The River Wanders...

sarahlee310:

At a meeting convened in 2011 to boost safety at Bangladesh garment factories, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) made a call: paying suppliers more to help them upgrade their manufacturing facilities was too costly.

The comments from a Wal-Mart sourcing director appear in minutes of the meeting, which was attended by more than a dozen retailers including Gap Inc. (GPS), Target Corp. and JC Penney Co.

Details of the meeting have emerged after a fire at a Bangladesh factory that made clothes for Wal-Mart and Sears Holdings Corp. killed more than 100 people last month. The blaze has renewed pressure on companies to improve working conditions in Bangladesh, where more than 700 garment workers have died since 2005, according to the International Labor Rights Forum, a Washington-based advocacy group.

At the April 2011 meeting in Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital, retailers discussed a contractually enforceable memorandum that would require them to pay Bangladesh factories prices high enough to cover costs of safety improvements. Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a Wal-Mart director of ethical sourcing, told attendees the company wouldn’t share the cost, according to Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, who attended the gathering. Kalavakolanu and her counterpart at Gap reiterated their position in a report folded into the meeting minutes, obtained by Bloomberg News.

“Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories,” they said in the document. “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

More at Bloomberg.

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

current:

Likened by Wal-Mart spokesperson Kory Lundberg to the “Super Bowl for retailers,” November 23 is now D-Day in the brewing battle between big box retailer Wal-Mart and thousands of disaffected employees trying to organize for better pay, fairer schedules and increased health benefits.

OUR Walmart, a union-backed organization of Wal-Mart employees, says it has mobilized thousands of associates for a nationwide Black Friday protest to end the retailer’s retaliation against workers agitating for reform. Wal-Mart is entirely union-free in North America and has filed suit with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that the sit-ins, protests and walk-outs over the past month are illegal.

Before you hit the streets on Black Friday to shop till you drop here are some key figures about Wal-Mart’s powerful position compared to its employees that might make you think twice about what retailers to support.

1.3 million – Wal-Mart employees in the United States. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the world.

$15.7 billion – Wal-Mart’s 2011 profits. The company is currently number 2 on the Fortune 500.

$8.75 per hour – average starting salary for a new Wal-Mart employee. That’s turns out to be an annual salary of $15,500, which is about even with the federal poverty level for a 2-person household.

$8,653 per hour – Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke’s $18 million annual salary converted to a 40 hour-a-week hourly wage.

$13 per hour – Hourly wage the OUR Walmart group is demanding from Wal-Mart.

$4.83 million – The fine Wal-Mart agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Labor in 2012 for failing to pay overtime wages to more than 4,500 employees nationwide, .

$56,068.58 – Online donations received to sponsor striking employees on Black Friday.

12 – number of cities where Wal-Mart is currently facing strikes since October 4, 2012.

0 – number of strikes Wal-Mart has faced since 1962.

$312 billion — Wal-Mart’s revenue in 2005.

4,700 – number of children of Wal-Mart’s Alabama employees receiving Medicare assistance in 2005.

16 million – the number of US children – that’s 1 in 6 – that struggle with hunger. As Current has previously reported, roughly 20 percent of American children live in a home with parents who are unable to regularly put food on the table.

Check out Jennifer Granholm” at 10E/7P on Current TV,’ as we talk with striking Wal-Mart associate Martha Sellars about she’s planning to join Friday’s walkout.

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

sarahlee310:

Now the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) has written to shipping owners and ship captains who carry Walmart goods and asked them to contact the gigantic global company and express support for the protesting workers. “Walmart workers taking industrial action know that their jobs are at risk. The least we can do to help is use our expertise at sea and relations with the shipping industry to back them in any way we can.”

ITF acting general secretary Steve Cotton told the Guardian: “We’re talking to captains and the ship operators moving Walmart goods, and asking them to register their concerns with the company about its treatment of staff – and the impact that could have on trade.”

The ITF is a global union federation representing around four and a half million transport workers worldwide.

In recent months, parts of Walmart’s outsourced warehouse supply chain in the US have been hit by strikes and demonstrations. Walmart has accused unions of seeking to cause trouble and organise its workforce. It has said previously that only a tiny minority of its 1.3 million US staff are joining the protests and has defended its wages and benefits as offering good jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans.

But the protests do appear to have rattled the firm. Walmart has filed a complaint with the labor board asserting that OUR Walmart’s protests violate federal law that prevents 30 days of picketing when a union is seeking recognition. Walmart says the protests fit that description and are actually sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It has sought an injunction to prohibit the protests. Both OUR Walmart and the UFCW deny those allegations and say that they are not seeking union recognition.

[…]

OUR Walmart has also filed complaints alleging that public statements made by Walmart executives have amounted to a threat to protesting employees. Walmart spokesman David Tovar this week warned on CBS Evening News of the possible consequences for employees walking off their scheduled shifts. “If associates are scheduled to work on Black Friday, we expect them to show up and to do their job. And if they don’t, depending on the circumstances, there could be consequences,” he said.

That statement angered some OUR Walmart members. “Some of my co-workers are afraid, but this kind of intimidation by Walmart management is an example of why we are going on strike. I know my rights and I’m not afraid to protest,” said Dan Hindman, a California Walmart worker and member of OUR Walmart.

Those protests look set to go ahead and range from walkouts to leafleting of shoppers as they crowd into stores in the hunt for bargains to stunts like “flash mobs” and other events.

They are currently planned in various cities in states that include California, Illinois, Texas, Maryland, Louisiana, Florida, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Wisconsin.

This is an interesting twist.

robertreich:

A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today’s dollars, including health and pension benefits.

Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an…

(via norseye-deactivated20121127)

Walmart really doesn’t want organizers talking to its workers as actions against the retail giant heat up in advance of Black Thursday. That’s no surprise, of course, but still, lying to police to get them to handcuff a former Walmart worker in the store to talk to current workers is a little much.

Josh Eidelson reports that Alex Rivera worked at an Orlando Walmart store until September, when he was on the receiving end of one of those coincidental firings we see so often when workers become activists, with Walmart changing his workload and checking up on him constantly, then firing him for the common practice of correcting his time sheet to account for time he spent helping customers while officially off the clock. Since his firing, Rivera had returned repeatedly to talk to his former coworkers about taking part in Black Friday strikes and protests, which is something that’s going to get you kicked out of Walmart in a hurry. This was different, though:

According to Rivera and an OUR Walmart organizer who accompanied him to the store, Rivera was leaning over to drink from a water fountain when a police officer grabbed his arm without warning, put him in handcuffs and led him to an office. Rivera said that the officer told him that Walmart management had informed the police that Rivera had previously signed a written trespassing warning obligating him not to return to the premises. Walmart “lied to the police officer.…” said Rivera. “That’s why they handcuffed me.”

Rivera added that when the store’s “asset protection” manager suggested additional details for the officer to add to the police report, “The police officer told him three times. He said no, I’m not going to add that stuff.” Rivera said that after discovering that the police department had no trespassing warning on file for him, the officer asked the store’s co-manager to produce a copy of it. At that point, according to Rivera, the co-manager backtracked, and the police officer “started making faces” at the manager, and quickly released Rivera’s handcuffs. Rivera and the OUR Walmart organizer said that the officer issued them a trespassing warning against returning to the store, but told them that he never would have handcuffed Rivera if he hadn’t been told incorrectly that he had already violated such a signed warning.

As a union organizer, you expect to get kicked out of anti-union stores like Walmart. But, as Rivera told The Nation, this wasn’t so much about getting him out of the store as intimidating current workers: “They’re going to say, ‘If I join the organization and do something like that, this is what’s going to happen to me.’” Intimidation and retaliation are exactly how Walmart keeps its poorly paid, discriminated-against workers from organizing. And that’s just one of the reasons it’s so important to keep fighting the Walmart economy.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

thenationmagazine:

Mitt Romney, yesterday:

We simply can’t have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table… I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It’s the wrong way for us to go.

So Mitt’s got absolutely no problem with billionaires buying elections, but working people participating in the political process is apparently a bridge too far.

The only good union is the NFL referee’s union.

(via silas216)