
Yet
Thanksgiving time is also becoming more of a focus for protests from labor
unions and other social groups, taking advantage of the Thanksgiving themes of
peace, cooperation and gratitude for abundance as a time to call for solidarity
and support for those who have fewer material reasons for thanksgiving this
year.
The trend
got a big kick-off in 2012 with the actions of OUR Walmart, an organization of
Walmart workers started by and principally supported up until the middle of
this year by the United Food and Commercial Workers. On Black
Friday , busloads of Walmart workers and their allies set up picket lines as
close as possible to Walmart store entrances on the heaviest shopping day of
the year. This year OUR Walmart has highlighted the problems of Walmart
workers who often do not have enough food for themselves or their families,
many of whom rely on food stamps because Walmart pays too little or provides
inadequate hours of work.
This year,
for example, a couple hundred Walmart workers, joined by 1400 supporters, have
taken part in a Fast for 15—going without food for one day to two weeks before
Thanksgiving and black Friday in order to win $15 an hour in pay and an
adequate, predictable schedule of work. For several days, a group of
Walmart workers and supporters, such as Rev. William Barber, founder of the
Moral Mondays movement, maintained a presence outside the New York City mansion of Alice Walton , the leading heir of the family’s
Walmart fortune. OUR Walmart captured the event in an emotional video.
Then OUR
Walmart called for more traditional demonstrations in major cities across the
country against Walmart policies, such as the corporation’s refusal to re-hire
most active OUR Walmart workers at five west coast stores. The company had
recently re-opened the stores after keeping them closed for months, supposedly
for plumbing problems. “Walmart was very clearly trying to pick off our
people,” says OUR Walmart executive director Dan Schlademan. A former Pico
Rivera OUR Walmart member, Denise Barlage, explained how at her wages, she
often had to choose between buying gas to get to work or lunch, but if Walmart
CEO Doug McMillion spent the average percentage of the wage or salary that
Americans pay out each day for food, he could comfortably set aside $5,225—and
even at Michelin 3-star restaurants for every meal, he would not go hungry (and
have money left over).
OUR Walmart
demonstrators also linked up with workers from other movements—in Seattle with Black Lives Matter, in Minneapolis with Target employees, and in New York with the Retail Action Project of
the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers (a division of UFCW).
“We need to
understand how many people work in this country and don’t have enough to eat,’
says Cynthia Murray, 59, a founding leader of OUR Walmart who participated in
the fast. “I fast all the time, involuntarily. It’s not just a problem for
Walmart workers. If we [members of OUR Walmart] do actions, it’s for all of us.
Walmart raised our minimum wage to $9, as a result of pressure on them. That’s
not enough. But if we get Walmart up, the rest [of the retail industry] should
follow if we continue to keep pushing. I want this to continue all year.”
OUR Walmart
members’ call for much higher wages, starting at $15, and full-time work for
those who want it, received reinforcement from two new reports issued by
sympathetic non-profit research and advocacy groups. Both Demos and the Alliance for a Just Society presented
evidence that a “living wage” in most of the country would be higher. Even the
$10/hour minimum the company promises in 2016 would yield less than half the
income needed for a single adult working part-time would need for a basic
standard of living in 33 states, and working a 34-hour week-“full-time” by
Walmart standards, a Walmart worker with one child would earn only 39 percent
of the median needed for a living wage, as calculated using a formula developed
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Alliance study concluded that even $15 is
inadequate: a national living wage for a single adult would be $16.87. In 35
states and the District of Columbia , a single worker needs more than
$15 an hour.
But
workers, especially at Walmart, face systematic employer opposition to their
attempts to raise their pay. Based heavily on documents from a National
Labor Relations Board case, Business Week reporter Susan Berfield (with help
from Josh Eidelson) present in
the current issue one of the most detailed accounts of how the Walmart intelligence
apparatus tracks the slightest signs of organizing or discontent, even
employing an arm of the giant defense and government services contractor, to
help suppress workers’ efforts to improve their work lives (which would likely
spill over to help most retail workers).
The
demonstrations this year were different in tone and somewhat smaller, but they
demonstrate the tenacity and resiliency of OUR Walmart as an organization and
the new depth of worker commitment to changing Walmart. Considering the organizational
upheaval that shook OUR Walmart’s foundation this year, it rebounded quite
well.
More
groups of workers and others constituencies have joined OUR Walmart in trying
to transform a day that was once an all-American celebration of the morally and
materially full life, then captured and warped into a day of mass marketing
into a front in the fight for a more just society.
Workers at
seven El Super grocery stores who are represented by the UFCW went out on
strike on grounds of unfair labor practices by the employer in negotiating a
new contract, using the leverage of lost Thanksgiving sales to escalate
pressure on the company.
UFCW,
through its project, Making Change At Walmart, kept its iron in the fire at
Walmart despite the departure of OUR Walmart to operate more independently,
with Airport workers — including cleaners, baggage handlers, wheelchair
attendants and security officers—at 15 major airports where they are trying to
gain representation through the Service Employees International Union took
advantage of the busiest travel day of the year to engage in fasts, picketing,
leafleting and other actions asking passengers to support them. Many of
the workers are employed by contractors who pay at or near the minimum wage.
A Walmart
worker who is a customer at CREDO, the progressive values-oriented long
distance telephone company, started a campaign at CREDO to win a discount of 10
percent on all groceries at Walmart for Walmart employees, and Interfaith
Worker Justice urged its members to take actions linked to hunger among Walmart
employees. MoveOn likewise urged its members to sign and deliver
petitions to Walmart demanding that the company set $15 an hour as its minimum
pay for its employees.
The
International Labor Rights Forum joined in with an appeal for people to write
around Nov. 24, just before Thanksgiving, to demand that Walmart pay for the
suffering and loss of the families of workers at the Tazreen Fashions factory
in Bangladesh on that date three years. The
majority of clothing manufactured at that plant went to, but Walmart has
refused to pay anything to the 150 injured but surviving workers nor to the
families of 112 workers who were killed in the factory fire.
The biggest
demonstration in Chicago had nothing directly to do with labor
but rather was an attempt led by some African-American youth groups to shut
down Black Friday shopping on ritzy North Michigan Avenue . They were protesting not
only the killing 18 months ago of a 17-year old black man, Laquan McDonald, by
a Chicago police officer, Jason Van Dyke, but also the long delay in revealing
and acting on evidence in the hands of police. After public pressure and a
judge’s order led to release of one of several police videos showing McDonald’s
killing, including footage of the officer firing most of his 16 shots into
McDonald as he lay on the ground, the authorities ended what many observers
think was a deliberate cover-up and indicted the officer last week—the first
time a Chicago policeman has been charged with murder in 35 years.
Rev. Jesse
Jackson, accompanied by several prominent black and Latino politicians, led a
Black Friday rally for justice in the case. The Chicago Teachers Union sent a strong delegation, and
Service Employees International Union Local 1 president Tom Balanoff was a
high-profile labor leader marching with Jackson . However, more militant
groups took control of the action, leading to shutdown of many elite stores,
such as Neiman Marcus and the Apple Store. Chanting “indict Rahm,”
referring to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the mobile groups found support but also
hostility among shoppers. Although there were some scuffles, police made only
three arrests, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Unlike most
of the labor actions, the protest against the police killing tapped into deep
anger, especially among young people, and the crowd was led by people
apparently intent at inflicting economic damage, should have—been a labor
march. The black youth that are disproportionately victims of police misconduct
are in large part victims of city economic policies that help black communities
very little as well as historic legacies of racism found throughout
society. With less discrimination and more opportunity, many more of
those young people would be heading into working or even middle class jobs.
They are workers in waiting for opportunity and a job, which would make them
likely strong union members disproportionately ready to sign union cards, not
gang bangers making the lives of their neighbors and themselves more deeply
traumatized.
Labor
unions have their own history of falling short of what they need to do to
combat racism, but as the presence of white labor leaders like Balanoff and CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey
indicates, labor still remains one of the most important elements of a broad
coalition against the consequences and continuation of systematic racism, but
it would have made a strong statement if there had been high-profile
participation by union leaders are more heavily white than SEIU and CTU . But it doesn’t help when a
publicist and talk radio host, Maze Jackson, questions why any white leader
should be among the heads of a march against racist police practices. “Explain
to me why Tom Balanoff would be at the front of a march for a dead black
child,” Jackson told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Does he have a black
child?”
From
peddling pro-union books to promoting fasts for the holidays, the scope of
activity around Thanksgiving by progressive organizations, especially unions
and other worker groups, is making an old holiday new again, and
much closer to its best meaning. Although it’s too late for this year’s
Thanksgiving dinner, be prepared for next year with a guide to arguing against
your relatives’ right-wing Fox drivel prepared by the Economic Policy
Institute’s research director, Josh Bivens. Then again, reading Bivens’ guideis
a good idea all year ‘round, not just at Thanksgiving, as are the protests
themselves.
> The article above was written by David Moberg, and is reprinted from In These Times.
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