Walmart Workers Strike, Protest Company Heiress on Black Friday

By Alan Pyke, ThinkProgress

28 November 15

almart workers and their supporters are protesting at a dozen stores around the United States on Black Friday as part of an ongoing campaign for union recognition and a $15 hourly wage.

The protests are scaled down from previous years’ Black Friday activism, when striking workers and solidarity protesters staged larger rallies and a longer list of locations. The more than three-year-old organizing movement is shifting its tactics in some subtle ways as the campaign wears on.

Over the past two weeks, approximately 1,400 people committed to fasting in support of workers. Many went on a purely liquid diet for the full “Fast for $15” period ahead of Black Friday, but the participants list includes anyone who fasted for at least a day in that window.

The workers’ decision to emphasize such alternative protests over the mass strikes of previous Thanksgiving seasons comes in part because Walmart has been aggressive about trying to forestall activism on its property. The company reportedly sought a number of injunctions prior to the holiday period in hopes of preventing protests at its stores.

Workers formally notified their bosses they planned to strike in six states on Friday. Another group of OUR Walmart workers and supporters are staging a protest outside the New York home of Walmart heir Alice Walton.

The Thanksgiving season has become a key time for Walmart worker activism over the past couple of years, since Black Friday is traditionally such an important sales day for all retail firms. Some changes have already come thanks to the pressure exerted by groups like OUR Walmart and the media and shareholder scrutiny that the organizing has helped bring to the firm’s labor practices. But even after the store raised its wage floor by a couple of dollars earlier this year, its largely part-time workforce remains far shy of the income level that would make them self-sufficient. The taxpayer-funded public assistance dollars that go to Walmart employees amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual public subsidies for the company’s wage policies.

When workers first announced the fasting campaign, they recounted stories of sharing lunches with coworkers and talking in the break room about their reliance on food stamps and community charities to make ends meet. Such chatter at work has always been a risky thing for Walmart’s entry-level workers, as company training packets reveal. The company trains its management employees to monitor conversations in the workplace. Managers are supposed to quickly report worker discontent or discussions of union activity to corporate. Walmart also trains its managers in how to dissuade workers from organizing without crossing over the legal line between advice and intimidation.

But the company’s commitment to keeping tabs on its low-wage workforce goes much farther than managers listening at the break room door, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported this week. While the company has always downplayed the significance of Black Friday actions in public statements, behind the scenes the firm’s leadership has treated the activism as an existential threat.

Documents uncovered in a court case between OUR Walmart and the company reveal that Walmart aggressively tracked the organizing effort. It paid defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin to track employees and activists on social media. Tweets from certain workers who’d been flagged for monitoring would prompt a flurry of emails between members of Walmart’s security team, often copying a Lockheed employee who helps to run that firm’s online communication monitoring system. Lockheed also helped security staff map out protesters’ likely plan of action for a day of protest outside the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters during a 2013 shareholder meeting. The company even enlisted the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force for aid in advance of that protest, after they got word that Occupy protesters might be joining workers in Bentonville.