DÉjÀ Vu

Strike!

Monday, December 01, 2014

2014

Wal-Mart workers across the country protested low wages and poor treatment on Black Friday, typically the busiest shopping day of the year. Workers in 10 states walked off the job, while others staged sit-ins, with some Los Angeles-area workers organizing a Thanksgiving day hunger strike. Al-Jazeera America reports

“There are numerous times when I have to scrounge for change or borrow a nickel to buy a 30-cent ramen noodle meal,” one worker says, as she climbs onto a bus to attend a Black Friday protest rally with other members of Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) at one of the companies flagship stores in North Bergen, New Jersey. “All we’re asking for is a living wage to support ourselves and our families. That should be a basic right.”

For the past three years, OUR Walmart, a worker based group that is backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, has been staging protests to highlight their demands for a $15 minimum hourly wage and consistent schedules. This Black Friday morning, hundreds of protesters rallied outside the North Bergen store with similar protests planned at over 1,600 stores nationwide.

 

1937

Workers in New York branches of Woolworth’s were fed up with long hours, poor treatment, and low pay, and so in the spring of 1937, they staged a sit-in at a Manhattan branch of the store. Supporters passed the women strikers food and bedding, and the women involved reached out to public channels, including the New York Times, and the chain’s celebrity heiress to make their voices heard:

The Woolworth strikers sent a cablegram to Countess Barbara Hutton Haugwitz Reventlow, whose fortune is based on the store chain, declaring:

“Hunger strikers in New York store ask your intervention for a living wage.”

The former Miss Hutton's name figured also in an earlier demonstration by the strikers, in which placards were carried about the store, with lettering to the effect: “Miss Hutton counts millions while five-and-ten girls count ten and twelve dollar salaries.”