Walmart's First-Ever Retail Worker Strike Spreads To 12 Cities [UPDATE]
Posted: 10/09/2012 2:22 pm EDT Updated: 10/09/2012 9:41 pm EDT
PROTEST FOR LIVING WAGES BY WALMART WORKERS
A TYPICAL WALLMART STORE EMPLOYS 350 PEOPLE & MAJORITY DOES NOT MAKE LIVING WAGES
Out of that 320 are min. wage earners or less than $10/hr earner.
10 are managers and 20 are Supervisors.
98% of the stuff sold in Walmart is Made in China.
The minimum wage earners in America are not making the "Living Wages" that can take care of their families. That is the reason they are on Food Stamps and other welfare schemes run by Federal & state governments.
In America 30% of the jobs in Private Sector are paying $10/hr that can not provide sustainability to a family. So these earners are not making "Living Wages"; they need assistance to survive.
If India wants to give a bost to Chinese Economy & bost in the number of employed people on Welfare THEN THEY SHOULD WELCOME WALMART & ITS COUNTERPART FROM AROUND THE WORLD.
INDIA ADOPTING US ECONOMIC POLICIES TO SLAUGHTER MAIN STREET
India has blindly adopted the American Economic Policies, without taking into account America a one time Super Power is barely crawling and can't even walk under the load of these Anti-common people and Pro 1% Rich policies.
Today America has 50 mil people on Food Stamps, 20 mil unemployed, 30 mil under-employed, 16 mil children facing hunger, 1.5 mil homeless youth and 70 mil with no health insurance. Above all $16 Trillion external debts, $4 Trillion state government debt and $175 Trillion in unfunded liabilities. Today if you sell every American's assets the total that can be realized is $78 trillion!
DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN AMERICA UNDER PRO RICH ECONOMIC POLICIES
Bottom 50% owns 2.5% of the Nations Assets, 40% owns 26%, Assets, 9% owns 37.8% assets and top 1% owns 33.7%. In other words top 10% owns 41.5% of US assets.
The six heirs to the Walmart fortune are worth as much as nearly half of all American households. The Walton family was worth $89.5 billion in 2010, the same as the bottom 41.5 percent of U.S. families combined, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That's 48.8 million American households in total.
SHRINKING WORKERS WAGES & RISING CEO SALARIES
Workers wages in USA has Dropped 14.4% SINCE 1945 and on the other hand CEO salaries has gone up by 1400% in the same period.
30% employed in private sector of America are making less than $10/hour in other words not making "LIVING WAGES". The National Minimum wage has lost 30 percent of its purchasing power since 1968 as per NFLP report.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY
Walmart's First-Ever Retail Worker Strike Spreads To 12 Cities [UPDATE]
Posted: 10/09/2012 2:22 pm EDT Updated: 10/09/2012 9:41 pm EDT
The first retail worker strike against Walmart has spread from Los Angeles, where it began last week, to stores in a dozen cities, a union official said Tuesday.
Walmart workers walked off the job in Dallas, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay area, Miami, the Washington, D.C., area, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Chicago and Orlando, said Dan Schlademan, director of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Making Change At Walmart campaign. Workers also went on strike in parts of Kentucky, Missouri and Minnesota, he said.
Tuesday's walkouts included 88 workers from 28 stores -- a miniscule fraction of the 1.4 million who work at Walmart, the world's largest private employer. Until Friday, when about 60 Walmart employees walked off the job for a day in LA, no Walmart retail workers had ever gone on strike, the union said.
The workers are protesting company attempts to "silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job," according to a United Food and Commercial Workers news release. Walmart workers, who are not unionized, have long complained of low pay and a lack of benefits.
Some striking Walmart associates plan to protest Wednesday at a Walmart annual investor meeting at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., said a striking worker.
"I make $8.90 an hour and I've worked at Walmart for three years," said Colby Harris, 22, of Dallas. "Everyone at my store lives from check to check and borrows money from each other just to make it through the week." The six heirs to Walmart founder Sam Walton, meanwhile, are worth $89.5 billion, or as much as the bottom 41.5 percent of Americans combined.
David Tovar, the retailer's vice president of communications, said the unhappy strikers "aren't representative of our entire associate base."
"We do surveys and our associate satisfaction scores have been improving over the past couple years, which runs counter to what a few workers who show up at events that the unions put them up to would say," said Tovar. He said Walmart's employee turnover rate is lower than the retail industry average.
Harris, who works in the produce department in Lancaster, Texas, belongs to OUR Walmart, the UFCW-backed worker organization that planned Tuesday's strike in Dallas and the others across the country. Harris said it's not just the wages that bother him. Walmart harasses and fires workers who join labor groups or complain about company policies, he said. "But I'd rather lose my job than be treated like this."
Tovar said Walmart has a policy of listening to complaints from workers. "We have an open-door policy," he said. "If you have any kind of issue you should bring it forward to your manager and if it isn't resolved to your satisfaction you can go to the next level of management."
Walmart also disputed the UFCW's claim that the strikes this week were the first ever. "The UFCW has done these same publicity stunts in the past," said Tovar, citing a 2006 walkout at a Walmart store in Hialeah Gardens, Fla.
However, the walkout in Hialeah Gardens was not exactly an organized union strike. In that case, workers with no ties to union groups spontaneously walked out of a store after an abrupt scheduling change, according to reports from the Miami Herald and Bloomberg news. Tuesday's strikes, meanwhile, had been planned for weeks.
"They say [these strikes] are an attempt to get attention," said Harris. "But if we were getting the attention we deserved, we wouldn't be protesting." He added: "I'm not being paid for these days. We're taking off work to protest -- obviously there must be something wrong."
Non-union workers employed in Illinois and California warehouses owned by Walmart also went on strike earlier this month.
UPDATE: 7:20 p.m. This article has been updated to include comments from David Tovar, Walmart vice president of communications, and Colby Harris, a Walmart worker.
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