Walmart Still Downplaying Labor Issues, Touts Black Friday Successes

Walmart Monday continued to minimize the scale of strikes and protests on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday in support of workers’ rights in numerous cities around the country. “We had very safe and successful Black Friday events at our stores across the country and heard overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers,” said Bill Simon, president of Walmart U.S. Walmart’s statement, released Friday, addressed planned protests supported by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and said, “Only 26 protests occurred at stores last night and many of them did not include any Walmart associates."

According to the statement attributed to Simon Friday, the company “did not experience the walk-offs that were promised by the UFCW,” although walk-offs were promised for Friday as well as Thursday. “We estimate that less than 50 associates participated in the protest nationwide,” Simon said. In fact, this year, “roughly the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year,” Simon said Friday, referring to Thursday’s shifts. During the “high traffic period” from 8 p.m. through midnight on Thursday when Walmart held events for guaranteed prices on toys and electronics, Walmart processed “nearly 10 million register transactions and almost 5,000 items per second,” Simon said.

Retail Action Project, a New York-based activist group that supports rights of retail workers, said 500 protestors showed up Friday at a scheduled protest at a Walmart store in Secaucus, N.J., just west of Manhattan, according to Justin Hamano, program associate. A story from The Jersey Journal pegged the crowd at about 200. There are no Walmart stores in New York City, Hamano noted. The protest, which included supporters from Occupy Wall Street, former Walmart employees and performance group Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, lasted from noon to 3:30 p.m., Hamano said, when law enforcement shut down the protest. Shoppers had begun leaving because of “the volatile situation,” Hamano said. Activists went into the store to disrupt operations by purchasing inexpensive items and paying for them with pennies and dimes “to slow down the machine,” Hamano said.

The number of protests being reported by the UFCW is “grossly exaggerated,” Walmart spokesman Steven Restivo told Consumer Electronics Daily. Walmart is aware of “a few dozen protests” at stores Friday and the number of associates missing scheduled shifts on Friday was about 60 percent less than Black Friday last year, Restivo said on Monday. He said it “was proven last week” that the OUR Walmart group, a faction of Walmart workers behind the protests, “doesn’t speak for our 1.3 million Walmart associates. … We had our best Black Friday ever, and OUR Walmart was unable to recruit more than a small number of associates to participate in these made-for-TV events.”

In a news release issued Friday, OUR Walmart said Walmart workers in more than 100 cities were expected to go on strike as part of “the continued wave of 1,000 protests in 46 states leading up to and on Black Friday,” which it said would include strikes, rallies, flash mobs, direct action “and other efforts to inform customers about the illegal actions that Walmart has been taking against its workers.” Workers walked off the job Thursday in Miami, Dallas, Wisconsin and the Bay Area, said a news release issued by OUR Walmart. Friday they were followed by workers from Chicago beginning at 5:30 a.m. and Washington, D.C., it said. Lynsey Kryzwick, a spokeswoman for OUR Walmart, said 500 protestors marched on a Walmart in Landover, Md., Friday. Overall, she said, hundreds of Walmart workers were set to strike Friday and thousands of community supporters were joining them.

In Florida, U.S. Rep.-elect Alan Grayson, D-Fla., joined a Walmart worker as she walked off her job in St. Cloud, Fla., Thanksgiving night and then joined a walkout at another Walmart store in Orlando on Friday, according to news reports.

In a Q&A session following a webcast by Making Change at Walmart Friday, Director Dan Schladerman called the walkouts “open-source striking,” that would take a while to calculate as they were an ongoing process over the course of the day. “We know there are hundreds and hundreds of workers on strike as we speak,” but the actual number was unknown, he said. On the starkly different numbers of striking workers supplied by Walmart, Schladerman said, “Walmart continues to downplay everything that’s happening.” Schladerman said there were 35 violations of the National Labor Relations Act that were under review by the National Labor Relations Board against Walmart last week and another 50 scheduled to be filed in the coming days, including illegal terminations, illegal cuts in hours, threats and intimidation, and others. The group did not respond to our request for an update Monday.

Going forward, Schladerman said labor activist groups would use the holiday season to continue the momentum of a “movement to change Walmart.” Announcements of future events in support of workers’ rights will be made in coming days, he said.