PHOTO/UFCW INTERNATIONAL UNIONFOLLOW/CHRISTOPHER DILTS
“As Walmart Workers, we are sick of struggling to put food on the table while our hard work makes the country’s wealthiest family, the Waltons, even richer.” That statement of one Walmart worker summed up the sentiment of Black Friday Strikers in their “Fight For 15” in more than 200 cities across the country. Indeed, this sentiment is evidenced by a sign over bins in a Cleveland Walmart store this holiday season that reads, “Please donate food items here so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner.”
Walmart is the single largest private employer worldwide. Super exploitation of their work force has grown the Walton family fortune to $150 billion. That equals the wealth of the bottom 42% of Americans combined. Last year $6.2 billion in federal dollars went to assist Walmart workers who couldn’t afford food, housing and medical care. At that same time, Walmart captured 18% of the food stamp market. All this amounts to tax subsidies for Walmart’s profits, hidden behind aid to workers it put in need.
These workers are part of a new, growing impoverished section of the working class for whom hunger, homelessness and absolute destitution are a constant threat. Gone forever are the better paying industrial manufacturing jobs of the past. The assembly line, powered by human muscle and brain, is being replaced by the computer and robot. This phenomenon continues to spread to industries everywhere.
Even in the service sector, fewer and fewer workers distribute more and more goods. The effect is that full-time work, once the norm, is becoming part time, contingent, and temporary. This is reflected in places like Walmart giving so few hours to workers that they can’t survive.
Add to the list the theft of wages by making people work through their breaks and unsafe working conditions like pregnant women forced to climb ladders with heavy boxes. Punishment for those who speak out against all the abuse clarifies why striking Walmart workers, who feel they have nothing to lose but their chains, are energizing the movement.
This is not simply about the greed of one family. The Walton family is one example of an entire class. That class grows its wealth and private property by exploiting human labor. Yet it is their thirst for maximum profit that is replacing human labor with less expensive, more productive technology. The result is the polarization of society into extreme wealth and bone chilling poverty in the midst of plenty.
Historically, the ruling class has promoted charity to improve their image, but by their own admission, the Waltons’ don’t do charity. Instead, they manage an “Associates In Critical Need Trust,” which is completely funded by employees through payroll deductions. In other words, workers are sharing what little they get so the least among them can survive without any contribution from their exploiter.
The imaginative one-day “Fight For 15” strikes are demanding from the exploiters more of the wealth the workers’ produce. The sharing and bold stance by these impoverished workers offers a glimpse of a possible future. Now imagine a world without exploiters altogether —where the entire wealth of society is shared among us all.
