alleged retaliation, but the labor board does not have a very successful history of averting or avenging actions by companies that try to squash workers organizing.
OUR Walmart is a group that has very close ties to the UFCW. It is not a union. It is not seeking collective bargaining. But it’s a group of workers who are demanding changes to scheduling, schedules that they say are erratic and insufficient; changes to wages, including a demand for a $25,000-a-year wage floor for full-time work; and an end to that retaliation, the right to organize and speak up, which is recognized under U.S. law not just for people who want a union, but for workers who want to engage in action collectively to change their conditions.
there was a study that was released by congressional Democrats looking at Wisconsin that estimated that Wal-Mart workers at one store used nearly a million dollars in public assistance. And this speaks to—while there are questions about what kind of language makes sense to use—I think sometimes the language that people use to talk about this really reinforces some of the anti-welfare sentiment that people have—it is clear that the fact that our largest employer, which is owned by our wealthiest family, is a company whose employees, in tremendous numbers, depend on our very stingy poverty programs in the United States, says a lot about the state of the U.S. economy and work.
In Minnesota, there were also subcontracted janitors involved who clean Target buildings. These are workers who have gone on strike previously, who are facing, as Wal-Mart warehouse workers do, what I call the “Who’s the Boss” problem, where they’re not legally employed by this giant corporation, but they would argue they are subject to the business model of that company, and they’re trying to put that company in the spotlight as a way of forcing some pressure to raise those conditions.
The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse reported that the fast-food campaign, an effort that, as I reported first at Salon, came out last year with a strike in one city in New York, which we’ve seen escalate since then, Greenhouse reported, is going to involve strikes in a hundred cities on Thursday and protests in many more. So this is a serious escalation by a campaign that is significantly backed by the Service Employees International Union, that also represents an effort by labor, in a time when organized labor is largely on defense, to tackle one of our largest and increasingly representative industries. The nature of fast-food work increasingly is the nature of work in the United States—precarious, surveilled, involving emotional labor, involving a lack of a consistent schedule, and poverty wages. And so, these workers, by going on strike not against one company, but against all the big companies in the industry, and beginning in one city and now escalating reportedly to a hundred cities, are trying to squeeze that industry. It remains to be seen whether the end result there, whether the best-case scenario for them, happens through some kind of national deal with major corporations to pave the way for unionization at the franchisees or whether the most direct effect is seen through legislative change. But workers have been clear from the beginning that their demand is $15 an hour and the right to unionize.
I reported on the case of Whole Foods workers in Chicago, who went on strike demanding the right to be off on Thanksgiving. Their argument was, let people do the shopping up until Thanksgiving, and then on Thanksgiving, this holiday that we’ve made possible for people, we should get to be home and enjoy it. And those workers at Whole Foods went out on strike in Chicago. This is a group that’s tied to the same folks in the fast-food movement in Chicago, which also includes retail and Whole Foods, and they got what they wanted. Whole Foods claimed to me and to them that that had been their policy all along, that no one has to work on Thanksgiving if they don’t want to. But none of the Whole Foods workers I talked to in Chicago or elsewhere in the country said that that was how the policy had been explained to them. And so, a rally planned by those workers for that Wednesday turned into something of a victory rally when the company said, “Yes, anybody can take the day off on Thanksgiving if they want to.”
$15-an-hour victory that was won at SeaTac Airport in Seattle. folks who are involved out in Washington state have attributed the political momentum behind that $15 win, that narrow but quite significant in terms of where we go nationally potentially win, attributed it in part to the call for $15 being made by those fast-food workers around the country.
– source democracynow.org