Walmart employees plan Black Friday strikes
Employees at Walmart, one of the nation's largest retail outlets, have announced plans for pickets and strikes on Black Friday, the busiest single shopping day of the year.
Reuters reports that the labor activist group Our Walmart will hold protests and civil actions at 1,600 stores throughout the United States on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.
Black Friday gets its name from the fact that it is usually the first day of the year that most retailers crossover from the "red" of unprofitability into the "black" of positive profits. It is a uniquely American phenomenon that sees people camp out in parking lots to be first in line for products. Black Friday also usually results in arrests, fist fights, and sometimes even deaths as people are trampled by mad stampedes of shoppers bursting into stores when they first open their doors, usually at midnight. The traditional midnight opening has begun to fall out of favor recently as Black Friday has even begun to creep into Thanksgiving itself, with many stores such as Best Buy, Target, and Walmart forcing their employees to work on Thanksgiving. Reuters notes that on Black Friday of 2013, Our Walmart organized rallies at around 1,400 stores nationwide. The labor actions are motivated by demands for higher wages and a more accommodating policy for pregnant employees, according to Reuters. Labor actions by Walmart are increasingly common, and one day before the announcement by Our Walmart, 23 Walmart employees demonstrating for better benefits were arrested in Los Angeles. Those employees occupied two area Walmarts for several hours and were eventually arrested as they sat down in an intersection in an effort to stop traffic, according to Reuters.
