October 2012

In the wake of the unprecedented strikes by Walmart Associates all over the country, the Huffington Post uncovered a confidential memo Walmart issued to salaried managers on October 8th, just after the first wave of strikers walked off the job in Southern California. The document contains seven pages of instructions for how to respond to both strikes and actions by community members.

The document shows that the dozens of walk-outs and hundreds of store actions have unsettled the company, in spite of their public claims that neither the strikes nor protests have impacted their ability to operate. It also shows that Walmart expects both workplace and community actions to continue, and wants to carefully control the response from local store managers.

Walmart has seen their fair share of “days of action” from the labor movement. But the recent call to “Stand Up, Live Better,” culminating in walk-outs throughout the country this week, is being called “a game-changer.”

The momentum has been building for months. Workers, community members, and workers’ rights organizations like Jobs with Justice have been leafleting, organizing delegations, protesting, and inspiring a groundswell of activity across the country of historic proportions.

In June, guestworkers at C.J.’s Seafood in Louisiana went on strike over complaints of forced labor, wage and hour violations, and discrimination at the crawfish processing company, which supplies 85 percent of its products to Walmart and Sam’s Club. The workers immediately took their grievances to Walmart, calling on the company to use its clout as a major buyer and live up to its own supplier ethics standards by meeting with workers and taking steps to eliminate forced labor among its seafood suppliers.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user lwvc

Today, community and labor leaders gathered in front of the California State Building in San Francisco to voice frustration over the Governor’s vetoes of three pieces of key legislation that would have ensured worker protections and extend integration of immigrant communities: the Trust Act, the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights and the Farm Workers’ Heat Protection bills. The bills would have helped to make California the “Anti-Arizona” by upholding the rights of immigrant workers.

The TRUST Act (AB 1081 – Ammiano) would have limited unfair, costly detentions of immigrants in local jails for extra time for deportation purposes- people who would otherwise be released. Despite the movement of communities across the country passing similar laws, the Governor’s veto shot down the policy that was aimed at restoring trust between immigrant communities and local police, bringing S-Comm back to its original stated purpose, and lifting the burden of immigration enforcement from local law enforcement.

The courageous stand taken by Chicago’s nearly 30,000 public school teachers and their organization, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), has changed the conversation regarding the causes and the solutions to our national public education crisis.