In what is becoming its own holiday tradition, a union-funded anti-Walmart group is planning a round of protests at the retailer’s locations across the country, hoping to disrupt it during one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
“Tens of thousands of Americans said they plan to support workers that day at 1,600 protests nationwide — the largest mobilization of working families — calling on Walmart’s owners to raise wages to a minimum of $15 an hour and provide consistent, full-time work,” the nonprofit group OUR Walmart said Friday.
However, the protesters will not necessarily be Walmart employees themselves — a fact the organizers reluctantly conceded. They declined to say exactly how many Walmart workers they expected would participate. One organizer even admitted that many of the group’s own members wouldn’t be attending.
“In some of our stores, like in California, we have a large amount of members but we may not have workers who are ready to commit to going on strike because there is still that fear of being fired. So, their communities step up [for them],” said Barbara Gertz, an OUR Walmart member from Denver, during a Friday press conference call. “Really, these Black Friday protests are communities telling Walmart they want them to start addressing our issues.”
In its announcement, the group said the protests will be made up of a “broad group of Americans … including tens of thousands of teachers, voters, members of the clergy, elected officials, civil rights leaders and women’s rights activists.”
OUR Walmart has nevertheless been striving to present the events as grassroots efforts by disgruntled workers. The Friday press release was headlined “Walmart Workers Announce Black Friday Strikes.”
A total of 23 people were arrested in sit-down protests at Walmart stores in the Los Angeles area on Thursday. OUR Walmart declined to say during the Friday conference call how many people involved in those protests worked the retailer.
OUR Walmart has organized similar events at Walmarts for the last several years, with the day after Thanksgiving Day being a particular target. The National Labor Relations Board is investigating charges that Walmart has retaliated against 117 employees for participating in the events.
Walmart officials predicted the protests would be more hype than reality. “It was supposed to be 1,500 stores last year. On the day, we had demonstrations at about 200-220 stores. They make a lot of bold predictions and don’t follow through on it,” said Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg. “For the last two years, we have had our best Black Friday events ever.”
Gertz claimed Friday there were events at 1,200-1,400 Walmart locations on Black Friday last year. The OUR Walmart organizers could not immediately say how many workers participated in those events.
The nonprofit group, whose name stands for “Organization United for Respect at Walmart,” describes itself as an organization of employees seeking to better the conditions at the company. It is financially backed by the 1.3 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers union. UFCW has referred to the group as a “subsidiary organization” in Labor Department filings. UFCW members work for numerous companies in direct competition with Walmart, such as Giant, Safeway and Kroger.
UFCW has sought for years to organize Walmart, which has an estimated 1.3 million U.S. employees and is non-union. The protest organizers said that they had had no communications, not even back channel ones, with Walmart’s corporate leadership since they started their protests.
The existence of OUR Walmart allows UFCW to organize regular protest events at Walmart by claiming that the events are not specifically about labor organizing. Under federal law, unions themselves must stop protests after 30 days and either attempt to organize the workers or walk away.
The announcement of the protests concludes with a legal disclaimer stating: “UFCW and OUR Walmart have no intent to have Walmart recognize or bargain with UFCW or OUR Walmart as the representative of its employees.”
