Walmart employees to demonstrate over low wages on Black Friday

Walmart employees do not make enough money to afford Thanksgiving dinner, so they would be holding food drives for fellow employees, Huffington Post reported.

It had been reported that an Oklahoma City Walmart store set up bins for underpaid associates to donate canned goods to other underpaid associates.

However, on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, when tens of millions of Americans will travel to Walmart stores to look for holiday discounts on computers, toys and cellphones as well as to buy groceries and basic household items, they would be greeted at 1,600 of Walmart's 4,000 stores by Walmart employees handing out leaflets and holding picket signs - "Walmart: Stop Bullying, Stop Firing, Start Paying" and "We're Drawing a Line at the Poverty Line: $25,000/year."

The protest  would serve to highlight the company's abusive labour practices, including poverty-level wages, stingy benefits, and irregular work schedules that made it impossible for their families to make ends meet.

The Black Friday rallies and demonstrations would serve to underline a dramatic escalation of the growing protest movement among employees of the largest private employer in the US. However, they also point to the country's widening economic divide and the declining standard of living among the majority of US citizens.

Meanwhile, BBC quoted Wal-Mart spokesperson Brooke Buchanan, as saying that  the company had "an open door policy where associates can share any of their questions or concerns".

Unfortunately the labour unions, who did not represent the 1.3 million associates that worked at Wal-Mart in the US, used the holiday season to support their agenda, she added.

According to Wal-Mart the majority of those who would be protesting across the country were union workers or supporters.

The unions had for many years been working largely unsuccessfully, to try to unionise Wal-Mart workers and other low-paid retail employees.

However what was different with the latest protest was that unlike those traditional unionisation efforts, the OUR Wal-Mart coalition was part of a new group of so-called "alt-labour" groups that were taking a new approach to arguing for workers' rights.

Rather than immediately pushing for unionisation, the approach worked around staging demonstrations and strikes to press employers to change specific practices.