UFCW400
Published on Nov 29, 2013
Walmart workers and community
supporters in the Washington, D.C. area today protested against
Walmart—the nation's largest retailer—joining 1,500 protests across the
nation in one of the largest mobilizations of working families in
American history. Workers in the Washington, D.C. area were joined by
tens of thousands of Americans in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle,
Sacramento, Miami, Minneapolis and other locations who called on Walmart
to end illegal retaliation and publicly commit to improving labor
standards, including providing workers with more full-time work and
$25,000 a year. At a protest at the Walmart store located on Richmond
Highway in Alexandria, Va., nine people, including one Walmart worker,
were arrested in an act of civil disobedience calling for an end to the
exploitation of Walmart workers by their company.
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Published on Monday, December 2, 2013 by Common Dreams
Fast Food Giants Starve Workers' Wages, Gorge on Taxpayers: Report
Demonstration
outside McDonald's in Times Square in support of employees on strike
New York November 29, 2012. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly)As the nation's largest fast food giants continue to push back against the ongoing fight for better wages by fast food workers across the country, a report released Monday reveals a world in which those companies are "pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies" as they feed their CEOs' growing paychecks.According to the report, Fast Food CEOs Rake in Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, current tax code allows corporations such as Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's "to deduct unlimited amounts from their income taxes for the cost of stock options, certain stock grants, and other forms of so-called 'performance pay' for top executives," meaning that the more corporations pay their top earners, the less they pay in federal taxes.
As IPS reports, over the past two years, CEOs of the top six publicly held fast food chains brought home over $183 million in deductible "performance pay," which in turn reduced their companies' taxes by an estimated $64 million.
As Sarah Anderson from IPS points out in an op-ed Monday, $64 million is enough to cover the average cost of food stamps for 40,000 American families for a year.
Fast food profits, in this way, come at the taxpayer's expense from two sides: while CEOs' paychecks expand and corporations pay less in taxes, those companies have simultaneously worked "to keep low-level workers' wages so low that many must rely on public assistance."
As another report from UC Berkeley recently showed, low-wage fast-food jobs currently cost the American public nearly $7 billion a year, as 52% of fast food workers, including those who work full-time, are payed so little they must rely on safety net programs including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as Earned Income Tax Credit payments.
"What makes all this even more galling is that these fast food giants are pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies for their CEO pay while fighting to keep their workers’ wages at rock bottom," writes Anderson.
"All of the big fast food corporations are members of the National Restaurant Association," Anderson writes, "which is aggressively working to block a raise in the federal minimum wage to a level that would let millions of fast food workers make ends meet without public support."
Meanwhile, across the country workers are fed up with low wages and have embarked on a series of local and national strikes against their fast food employers over the course of the past year.
On Thursday, fast food workers organized by groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, with backing from unions such as the Service Employees International Union, will strike in one hundred cities across the U.S. at McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurant locations, demanding a $15-an-hour wage.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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Published on Nov 28, 2013
Walmart is facing protests on Friday
11/29 at 1,500 locations across the country. Employees and activists
will be pushing for higher wages, more full-time jobs and an end to
employer retaliation. Please Stand With Walmart Workers and join a
BLACK FRIDAY PROTEST near you!
To learn more please visit: http://forrespect.org/
71% of Wallmart Workers will be working on Thanksgiving! Don't you think they deserve a holiday too? And Christmas off too?
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ss...
To learn more please visit: http://forrespect.org/
71% of Wallmart Workers will be working on Thanksgiving! Don't you think they deserve a holiday too? And Christmas off too?
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ss...
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A volunteer loads food at the Capital Area Food Bank, Nov. 14, 2013 in Washington, DC.
Walmart collecting food donations to feed employees
11/18/13 04:45 PM Updated 11/19/13 08:15 AMOrganized labor, protesting workers and other activist groups have been saying for years that low-wage Walmart employees can’t afford to meet basic needs like food. Now, one Cleveland, Ohio, location is doing something about it: soliciting food donations from other workers.
In an employees-only section of the store, management has placed two bins underneath a sign reading, “Please donate food items here so Associates in Need can enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” local paperThe Plain Dealer reported on Monday. Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg told the newspaper that it is for employees “who have had some hardships come up.”
“This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships,” said Lundberg.
The majority of Walmart employees reportedly make less than $25,000 annually, and many of them rely on food stamps. A case study compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that employees in one Walmart location received between $96,007 and $219,528 in food stamps over the course of a single year.
Read More Here
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