BREAKING: Wal-Mart workers strike, Target workers threaten to join Black Friday walkout

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Salon.com

Exclusive: Puget Sound workers are latest to join the strike wave, with weeks to go before a Black Friday showdown

Josh Eidelson

Four days after the end of a Southern California strike, Seattle-area Wal-Mart workers plan to mount their own walkout this morning. The one-day strike is the latest in the lead-up to a larger day of strikes and protests planned for Black Friday, the high-profile post-Thanksgiving shopping day at the end of this month.

“I don’t know if I’ll see it in my lifetime,” Washington Wal-Mart employee Mary Watkines told Salon in a pre-strike interview, but “I want all of the associates, including myself, to be able to walk into our workplace, you know, this place that they call our family…and not be physically ill, not just feel like you want to throw up or pass out or even just turn around and walk out” over “intimidation and humiliation.” Watkins added, “I want people to be able to live better, you know, like the commercial says…Nobody lives better except for the Waltons now.”

Today’s strike is the latest by the non-worker group OUR Walmart, which is closely tied to the United Food & Commercial Workers union. As I’ve reported, OUR Walmart has promised major mobilization for this year’s “Black Friday” strike; organizers say last year’s drew four hundred-some strikers. Sub-contracted Twin Cities janitorial workers who clean stores for Target and other corporations plan to announce today that they’re prepared to strike that day as well.

“I need to be able to take care of my family,” Anthony Goytia told reporters on a conference call during last week’s SoCal strike. “And that’s why yesterday and today, I’m risking everything – my livelihood, my ability to provide for my family, my ability to pay rent on time, put food on the table – everything, by striking against a company that aggressively and illegally disciplines and fires workers who speak out for better jobs.”

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/12/breaking_wal_mart_workers_strike_as_target_workers_threaten_to_join_black_friday_walkout/

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Employee protesting in front of Walmart (Credit: AP/J Pat Carter)

[RitchieRich]

1. thank you for posting

new source of new for me.

[TBF]

2. Good - and I will not cross that picket line.

I look around my house and see all the "stuff" and I think this holiday season is going to be one nice present for each child (we do spoil them ...) and more importantly some time volunteering at the local food bank. Enough is enough.

[Treant]

6. We did this years ago

Of course, we're adults, but Christmas became one nice or a few smaller gifts, and time spent with the family.

I'm fortunate that I'm a handy person and make things, so my soap is very popular around Christmas. So are my electronics, for that matter--the stuff I make, not buy.

[Tansy_Gold]

3. A few words for the UCFW and especially its members

I don't remember exactly when the big strike against the grocery stores was. Very late 1990s, very early 2000s. Kroger affiliates in California and Arizona were targeted. The issue of course was wages and benefits. The strike lasted a couple weeks, if I remember correctly. The company/ies insisted they couldn't continue to pay high wages because of competition from -- surprise, surprise! -- Walmart.

So the union members voted to accept a new contract that protected the wage rates of current members but allowed new hires to be paid just about the same as Walmart employees.

When I went to work for a Kroger affiliate a few years later, my starting rate was $7.50/hour. No benefits. No guarantees of number of hours. And because the employees with most seniority got to pick their schedules first, those of us making the lowest rate got the fewest hours and the worst hours. Pre-strike union members chose Saturdays (time and a half) and Sundays (double time) which, at their $17/hour rate gave them very comfortable paychecks. Those of us hired in at $7.50 had to settle for the late-night shifts, the busy sale days, and that was if there were even any hours left for us after the others had taken their pick.

We had no hope of ever seeing any overtime bonuses, because we were the first to have our hours cut if we even approached 40, and we didn't get automatic bonus pay for week-ends.

In fact, working week-ends was a double burden on us. Not only did we not get overtime pay like the pre-strike union members, but we also got penalized with extra work for our $7.50 an hour. Those higher wage workers put a huge burden on the store's labor budget, which had to be kept under control per corporate policy. The only way to do that was to make sure there were as few workers as possible on the floor on the week-ends when labor costs were highest.

As a cashier, I was expected to do more of my own bagging on a week-end when it was busy than during the week when the store could afford lots of check-out helpers. We often had fewer cashiers on a busy Saturday morning than on a slow Thursday evening and so customers got crabbier and more demanding when they had to wait in line longer.

All of this might have been reasonably tolerable were it not for the attitude displayed by a couple of the four or five most-senior pre-strike cashiers. They actually resented our being there, and they resented that we were "willing" to work for $7.50 an hour. One woman in particular, who bragged that she made $22/hour and $44/hour on Sunday, who drove a shiny new Corvette that she stubbornly refused to park in the distant spaces designated for employees, and who made sure she ALWAYS had an assistant to do her bagging, had the nerve to tell me to my face that if it weren't for people like me who accepted that $7.50/hour wage, she would have been making at least $25/hour instead of only $22.

I didn't dare point out to this arrogant __________ that it was the union and members just like her that voted for the contract that relegated me and all the other new hires to second class membership. She made more on a 6-hour Sunday shift than most of us made in two or three weeks, but she had the nerve to blame us?!

Maybe if the UCFW had spent more time and money organizing the Walmart workers 10 or 15 years ago instead of voting in contracts that restricted their own new membership to Walmart-like wages and fringes (none), they might have had more success. They might even have broken the stranglehold Walmart has on retail business. While I wish them all the luck and I hope for the best for the Walmart workers (I was a cashier there, too), I think the union needs to look at its own part in creating the current conditions.

But if the UCFW membership is more concerned about protecting their own cushy jobs and wages, they have no right to assign any blame to the workers they themselves screwed when they voted for those contracts.

We'll see what happens.

[arikara]

8. Unions all over

gutted themselves when they accepted deals like that. They should never have agreed to a 2 tier system like that but they did it in many places. And I've never heard of a deal where they pay double time for working weekends unless the shop isn't normally open then.

[Tansy_Gold]

11. This one paid overtime on week-ends

The cashier in question had to go to the union to force the store to let her work on Saturdays and Sundays.

Most people didn't want to work the week-ends but she did because she made big money for it, and she had the seniority to choose those week-ends when she didn't want to work. When manager told her she couldn't sign up for week-ends because she was too expensive for the store's budget, she went to the union and the union told management: She has seniority, so she gets to pick her days and shifts, and if it puts a burden on the budget, then you have to cut someone else's hours. She worked the 6:00 a.m. to noon shift every Sunday and made $44/hour when it was quiet while people were in church or sleeping late. But her pay was the equivalent of five or six "new" cashiers and what were then (2005) called courtesy clerks: the kids who bagged the groceries and gathered carts out of the lot.

The auto unions did the same thing -- voted in contracts that allowed for new hires to be paid half (or less) what the pre-strike or pre-bailout workers were getting. The unions forgot about building a sense of solidarity with ALL workers, not just union members. That sense of "we got ours, now you younger folks can go scratch" was just as pervasive in unions -- where it should have been anathema -- as in the GOP.

So it's great that UCFW is finally going to bat for the Walmart workers, but they might have had a better chance of success if they had fought for their own members' rights ten years ago.

[marble falls]

15. No doubt about it, some unions sold us out.

[bread_and_roses]

16. Sadly, an all-too-common tale, Tansy

... too many of my Sisters and Brothers seem to have forgotten: "An injury to one is an injury to all."

One can only hope the tide is turning. Because unless we see it turn from a siege mentality to an activist mentality, this sort of thing will continue until being a union member will be totally irrelevant because the union will be totally powerless and totally under the thumb of the Corporations - the 1%ers will have won, and will let as many as feel the urge organize because it won't matter any more.

[grilled onions]

4. Gads They Want SO Much

A livable wage! Food on the table! Shoes for the kids! Rent Paid on time! How dare these ingrates!! Sadly many workers at the upper end and almost all the CEO's feel this way. After all their expenses are more important. Those country club dues,that new sailboat or that new summer home will cost plenty. Their standard answer is work more,get another job etc. How much more can some work without not seeing their kids or spouse at all? How can you get another job if this one won't give you certain hours on certain days? Our jobs are becoming more unfair every day to so many and so few give a damn.

[grahamhgreen]

5. Kick!

[hog]

7. Strike!

If a job isn't worth a living wage, it isn't worth doing.

[Half-Century Man]

9. One wonder the kind of message the upper echelon would get

if a general strike/boycott was held for this holiday season? After all their welfare is more closely linked to the stock and commodities markets. Buying lots of product without the means to deliver or the customers to deliver too is very expensive. And the stock market goes into shitstorm maximus at the slightest drop of nearly any hat.

Let the rallying cry be "$20.00 an hour; over 8 or 40 double dollar" and the sudden mass release of adult diaper filler on Wall Street will be audible in Sri Lanka.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

10. Kick and Rec n/t

[DeSwiss]

12. K&R

[Brigid]

13. And, in the same vein, to quote Harrison Ford on a job he once had:

"One hundred twenty-five bucks a week and all the respect that implies."

[marble falls]

14. I refuse to cross picket lines and I am boycotting WalMart until they treat their workers right.