After a five-day organizing training and strategy summit in Birmingham, Alabama, members of OUR Walmart — a group trying to organize low-wage Walmart workers — announced a plan to send a caravan of workers from around the country to converge at the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. annual shareholder meeting next month, demanding pay increases, respect and the right to form a union.
Organizing Walmart workers has proven difficult given the company’s resistance to collective bargaining, including their 24-hour rapid response team, employed to squash unionizing efforts.
Despite these challenges, OUR Walmart has helped organize several hundred workers in demonstrations, most notably the Black Friday action in November, which saw walkouts across thousands of stores on the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States.
OUR Walmart, a campaign “united for respect,” began in June 2011 with 100 workers issuing a declaration of demands to corporate executives at their corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Among the demands were a call for $13 per hour minimum wage and full-time jobs for those who request them.
Organizers hope that what started as a few hundred employees soon will grow to include the bulk of the 1.4 million Walmart employeesacross the country. Already, the campaign is winning the hearts and minds of workers who feel disrespected by the multibillion-dollar corporation.
“I feel like we’re facing many of the same issues [as the civil rights movement] — even though it’s not necessarily about race. This time it’s about respect. And being able to feed our families, and having good working conditions,” said Tsehai Almaz, a Walmart worker in Los Angeles.
The latest action, a worker’s caravan modeled after the civil rights-era freedom rides, will bring hundreds of Walmart workers from across the U.S. to protest the shareholder meeting on June 7 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
It is a salient demand at a time when shareholders and corporate executives count profits earned through the hard work of the Walmart workforce. Despite being the top Fortune 500 company last year with $469.2 billion in revenue, the average Walmart sales associate still makes $8.81 per hour, according to independent market research group IBISWorld.
This translates to annual pay of $15,576, based on Walmart’s definition of full-time as 34 hours per week. Hundreds of thousands who work “full-time” still earn wages below the 2010 federal poverty line of $22,050 for a family of four.
“I’m 52 years old and I can’t afford to have my own apartment on what I make at Walmart,” one employee with the OUR Walmart campaign said.
With few benefits provided by the company, 80 percent of Walmart employees have turned to food stamps and other forms of public assistance in order to make ends meet.
According to the AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch campaign, Wal-Mart CEO Michael T. Duke received $18,131,738 in total compensationlast year including stock options. By comparison, the average Walmart worker made $34,645 last year. Put another way, Duke made 523 times that of an average worker’s pay.
This is in keeping with the low-wage philosophy espoused by Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton, who once said, “I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We’re going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.”
Originally published by Mint Press News.
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