Published: Thursday, October 11, 2012, 2:43 AM

The latest news in the Walmart labor protests is the threat of a strike on Black Friday, according to ABC News.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is considered the busiest retail day of the year.

Walmart employees have already protested in Dallas, San Diego, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Roughly 200 angry protesters showed up at a meeting of investors and analysts Wednesday at Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

Walmart, according to ABC, has been a target of workers' rights groups, who advocate higher wages, more flexibility in hours and an end to the punishments (reduced shifts, for instance) they claim are meted out to workers seeking to unionize.

Evelin Cruz, a department manager at Walmart in Pico Rivera, Calif., told ABC News that for many years she kept quiet about what she views as the company's unjust labor practices because she feared she would be fired if she spoke up...

more here: http://blog.al.com/live/2012/10/walmart_workers_threaten_black.html

Man I hope this happens

Really. Haven't heard anything locally, but this would be the last place on earth.

Pretty high stakes for both sides, ya know anybody who participates is gonna get fired, otoh the losses on that one day would be immense. If this gets traction it's gonna be one hell of a 'Mexican standoff'.

Really. Haven't heard anything locally, but this would be the last place on earth.

Pretty high stakes for both sides, ya know anybody who participates is gonna get fired, otoh the losses on that one day would be immense. If this gets traction it's gonna be one hell of a 'Mexican standoff'.

And on the other, other hand, maybe (just maybe) these Walmart workers have figured out that Walmart cannot make money without them. It only takes grasping that fact, and then...

Oh noes! Black Friday, the opening ceremony of Capitalism's Special Olympics. This could be great.

Not to be a buzz kill (I know a few workers from the Seattle stores that marched on the 9th) but check out the strike gateway site "Our WalMart" and see what ya think:

http://forrespect.org/



OUR Walmart Vision

We envision a future in which our company treats us, the Associates of Walmart, with respect and dignity. We envision a world where we succeed in our careers, our company succeeds in business, our customers receive great service and value, and Walmart and Associates share all of these goals.

OUR Walmart Mission

OUR Walmart works to ensure that every Associate, regardless of his or her title, age, race, or sex, is respected at Walmart. We join together to offer strength and support in addressing the challenges that arise in our stores and our company everyday.

OUR Walmart Declaration for Respect

In June of 2011, nearly 100 Associates representing thousands of OUR Walmart members from across the United States came to the Walmart Home Office in Bentonville, Ark., and presented a Declaration of Respect to Walmart executive management. The Declaration calls on Walmart to:

Listen to us, the Associates
Have respect for the individual
Recognize freedom of association and freedom of speech
Fix the Open Door policy
Pay a minimum of $13/hour and make full-time jobs available for Associates who want them
Create dependable, predictable work schedules
Provide affordable healthcare
Provide every Associate with a policy manual, ensure equal enforcement of policy and no discrimination, and give every Associate equal opportunity to succeed and advance in his or her career
Provide wages and benefits that ensure that no Associate has to rely on government assistance.

Adopting this Declaration will make Walmart a better company for Associates, customers and the communities in which it operates. As Sam Walton said, “Share your profits with all your Associates, and treat them as partners.”

I know, I know I'm maybe overreacting, but why does "organizing for respect" as a slogan give me the creeps? Meh, maybe it's just me.

They're being backed by the UFCW, which loves it some Obama!
http://www.ufcw.org/





(but I'm sure everything will be fine)

I hear you Runs, it is hard not to be discouraged. I'd still see this as a plus if it happened - the least bit of resistance is exciting at this point. Of course the media will go to work quickly pitting low-income shoppers against the strikers ...

Discouraging language there to be sure, reminds me of Occupy, groveling instead of demanding. But there we are, such is the state of things. But is something, even if the only thing accomplished is understanding that this approach does not work. Without a union and the solidarity and discipline that comes with it I don't think this can go far no matter how much we want it to.

Walmart Strike Memo Reveals Confidential Management Plans

The seven-page internal memo, issued Oct. 8, is intended for salaried employees only, and contains instructions on how to respond to strikes by hourly workers that spread to 28 Walmart stores in 12 cities earlier this week. The strikes were the first by Walmart retail employees in the company’s 50-year history.

The memo makes clear that Walmart, the world's largest private employer, views the labor protests as a serious attack, a message that runs contrary to the company's public comments that the strikes are mere "publicity stunts," as Walmart's vice president of communications David Tovar told The Huffington Post Tuesday.

"As you know,” the memo opens, “activists or union organizers have been trying for years to stop our Company’s growth and to damage our relationship with our customers and members. One of the activists’ or union organizers’ tactics is to try to disrupt the business by urging our associates to participate in a walkout or other form of work stoppage.”

snip

The memo is peppered with Walmart management jargon, offering a window into the secretive corporate culture built by founder Sam Walton. Managers are reminded over and over of the acronym TIPS (Threaten Intimidate Promise Spy) when dealing with potential labor organizing by hourly-wage "associates." The widely used human resources term serves to remind managers that they cannot, by law, threaten or intimidate workers who organize, promise them benefits if they stop organizing, or spy on their activities.

snip

According to Compa, the memo reflects Walmart's concern over the 20-some charges of unfair labor practices that Walmart workers filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the past 8 weeks in concurrence with the strikes.

The charges include dozens of allegations from employees who claim they were subjected to harassment, cut hours and other disciplinary actions when Walmart higher-ups learned that they supported OUR Walmart, the United Food and Commercial Workers-backed worker group that organized the recent strikes. If the NLRB sides with the workers, Walmart may eventually be forced to pay a huge settlement in back pay, the specific amount of which would vary for each individual case.

snip

Notably, the leaked memo lacks many of Walmart’s famously tough labor policies.

In the past, internal Walmart documents instructed managers to remind employees that they could be permanently replaced if they went on strike, as well as provided talking points on the false guarantees unions make to workers, according to a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch that examined 292 NLRB charges against Walmart. The new document bears no mention of replacing employees.

At one point, Walmart is even more cautious than the law requires. The document does not instruct managers to evict employees conducting a sit-in on company property, as is within their legal right, according to Compa, who also serves as a consultant to Human Rights Watch.

Still, a few of the strategies that made Walmart famous as a union-buster rear their heads in the document. Tacked onto the end of the memo is a definition of the term, “Coaching By Walking Around” (CBWA), or “when managers walk through their facility or department everyday just to visit with associates,” as Walmart explains it. While it may sound benign, the verb "to coach" in Walmart lexicon also means to discipline employees. According to workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Walmart managers have used CBWA as a surveillance tactic to monitor and deter labor organizers.

The Walmart document here:

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Walmart-2.pdf

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/13/walmart-strike-memo_n_1962039.html

Of course they view it as a serious attack. Not only do they not want to pay their workers any more than they have to - but they don't want their lower level managers screwing up and getting them sued for blocking organizing that is legal. Lawsuits scare the hell out of these companies. Their lawyers drafted this with that fear in mind ...

Back to the Future for Labor?

The Walmart Strikes

For the past two decades, retail giant Walmart has served as a model for corporate America to emulate. Now, by forcing unions to break out of old habits, its workers might be showing the way forward for labor.

Walmart stores and critical parts of its distribution chain have been hit by a series of strikes in recent weeks. These strikes are remarkable for three reasons. First, the workers involved have no union protection. While their strikes are technically legal, they are taking huge risks by walking out. Second, many are not technically employed by Walmart. Rather, they work for a variety of sub-contractors that Walmart can replace at will. Third, despite items one and two, these workers are winning, and the strikes seem to be spreading.

So far, the victories are small. Workers at the Elwood, Illinois Walmart distribution center won full back pay for the three weeks they were out on strike. Workers at the Mira Loma, California distribution center returned to work after two weeks with nobody fired and a commitment from Walmart to monitor its contractors’ safety performance more closely. And groups of Walmart store workers who have struck in cities across the country to protest wages and working conditions have done so without facing company retaliation.

But given the company’s notoriously scorched-earth policy towards unions throughout its fifty-year history, these victories are significant. Usually, when Walmart workers so much as hint at joining a union, they are immediately hit with an army of company managers and outside consultants, deployed with the singular goal of quashing any union activity. Several times, Walmart has closed down entire stores rather than allow even a small group of workers to unionize.

This time, it’s different. And it’s different because the Walmart workers are dusting off some old tactics from the labor playbook and updating them to fit the challenges of modern-day organizing.

The primary old tactic we’re seeing is workers striking without union protection. This harkens back to the early 20th century, back to the days when unions were essentially illegal. Back then, workers wanting a voice on the job had no choice but to go on strike to win their demands. There was no legal recourse, no set procedure for recognizing unions or addressing worker grievances fairly. Workers had to risk everything for the very uncertain chance that their actions might improve their lives on the job. Sometimes they won, more often they lost. Almost invariably, they broke the law.

But workers kept fighting, and as the unrest in the depths of the Great Depression swelled, some politicians recognized that criminalizing workplace protest would not bring industrial peace. Instead, they proposed a government-backed system for collective bargaining between workers, represented by certified unions, and management representatives. The result was the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), passed in 1935.

The NLRA has nominally been the law of the land ever since, with a few notable adjustments. It set up the system through which unions persistently tried and failed to organize Walmart workers over the past several decades. But unions’ repeated failure to organize Walmart does not show workers’ lack of desire to join unions, as the company often claims. Rather, it shows the degree to which the NLRA has been eviscerated over time. Absent effective enforcement and meaningful sanctions, employers like Walmart have felt free to violate the law with impunity. The potential cost of breaking the law simply pales in comparison to the benefits of staying “union-free,” which has allowed Walmart and others to drive down wages, cut or eliminate pension and health care costs, and erode job security.

Walmart’s distribution centers represent the logical outcome of this approach to employment. Workers in these distribution centers spend all day handling goods destined for Walmart stores. But they are not Walmart employees, and usually the facilities themselves are not Walmart facilities. Rather, they are operated by contractors, and staffed by “temp” agencies, even though the operations run fairly permanently—year round, around the clock. For example, the Elwood, Illinois distribution center is operated by Schneider Logistics and staffed by Roadlink Workforce Solutions, and the Mira Loma, California distribution center is operated by NFI and staffed by Warestaff.

Unsurprisingly, low pay and low to no benefits are the norm at these centers, as are long hours and unsafe working conditions. The web of warehouse and staffing contractors allows Walmart to evade responsibility for working conditions, while giving it the flexibility to swap out contractors if one group of workers poses a potential threat.

In this, the new world of work in Walmart’s warehouses today bears a strong resemblance to that of a bygone era, a time before the NLRA. It resembles the “shape-up” system used on the docks in the early 20th century. Then, longshore workers would line up every morning to see who would be lucky enough to get picked to work the ships that day. Then as now, those who did get picked toiled for long hours for meager wages, with no guarantee that they would have work the next day. Similarly, dockworkers back then had little idea of who their real boss was, beyond the foreman who would or would not pick them in the morning.

What got rid of the shape-up on the docks was workers organizing a legally questionable, incredibly risky strike, one that shut down ports up and down the West Coast, and much of the city of San Francisco for several days in July 1934. It wasn’t legal compulsion that brought the shipping magnates to the bargaining table; it was the disruptive threat to their bottom line that the workers’ risky gamble represented that did the trick.

With Walmart turning back the clock on employment relations to pre-NLRA times, it makes sense that its workers are also reaching back in time for a response of their own. Of course, Walmart workers’ actions thus far don’t come anywhere close to matching those of the longshore workers of the 1930s. But the fact that groups of marginalized workers are now willing to risk going on strike without traditional union protections and outside of traditional collective bargaining relations shows how broken the current labor rights regime is in the U.S. It also potentially points the way forward for unions in this country.

After decades of defeat and demoralization, the Walmart strikes show that U.S. labor is willing to try something radically different and incredibly risky to claw itself back from the abyss. And to do that, they are combining the strikes of old with something new. Unions are involved in the Walmart organizing, but not in the usual way. The workers are not striking for a union contract. They are not even strictly speaking trying to join a union. They are organizing with the help of groups like the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), Warehouse Workers United, and Warehouse Workers for Justice. These groups are union funded, but organizationally autonomous. They do not engage in collective bargaining. Instead, they help workers organize to protect their rights, and advocate for policies and regulations to improve job quality and safety. In short, they seek to improve workers’ lives on the job without getting tangled up in the dysfunctional labor relations machinery set up by the NLRA.

Backing such organizations is a bold move for unions, as it can mean sacrificing near-term membership growth potential in favor of much less certain and tangible future gains. More profoundly, it challenges the very foundations of contract/membership-based unionism that have shaped unions’ organizational functioning for over a century. But in an era where union membership levels have largely rolled back to those of a century ago, it is far past time to try something new. In combining the risky and disruptive tactics of old with new organizational forms, the latest round of organizing at Walmart could be just the ticket.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/17/the-walmart-strikes/

Well and good, but just as in the past, sooner rather than later a more disiplined form of organization will be required. Sooner rather than later workers will have to ignore NLRB and Taft-Hartley and engage in proscribed tactics, particularly the 'sympathy strike', because that is what worked in the past too.

Black Friday Begins (Early):Walmart Workers Already Striking in at Least Seven States

7:55 AM: Is Walmart getting camera shy?

A media advisory sent out Monday invited local reporters in North Bergen, New Jersey to visit the local Walmart on Tuesday or Wednesday and see preparations for Black Friday. But the same advisory (shared with The Nation by a recipient) announced that "Local media will not be permitted in-store access from Thursday, November 22 through Sunday, November 25. Regular media access will resume Monday, November 26." Walmart did not immediately respond to The Nation's inquiry regarding how widespread this policy is, or whether it's a change from the past.

Local reporters aren't the only ones Walmart is reportedly keeping out of its stores. At 12:28 AM, Huffington Post retail reporter Alice Hines tweeted from Wheatland, Texas:

"#kickedoutofwalmart for solicitation but was told i could report in the parking lot"

12:25 AM EST: It’s on.

A year and a half after retail workers announced the founding of a new Walmart employee group, five months after guest workers struck a Walmart seafood supplier, and seven weeks after the country’s first multi-store Walmart strikes, the Black Friday strike has begun.

Walmart stores opened at 8 PM, drawing additional ire from employees required to come into work on Thanksgiving earlier than ever. But workers’ protests got off to an early start too. Around 7:30 PM EST, 30 workers from three Miami stores went on strike, joining 100-plus supporters for one of several nighttime rallies across the country. “It’s been so long that I’ve been working for people that had no respect for me,” Miami striker Elaine Rozier told The Nation. “They retaliated against me, and they always treated me like crap. And I’m so happy that this is history, that my grandkids can learn from this to stand up for themselves.” In the past, said Rozier, “I always used to sit back and not say anything…I’m proud of myself tonight.”

At 9:45 PM CST, workers struck and rallied with supporters outside a store in Dallas; OUR Walmart says that the peaceful crowd was dispersed by police. When workers walked off the job in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the group says that managers kicked customers out of the store on the mistaken assumption that they were there to protest. Workers are also on strike in San Leandro, California, and Clovis, New Mexico. Stores in Ocean City, Maryland; Orlando, Florida; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana each have a single worker out on strike. In St. Cloud, Florida, Walmart associate Lisa Lopez was joined by Congressman-Elect Alan Grayson as she walked out on strike.

At 11:45 PM, labor and community activists demonstrated outside a store in Quincy, Massachusetts, the first of a string of protests that allied groups promise will hit all 48 Walmarts in the state.

OUR Walmart, the union-backed retail worker group that spearheaded last month’s 28-store strikes, promised last month to pull off a “memorable” Black Friday unless Walmart reversed a slew of allegedly retaliatory firings (Walmart hasn’t). Last week, as workers struck Seattle stores and a Mira Loma warehouse, OUR Walmart pledged 1,000 total actions for the nine days leading up to and including today. Workers say that will include flash mobs, rallies, leaflets, sit-ins, and strikes. Retail employees will have back-up from Occupy activists, women’s and consumer groups, and Walmart warehouse workers. But the day’s biggest question may be just how many Walmart store workers choose the risk and the sacrifice of striking. Last month, 160 struck; how many more will join them today?

Reached over e-mail Sunday, Walmart’s National Media Relations Director, Kory Lundberg, said, “we do not expect these actions by a very small minority of our associates (less than .0003 percent) at a handful of stores to have any impact on our stores or our customers’ shopping experience on Black Friday.” But the past week offers increasing signs of an aggressive campaign by the company to discourage workers from striking, including mandatory “captive audience” meetings, alleged threats, and public declarations that the strikes aren’t legal and strikers could face “consequences.”

OUR Walmart has also promised strikes in cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Washington, DC, and states including Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and Minnesota.

Expectations are high for a historic strike. Given Walmart’s role as the dominant employer of our era, the current wave of work stoppages is already among the country’s most consequential twenty-first century strikes. But in interviews this month, workers and organizers described today’s actions as a turning point, not a climax, in their struggle against the retail giant. “This is the beginning of something…” said Dan Schlademan, a United Food & Commercial Workers union official who directs the allied group Making Change at Walmart. “This is a new permanent reality for Walmart…2012 is the beginning of the season where retail workers are going to start to stand up.”

“There’s going to be more days that we’re going to strike,” said Rozier, “and it’s not going to stop. I’m not going to stop until they respect us and give us what we want.”

Check this space for updates throughout the day, and please send tips to jeidelson at gmail dot com.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/171430/black-friday-begins-early-walmart-workers-already-striking-least-six-states

(bolding added)

Live stream from DC 'burbs, looks pretty lively.

http://qik.com/video/55833064

An ok article on the Walmart and unions issue. Good info on salaries and lack of penalties imposed for union-busting. Not so great is the assumption that consumers should pick up the cost of Walmart paying more - how about if we actually take that out of profits? After all the Walton family is already controlling more wealth than 40% of this country, and that is before you count the tax-payer subsidies in the form of food stamps etc for their low-paid part-time workers.


Who's Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer
By Jordan Weissmann
Nov 22 2012, 3:40 PM ET

Forget the stampeding shoppers, the half-priced waffle irons, or the pepper spray wielding wackos: barring a federal intervention, the main event this Black Friday could turn out to be a showdown between organized labor and its arch corporate nemesis, Wal-Mart.

After organizing the first retail workers' strikes in the company's 50-year history last month, a union-backed group has promised to lead work stoppages and demonstrations at Wal-Mart stores around the country this holiday weekend in protest of its famously aggressive labor practices. Nobody truly knows how big the turnout will be, or if even more than a handful of Wal-Mart's 1.4 million U.S. employees will actually walk off the job. We might witness something historic, or we might witness a sideshow that shoppers ignore while brawling for bargains. Either way, the threat has made Wal-Mart nervous enough to ask the National Labor Relations Board for an injunction stopping the protests. Should they go on, they will be a test of whether, after years of failing to organize the country's largest employer, labor groups still have the wherewithal to take it on.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of this simply as a clash over one company. Rather, it's symptomatic of forces Wal-Mart helped set in motion and now shape our economy in fundamental way. It's about big box retail's refusal to pay a decent wage. It's about the way we've stacked the deck against unions. And it's about the choices we make as consumers.

Wal-Mart's Bad, But the Competition Isn't Much Better

As Harold Meyerson noted recently in The American Prospect, whereas Ford and General Motors paid their factory workers enough to buy the cars they built, Wal-Mart rose up by paying "its workers so little they had to shop at discount stores like Wal-Mart."

Much more here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-wal-mart-strikes-the-american-consumer/265542/

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/IBISWorld_Big_Box_Retail.PNG