Walmart Black Friday Protests Hit Major Cities With Calls For '$15 And Full Time'

Black Friday may be most famous for doorbuster shopping deals, but among progressives it's becoming a regular holiday for labor demonstrations. Friday marked the third consecutive year of scattered but highly visible protests against Walmart. Demonstrators, along with an unknown number of Walmart strikers, are calling for better pay and scheduling practices from the world's largest retailer.

On Thursday and Friday, photos on Twitter tagged with #walmartstrikers showed sizable protests in D.C., Pittsburgh, Northern New Jersey, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif., and St. Paul, Minn., among other areas. The protests were led by OUR Walmart, a union-backed worker group, alongside community and labor groups in different cities.
 
Dan Schlademan, campaign director of Making Change at Walmart, a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said on a call with reporters Friday that he expects the number of strikers to be in the hundreds by the end of the day, though the group could not provide a specific number of workers who'd submitted strike notices to their bosses.

"All the signs that we're seeing is that this is going to be the biggest day ever," Schlademan said.

Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Walmart, told HuffPost that the retailer was more concerned with serving its customers than with protests it views as union stunts. According to Buchanan, more than 22 million shoppers came to Walmart stores on Thanksgiving alone this year.

"We're really focused on our customers," Buchanan said. "We've got millions of customers coming in [on Thanksgiving] and Friday, and we're making sure they have a safe and exciting shopping experience."

Walmart Black Friday Protests Hit Major Cities With Calls For '$15 And Full Time'

Walmart Still Hasn't Paid Its $7,000 Fine For 2008 Black Friday Death

Five years after a worker was killed in a crush of shoppers on Black Friday, Walmart still hasn't paid the $7,000 it was fined for allegedly failing to protect employees on the biggest shopping day of the year.

Sitting on appeal with a review commission, the case of Jdimytai Damour's death highlights how corporations can choose to fend off modest penalties over workplace dangers for years on end, according to occupational health experts.

For a company with sales of $466 billion last fiscal year, the $7,000 fine from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration represents little more than a single store's rounding error. Walmart would have vastly outspent that sum simply in legal fees devoted to fighting the penalty. But the world's largest retailer is less concerned with the monetary fine than with the broader implications of the case. A negative ruling could compel Walmart and other retail companies like it to take additional safety precautions for workers or face new liabilities.

"It's not about the penalty," said Celeste Monforton, a former OSHA analyst who's now a lecturer at George Washington University. "It's this interest in seeing how far Walmart can push back against the decision."



Walmart Still Hasn't Paid Its $7,000 Fine For 2008 Black Friday Death