A union-backed activist group said it is planning a series of protests at Walmart stores across the nation on the day after Thankgiving, hoping to disrupt the retail giant during Black Friday, the unofficial kickoff of the Christmas shopping season. This year the group said it was organizing “food drives” on behalf of Walmart employees.
The group organizing the event, Making Change at Walmart, is a subsidiary of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union that represents workers at several of Walmart’s rivals such as Giant and Kroger’s. Through it and another UFCW-founded group, OUR Walmart, the union has staged a long-running public relations campaign against the non-union Arkansas-based company, which employs more than a million people.
On Tuesday, Making Change at Walmart announced it would “organize and/or support 1,000 local food drives in cities with Walmart stores so as to help gather food and goods for Walmart workers and other families in need.”
“Walmart pays its workers poverty-level wages, meaning that an estimated hundreds of thousands of hard-working Walmart employees will be forced to rely on assistance from food banks and food stamps this holiday season,” said Jess Levin, communications director at Making Change at Walmart.
Under a policy instituted earlier year, Walmart pays its associates a minimum base salary of $9 an hour, which is set to increase to $10 next year, well above the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. According to the website glassdoor.com, which calculates company payscales, the current average hourly salary for a Walmart sales associate is $9.31, meaning they would get about $19,300 annually before taxes. The Department of Health and Human Services defines a poverty level wage for an individual as $11,770 annually and for a family of four as $24,250.
In previous years, the UFCW-backed groups have promised large protests at dozens of cities, only to have smaller numbers turn out for the events. For example, Our Walmart promised more than 50 Walmart employees at a protest in front of a D.C. Walmart last year, then on the day of the event said 30 participated. Walmart officials said between five and 10 employees took part.
“We see these grandiose claims when the reality is it is only a handful of people at a few locations,” said Glenn Spencer, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce’s Workforce Freedom Initiative.
Representatives at the UFCW-backed groups have responded by arguing that the workers’ lack of participation was due to fears of retaliation.
Associates at the D.C. Walmart that was protested last year told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know anyone who participated and criticized the protesters for claiming to speak on their behalf. “They say we are just getting $9.50 an hour (DC’s then-current minimum wage), but that’s not so,” said one employee who requested not to be named.
Earlier this month, a group claiming the name Our Walmart said it was sponsoring a series of hunger strikes to protest the company’s treament of its employees. That group was founded by Andrea Dehlendorf and Daniel Schlademan, the previous directors of UFCW’s anti-Walmart efforts. Both were fired earlier this year as part of an internal shake-up caused by the union’s new president, Anthony Perrone, who took over in late 2014 and was reportedly unhappy that the union had spent so much on the effort but had not succeeded in organizing a single store.
Asked how many Walmart employees had committed to engaging in a 15-day liquid fast protest, Dehlendorf told the Washington Examiner, “I don’t have that number because people are still signing up all of the time.” Asked how many they had signed up so far, she said, “I don’t have that number.”
Dehlendorf and Schlademan announced on Sept. 17 that OUR Walmart was “relaunching” as an organization independent of UFCW. However, the union disputed that, claiming the other group “split from us.” UFCW maintains the group’s original website, forrespect.org, as well as the Making Change at Walmart website. Dehlendorf and Schlademan’s group uses united4respect.org.
