Black Friday’s shopping bonanza brings people out to line up in front of stores for hours before it begins. It has trampled people, but not profits for companies that reap a large chunk of their annual sales on the day after Thanksgiving.
At Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, the world’s largest shopping day generates more than a quarter of annual sales.
Now, with the help of online organizing and Our Walmart, Walmart workers are gearing up for a walkout on Black Friday. The workers hope to highlight what they say is the unfairness of having to work for low wages, in poor conditions, while Walmart profits.
They also say they are protesting retaliation like reduced hours and lost jobs that followed a wave of walkouts at Walmart stores and warehouses in recent months. Warehouse workers at Walmart in Southern California said they will go on strike this week because retaliation from the administration has not ended.
Truthout combats corporatization by bringing you trustworthy news: click here to join the effort.
Adding to the tension, many Walmart employees will be working through the Thanksgiving holiday to get ready for Black Friday.
“This essentially cancels Thanksgiving for hundreds of thousands of workers,” said Dan Schlademan, director of Making Change at Walmart, on a conference call to discuss the upcoming actions. “Lots and lots of Walmart workers are going to be forced to not have Thanksgiving because they’re going to be preparing all day for the busiest shopping day of the year.”
With more than 4,000 Walmarts across the country, organizers say online organizing has been essential to the campaign’s ability to reach far-flung areas. The Making Change at Walmart campaign site includes testimonies from workers like Mary Pat Tifft, who has worked at Walmart in Kenosha, Wisconsin for 24 years.
In fact, Walmart’s employee base for its stories has been in more rural and suburban areas, where low-income residents have few other job options.
The campaign has also used Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter to make itself heard. The Huffington Post notes that the campaign offers supporters the chance to help sponsor a striking worker. Since October 15th, the campaign has raised more than $13,500 toward grocery gift cards online.
Recent months saw strikes at Walmart stores and warehouses across the country for the first time in the company’s 50-year history. Walmart and two of its contractors also were the target of a class action lawsuit from temporary workers around Chicago alleging the company broke minimum wage and overtime laws for temp workers.
Cory Parker, a Walmart worker in Mississippi, said it was difficult to make ends meet on his Walmart salary. His home is in foreclosure, “and I’m not the only one in the store losing my place because I can’t afford it.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy