Wal Mart Strike!!!

[SPECTRE1]

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/walmart-workers-community.html

My experience with Walmart through years:

1. The company does extensive surveillance on its employees, internet, and even shoppers. Their surveillance rivals even North Korea or other police states. Wal-mart is looking for indicators of workers organizing to shut down dissent and intimidate workers. The likelihood of somebody from Wal Mart reading this obscure post is high!

2. Wal Mart prescreens candidates based on their likelihood of joining a Union. I believe I was fired from another employer based on my comments on ways to organize workers for higher wages at Wal-Mart! Being the biggest company, they can put pressure on other companies to terminate you!

3. By accepting Unions and raising wages, Walmart could increase the number of stores. Instead of communities fighting a store opening, they would welcome them with open arms and big tax incentives. It would also reduce turnover, allowing Wal Mart to keep more experienced employees.

4. Communities would keep more money with higher wages, rather than going to Bentonville, Arkansas. The store bring in merchandise from all over the world, sells it, and pays low wages to its workers. If Walmart didn't exist, a Union store would setup shop with high wages.

Following a series of unprecedented strikes by Walmart workers across the United States, a contingent of workers and their supporters showed up at Walmart’s corporate headquarters on Oct. 10, to demand an end to the company's efforts to silence and retaliate against workers speaking out for job improvements.

The group, which included national leaders from civil rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights and religious organizations, as well as union and community leaders, announced that their organizations were committed to “reclaiming” Black Friday for Walmart workers and their communities. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., is traditionally the beginning of the holiday shopping season. At the same time, workers, community leaders and elected officials joined together for protests at more than 200 Walmart stores across the country.

“If Walmart wants workers fully committed to the stores on Black Friday, Walmart needs to do more for us the rest of the days of the year,” said Colby Harris, who makes $8.90 an hour after three years working at a Walmart in Lancaster, Texas. Harris is a member of OUR Walmart, a labor group backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers, calling for changes at the company. In just one year, OUR Walmart has grown from an organization of 100 workers to a national organization of thousands of employees from 43 states.

Walmart workers walked off the job Oct 9 and 10 in more than a dozen cities, including Chicago, Dallas, the Washington, D.C. area, Miami, Orlando, Seattle and in many of California’s major cities.

Striking workers and national leaders committed to engaging in a wide range of activities on Black Friday, including rallies, flash mobs, direct action and other efforts to inform customers about the illegal actions that Walmart has been taking against its workers.

A giant retail monopoly

Walmart, with revenue of $444 billion and net profit of $15.7 billion in 2011, is the largest retailer in the world and the biggest private employer in the United States. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute reported that in 2010 the Walton family, heirs to the founder of Walmart, was estimated to have a total net worth of $89.5 billion. Four of the Walton heirs rank in the top 10 on Forbes' list of the richest people in America.

The wealth of the Walton family is equal to the total net worth of the bottom 41.5 percent of Americans. That is, this one family holds more wealth than 48.8 million U.S. households combined.

The wealth of Walmart and the Waltons was not a product of the hard work of the Waltons themselves, or the company's rich shareholders. It was wealth accumulated through the mass exploitation of Walmart’s workers, as well as workers across the globe who produce the goods sold in the giant retailer's stores for an incredibly low wage.

Walmart has repeatedly been charged for its unfair wage practices, and there have been dozens of wage and hour suits in which employees from stores across the country accused managers and Walmart of forcing employees to work unpaid off the clock, erasing hours from time cards and preventing workers from taking lunch and other breaks that were promised by the company or guaranteed by state laws. In 2008, Walmart had to pay up to $640 million in a legal settlement over wage violations.

Efforts to unionize Walmart workers have been ongoing for the past decade, but these efforts have been ruthlessly resisted, and unionization was made nearly impossible due to Walmart’s unremitting anti-union policies. The retail giant’s response to attempts at unionization within its stores and warehouses has included mass firings, anti-union propaganda and unlawful intimidation tactics.

The only successful effort to unionize a U.S. Walmart occurred in 2000 when employees were able to organize in a Walmart Superstore in Jacksonville, Texas. The 10 workers who led the effort were meat cutters in the chain’s grocery department, who after 7 votes in favor to 3 votes opposed, successfully joined with Local 540 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. It was a victory for the workers against unacceptable working conditions and for better wages and benefits, and it was an important step toward organization of Walmart’s 2.2 million employees worldwide.

Unionizing and Fighting these Corporation are about retaining your freedom and keeping the chains of economic slavery off of you. The great Migration from the South was an escape from repression, yet these transnational corporation from the South have been able to come into cities like Chicago, put the progeny of former slaves back in chains.

I believe the workers striking will be retaliated against in a sadistic way, once the cameras go off of them.

 

[SPECTRE1]

Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not race. Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation site in the U.S. and world economy. The Southern strategy of attracting foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends on having a local Southern workforce that is forced to work at low wages by the absence of bargaining power.

Anything that increases the bargaining power of Southern workers vs. Southern employers must be opposed, in the interest of the South’s regional economic development model. Unions, federal wage and workplace regulations, and a generous, national welfare state all increase the bargaining power of Southern workers, by reducing their economic desperation. Anti-union right-to-work laws, state control of wages and workplace regulations, and an inadequate welfare state all make Southern workers more helpless, pliant and dependent on the mercy of their employers. A weak welfare state also maximizes the dependence of ordinary Southerrners on the tax-favored clerical allies of the local Southern ruling class, the Protestant megachurches, whose own lucrative business model is to perform welfare functions that are performed by public agencies elsewhere, like childcare.

The Southern system is essentially about class and only incidentally about race. That is why, following the abolition of slavery, the Southern landlord elite exploited black and white tenant farmers and child workers indifferently. Immigrant workers without rights to vote or organize unions have always appealed to the Southern employer elite. After the Civil War some Southern landlords experimented with bringing in indentured servants or “coolies” from Asia, until that form of unfree labor was banned by Congress in the 1880s. Today many business-class conservatives from Texas and other Southern states, such as former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, champion “guest-worker programs,” which would bring in Mexican nationals and others to work as indentured servants in the South, while forbidding them to become U.S. citizens with legal and voting rights.

White supremacy was never an end in itself, but a tactic used by the Southern oligarchs to divide white workers from nonwhite workers. But the Southern elite can dispense with racism, because it has never cared what color its serfs are. Indeed, in the 17th century Southern planters initially experimented with white British and European indentured servants as farmworkers, before trying black slaves, who were easier to identify if they ran away. In theory, in a truly post-racist South, a multiracial Southern oligarchy could lord it over an underpaid, vulnerable and equally multiracial Southern regional majority.

The traditional Southern regional economic strategy, then, depends on the control by Southern employers of a huge pool of low-wage workers with little or no bargaining power in their dealings with their local bosses or the foreign (that is, extra-Southern) investors and corporations who are invited in to exploit their labor. This regional economic strategy can succeed only if the power of the Southern employer class over Southern urban and rural workers is protected from political and legal interference from outside the South and within.

Protecting the prerogatives of the Southern economic elite and the politicians it owns from external interference is the rationale for the defense of states’ rights, in the 21st century as in the 19th and 20th. While they demonize “the federal government” as though it were some external force, Southern conservatives are actually afraid of democracy — national democracy. They are afraid of their fellow Americans outside of the region they control. They are afraid that national majorities will impose unwelcome reform on the South, at the expense of their profits and privileges, as national majorities did during Reconstruction, the New Deal and the civil rights revolution.

 

[QueEx]

My experience with Walmart through years:

What is your experience based upon: your personal experience; or someone else's personal experience ???

 

[SPECTRE1]

What is your experience based upon: your personal experience; or someone else's personal experience ???

It is my personal experience, many of these large corporation have many traits similar to police states such as Libya, Egypt, or North Korea. The government wants to retain an economic system, position of power, or in the case of corporation a high ratio of owner to worker wages. As result, you get extensive surveillance, informers, and other tactics to suppress dissent.

The similarities are quite remarkable. I wouldn't be surprised if some database exists similar to the Stassi. The workers should visit dissidents in these countries Egypt to compare notes and learn tactics to overthrow this repression.

 

[thoughtone]

Unregulated capitalism is slavery!

 

[Lamarr]

Unregulated capitalism is slavery!

In an unregulated environment, ChinaMart would have a lot more competition. You do realize ChinaMart recieved numerous favors from the Clintons and the govt?

As I've said many times before; Facism is the result of collusion between govt & big business to stifle "the people"!

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[QueEx]

My bad. I thought YOU might have had some personal knowledge to share, i.e., based upon your personal work or application experience with Wal Mart. I'm not pro Wally-World, just trying to understand where you're coming from.

 

[thoughtone]

In an unregulated environment, ChinaMart would have a lot more competition. You do realize ChinaMart recieved numerous favors from the Clintons and the govt?

As I've said many times before; Facism is the result of collusion between govt & big business to stifle "the people"!

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source: New York Times

It is a surprising alliance between the discounter Wal-Mart and American Express, which until recently has been focused on high-end consumers. The move is intended to strengthen both companies’ position in the prepaid card market — which, unlike credit and debit cards, is largely unregulated and has far fewer consumer protections.

 

[SPECTRE1]

Walmart suppress wages of its workers and uses the money to open up more stores and pay dividends to shareholder. Walmart has very little in cash, when you compare it to Apple, it relies heavily on sales to generate cash its needs. While Apple has long term investment, Walmart long term investment is building more stores and purchasing shares outstanding which would increase EPS. In a sense, it is another Apple with hoards of cash and investment; however, Walmart hides this 'long term' investment through building all these stores like a McDonalds and purchasing shares to increase EPS.

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The Walton family is getting paid from the huge dividends that is paid, the high stock price from reducing the number of shares to boost EPS, and all the stores that are built on every block, $80 billion in building assets. All of this hides the hoards of cash they have earned to avoid Apple like stories where they talk about having 100 billion dollar lying around while paying somebody $8.90 an hour which would encourage unionization and look awful.

There are also political reason to fight Unions because they provide campaign support to Democrats.

 

[Upgrade Dave]

In an unregulated environment, ChinaMart would have a lot more competition. You do realize ChinaMart recieved numerous favors from the Clintons and the govt?

As I've said many times before; Facism is the result of collusion between govt & big business to stifle "the people"!

More likely, they would continue to squash smaller competitors and pay even less with even fewer benefits for their workers.

 

[muckraker10021]

Wal-Mart is one of the worlds most predatory sociopathic corporations. The Walton family are fucking sociopaths. When you get hired there, in your new employee package is an application to apply for Food Stamps & Medicaid, because they pay such a little wage. They know that the $10 bucks or less per an hour that they start you at, is so low that it will allow you to be eligible to collect food stamps & medicaid. So immediately every new Wal-Mart employee cost taxpayers money!!

But for now let's deal with something called DEAD PEASANT INSURANCE --You don't know what that is??
Watch the two videos below.

Wal-Mart and other predatory capitalist companies take out an life insurance policy on your life (their employee) without your knowledge!!

For example, Susan works in the bakery department of Wal-Mart, unknown to her Wal-Mart has taken out a life insurance policy on her life in the amount of $100,000. By the way they know she is sick and the odds are she might die. Anyhow Susan gets sick and dies. Wal-Mart collects the $100,000 insurance death benefit, which of course is tax free. Susan's family gets nothing. Wal-Mart has thousands of these DEAD PEASANTS insurance policies on their poverty wage employees. Other major corporations also engage in this practice. If you didn't see the Michael Moore movie Capitalism A Love Story then you must see it. If you want me to post links let me know





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Yes the picture above is a mug shot, Walton got arrested for DWI for the third time.
She screamed at the arresting officer "I'm Alice Walton, bitch!"

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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis-

 

[Greed]

I wish I could yell in this thread, "FUCK THESE INGRATE WORKERS."

If a guy wants to complain about getting paid $8.90/hour for three years straight, then try to find a job that values him more. My bet is he can't because that's all he's worth. The only group that should get paid more is the store managers because they have to deal with these idiots.

Every time I hear a Walmart employee wanting to unionized there is only one logic used, because Walmart makes too much money. And that's a direct quote, "too much money."

This is low skilled work that requires minimum thinking. Will Target, Winn-Dixie, Walgreens, or Kroger pay them more? Probably not. And if Walmart hires someone and helps them get government benefits, then how could that possibly be more expensive for taxpayers than the person not working at all. Walmart is doing too much in my opinion. Especially for fucking ingrates.

Stop complaining and just leave Walmart, if you're desperate and can't that means you suck as an employee.

And if you're a customer complaining then go to Target and pay more money for simple shit.

 

[SPECTRE1]

I wish I could yell in this thread, "FUCK THESE INGRATE WORKERS."

If a guy wants to complain about getting paid $8.90/hour for three years straight, then try to find a job that values him more. My bet is he can't because that's all he's worth. The only group that should get paid more is the store managers because they have to deal with these idiots.

Every time I hear a Walmart employee wanting to unionized there is only one logic used, because Walmart makes too much money. And that's a direct quote, "too much money."

This is low skilled work that requires minimum thinking. Will Target, Winn-Dixie, Walgreens, or Kroger pay them more? Probably not. And if Walmart hires someone and helps them get government benefits, then how could that possibly be more expensive for taxpayers than the person not working at all. Walmart is doing too much in my opinion. Especially for fucking ingrates.

Stop complaining and just leave Walmart, if you're desperate and can't that means you suck as an employee.

And if you're a customer complaining then go to Target and pay more money for simple shit.

Before:
Let use an example, the auto industry was pretty much like Wal Mart before the Unions came. The working conditions were dangerous, workers could be fired at any moment, and pay & benefits were low

After:
Detroit became the richest town in America afterwards, millions of people moved to the middle class with good wages and benefits.

The price we pay for oil is not a market price, it is based on what countries need to have to provide the social services for their people. The wages that workers are paid are fixed and colluded by these corporations. Unions can counter this tactic by companies to fix low wages for its workers. Plus Wal Mart knows there is no social safety net, there is high unemployment or the government does not try to reach full employment.

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This film shows you how the companies attempted to kill people that tried to Unionize. People were fired, shot, or even killed to prevent Unions.

 

[Greed]

Why are people always without power in your interpretations of the world? I think you should separate your personal feelings of powerlessness from the reality that exist where people have choices. People don't have to shop or work at these companies. People don't have to drive at all or drive as much as they do.

A Walmart job is an idiots job where you're expected to not think. It should be low pay and easy to be terminated. Don't compare it with the auto industry work that required some thought or your life/limb was forfeit. Or thousands of dollars of equipment could be ruined.

You should really fix your romantic idea of unions. They've murdered their fair share as well. Someone that wanted to cross the line to work, or black people trying to break into their rolls.

 

[QueEx]

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<A HREF="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-wal-mart-strikes-the-american-consumer/265542/">link</A>

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