Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Black Friday Strike Stokes Fear in Wal-Mart's Stone Cold Heart

Uh-oh, Wal-Mart's poverty-waged workers have gotten the retail giant's attention with the threatened Black Friday strike. Wal-Mart is actually taking steps to try to stop the union-backed group OUR Walmart from staging black Friday strikes across the nation: 

New York Times:
In a rare move, Wal-Mart is trying to stop a union-backed group from staging a series of demonstrations against the company on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year... Mr. Gould said. “But I must say if they’ve gone to the N.L.R.B. on this, that must show that Wal-Mart is really concerned.” 

...In this week’s planned events, OUR Walmart, which stands for Organization United for Respect at Walmart, is enlisting a broad range of allies, arranging fliers and letters that community, church and civil rights groups can use to publicize the Black Friday protest. OUR Walmart has even prepared remarks that it is suggesting members of the clergy might use in prayer, “to call upon the world’s largest corporation to treats its workers with justice and fairness.”

Many of those workers assert that Wal-Mart pays poverty-level wages, assigns too few hours a week and retaliates against protesting employees. “I will be protesting because there has been retaliation from the company — they have fired people, they have reduced people’s hours for speaking out,” said Greg Fletcher, an electronics department employee at a Walmart in Duarte, Calif.