From Truth Out: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12822-anatomy-of-the-walmart-strike-one-day-at-a-time
By David Bacon
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
On past Black Fridays, the nation’s annual post-Thanksgiving shopping celebration, Walmart stores have seen such a crush of shoppers that people have been trampled trying to get through the doors. On this coming Black Friday, however, shoppers are more likely to see protesting workers.
People have been criticizing the chain’s low wages and unfair competition with local businesses for years. But for a long time the company has been able to keep its workers from joining the critics. Where it could, Walmart has tried to give itself a paternalistic, we’re-all-one-big-family face. Where that hasn’t worked, it’s resorted to the age-old tactics of firings and fear.
But Walmart workers are waking up. Supported by a number of unions, they’ve organized a series of work stoppages, the latest and most extensive of which will take place on Black Friday. They call their organization OURWalmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart).
Strikes at Walmart stores are usually short walkouts by groups of mostly-young people, propelled by pent-up anger at abuse by managers and wages so low no one can really live on them. My heart goes out to these workers. I, too, was fired more than once for trying to organize a union where I worked. I remember how it felt to be an open activist in a plant where the company made no secret of its hatred for what we wanted – a union.
So when I went to take pictures at a walkout at the San Leandro, California Walmart, I wanted to make visible the faces of people with the courage to defy their boss. And I wanted to see how people who like that union idea, as I do, can help keep the company from firing them. This is what I saw.
We got together in the parking lot of the BART rapid transit station a few blocks from the store. Several dozen supporters joined a handful of workers who’d already been fired, along with a couple of associates (as the workers call themselves) from other Walmarts in the area. Together, they marched down Hesperian Boulevard, through the parking lot, to the doors.
Continue reading at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12822-anatomy-of-the-walmart-strike-one-day-at-a-time
