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Julie Anderson 202-721-8141
Nicky Coolberth (on site) 202-215-0905
Walmart workers walked off the job at three Washington DC area stores today, calling on Walmart to end its illegal retaliation against workers calling for better wages and full-time work. Many earning less than $25,000 a year at the country's largest employer, these workers are risking their livelihoods by striking against an employer that aggressively, and illegally, fires and disciplines workers for speaking out for better jobs.
Pointing to the $17 billion in annual profits and the $144.7 billion wealth of the Walton family, the group said Walmart can and should do more to improve jobs, and in turn, the economy.
Striking workers like Tiffany Beroid and Cynthia Murray have been emboldened by the recent disclosure from Walmart US CEO Bill Simon that as many as 825,000 Walmart workers are paid less than $25,000 a year.
"I'm speaking out today because Walmart can afford to do better by its workers," said Tiffany Beroid. "We want to work full time, and earn above the poverty level. And weare taking action today because Walmart needs to publicly commit to ending illegal retaliation against workers and better wages." Beroid who is 29 has worked at the Laurel, Maryland Walmart for two years and earns less than $25,000 a year. She is a wife and mother and says her Walmart salary has made it necessary to depend on food stamps in the past.
"Associates around the country have been retaliated against and fired for speaking out about how it is to work at Walmart," said Cynthia Murray. "Associates shouldn't have to fear for our jobs when we are simply asking to be treated with respect, for talking about it. We won't back down until the company commits to end all retaliation against workers who speak out, and pay all associates a minimum of $25,000 for full-time work." Murry has worked at the same Laurel, Maryland store for 13 years.
The group's call for better jobs includes:
* an end to illegal retaliation;
* a minimum of $25,000/year;
* more full-time work.
Since 30,000 workers and supporters participated in strikes and protests on Black Friday 2012, calls for change at the country's largest retailer and employer have been intensifying, putting Walmart on thedefensive. Citing low wages, manipulative scheduling, understaffing and unsafe working conditions, members of Congress, economic and policy experts, shareholders and financial analysts are pointing to practices that Walmart must end to improve jobs, strengthen the economy--and the company's bottom line.
The strikers are members of the growing national organization OUR Walmart. OUR Walmart, or Organization United for Respect at Walmart, formed just two years ago, when 100 Walmart associates came together to voice their concerns about the companyretaliating against those who speak out for better working conditions.
Background
Walmart's illegal retaliation against workers increasing
Since June, Walmart has illegally disciplined over 80 workers, including firing 20 worker-leaders who were exercising their civil rights. More than 100 Unfair Labor Practice charges have been filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Walmart. Workers in California recently announced that after an investigation, the NLRB regional office announced it found merit to OUR Walmart's charge that Walmart committed 11 violations of national labor law.
Because they want to keep denying American workers the wages and hours they need, Walmart is trying to silence workers who are standing up with their co-workers to live better and spending its time and money trying to deny workers a decent day's pay. But ongoing labor mismanagement concerns, including Walmart's inaction on ending illegal retaliation, improving jobs at stores and putting meaningful protections in place at its suppliers, have contributed to record-levels of votes against Walmart's board of directors and even shareholder divestment this year.
Walmart workforce reliance on public assistance costs taxpayers $900,000--at one store alone
Walmart, the largest company on the Fortune 500 list, has $17 billion in profits a year, and the Waltons--the majority shareholders of the company--have the combined wealth of 42% of American families. Meanwhile, workers are making low wages and not getting enough hours, forcing many to rely on public programs to support their families even though they work for the country's largest private employer.
A Congressional report released earlier this year calculates the Walmart workforce reliance on public assistance including food stamps, healthcare and other needs is estimated to utilize $900,000 per year of taxpayer funds at just one of the company's 4,000 stores.
$25,000 a year would mean 1.5 million move out of poverty, create 100,000 new jobs
A report from the national public policy center Demos shows that better jobs at Walmart and other large retailers would even help the store's bottom line, as well as have an impact on individual families and the larger economy. A wage floor equivalent of $25,000 per year for a full-time, year-round employee for retailers with more than 1000 employees would mean 1.5 million retail workers and their families move out of poverty or near poverty, add to economic growth, increase retail sales and create more than 100,000 new jobs.
For more information on Black Friday protests, visit www.BlackFridayProtests.organd follow the conversation and see photos at @ChangeWalmart, #WalmartStrikers and changewalmart.tumblr.com.
OUR Walmart works to ensure that every Associate, regardless of his or her title, age, race, or sex, is respected at Walmart. We join together to offer strength and support in addressing the challenges that arise in our stores and our company everyday.
"As long as non-human primates are used in scientific experiments, we are morally obligated to provide them with sufficient social conditions that ensure their emotional wellbeing," one researcher argued.
Hundreds of scientists, doctors, and academics from around the world—including renowned primatologist Jane Goodall—on Wednesday urged the U.S. National Institutes of Health to review and ultimately end funding for "cruel experiments" on non-human primates at Harvard University.
In a letter led by Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Clinic and the Wild Minds Lab at the University of St. Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience in the United Kingdom, 380 signatories urge senior National Institutes of Health officials to "review the protocols and justifications" related to the "funding of unethical experiments on macaque monkeys and other non-human primates taking place at Harvard Medical School."
\u201cBreaking: More than 380 scientists, including Jane Goodall, Ian Redmond and Richard Wrangham, join the Animal Law & Policy Clinic @Harvard_Law and the Wild Minds Lab @univofstandrews in calling on @NIH to stop funding cruel monkey experiments @harvardmed.\n\nhttps://t.co/i89Y1aA4ki\u201d— Harvard Animal Law (@Harvard Animal Law) 1675873266
As the letter details:
An NIH-funded Harvard Medical School lab run by neurobiologist Dr. Margaret S. Livingstone has used infant macaque monkeys to study visual recognition by depriving them of the ability to see faces, either by sewing their eyes shut or by requiring staff to wear welders’ masks around them. In some cases, the lab implants electrode arrays into the monkeys' brains.
By design, these experiments require maternal deprivation—a fact that drew the ire of scientists last fall, when Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published an Inaugural Article by Dr. Livingstone entitled Triggers for Mother Love. The article describes the lab's practice of taking infant macaques from their mothers shortly after birth and attempting to appease the mothers' distress by giving them plush toys as "surrogate infants."
"As a primatologist with decades of experience in the field, I can say with complete confidence that we know that infant primates and their mothers suffer greatly when they are separated. We also know that depriving infants of the ability to see faces will have adverse impacts on their brain and eye development," Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard, said in a statement.
"Taking infant monkeys from their mothers to use in invasive brain experiments could only be justified by expectations of extraordinarily important benefits for the monkeys themselves, or for humans," he added. "Because that high ethical bar has not been met, I see no legitimate need for any such research."
"These studies fail on both scientific and ethical grounds."
Catherine Hobaiter, the principal investigator at Wild Minds Lab, asserted that "these studies fail on both scientific and ethical grounds."
"The doublethink argument that maternally separated individuals represent appropriate models for conditions such as anxiety, while arguing these methods do not cause significant distress, is fundamentally flawed," she said. "Our fundamental role as scientists is to update, refine, and redefine our understanding of the world around us. Doing so must include not only our theoretical positions, but our ethical responsibility to the animals we have given no choice in becoming our subjects of study."
Gal Badihi, a graduate research student at Wild Minds Lab, argued that "as long as non-human primates are used in scientific experiments, we are morally obligated to provide them with sufficient social conditions that ensure their emotional wellbeing."
"This is not only an ethical requirement," Badihi added, "but essential for research validity and integrity."
"The energy sector should be looking to the future of justly sourced renewable energy, not pushing outdated technology that exploits people and the planet."
More than a dozen groups intervened in a case in Wyoming on Wednesday to defend the Biden administration's decision to postpone the sale of oil and gas leases in the state, arguing that numerous court ruling and settled laws have affirmed the U.S. Interior Department is free to determine when such sales will go forward—or whether they will at all.
The legal groups Earthjustice and the Western Environmental Law Center are representing 17 national and local groups in the case, in which the state of Wyoming and two industry trade groups sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in December over its postponement of sales that had been planned for 2021 and 2022.
The BLM currently has several sales scheduled for 2023, covering nearly half a million acres, but as Friends of the Earth (FOE) said in a press statement Wednesday, the groups "want the court to order the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the BLM to hold lease sales every three months across the West"—despite warnings from energy experts and scientists that fossil fuel extraction must be phased out in order to avoid the worst effects of the climate emergency.
"Today's filing demonstrates that we refuse to sit back and allow Big Oil to push for policies that perpetuate dirty energy," said Hallie Templeton, legal director for FOE. "The law is crystal clear: the federal government holds broad authority over whether, when, and how to lease public lands for oil and gas development. The energy sector should be looking to the future of justly sourced renewable energy, not pushing outdated technology that exploits people and the planet."
FOE is joined by groups including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Citizens for a Health Community, and the Western Organization of Resource Councils in defending the Biden administration's decision.
A U.S. District Court ruling in Wyoming in September 2022 affirmed that the administration can postpone the sales, and the U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that the agencies "have broad discretion to determine the timing and scope of lease sales, including not holding them at all," FOE said in the press statement.
\u201cNEWS RELEASE: Conservation groups to defend @POTUS administration postponement of oil, gas lease sales. Again.\n\nWe won this case last year, too.\n\nhttps://t.co/pN5NO55VgM @Earthjustice @Wilderness @foe_us @CenterForBioDiv @MTEIC @PRBResCouncil @NPCA @WildernessWork @SierraClub\u201d— Western Environmental Law Center (@Western Environmental Law Center) 1675882076
Bob LeResche, a Powder River Basin Resource Council board member and chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils, noted that the industry has already "stockpiled" more than 9,000 approved federal drilling permits.
"Forcing Interior to lease without fully weighing public impacts is industry’s attempt to continue looting public resources by accumulating excess leases at bargain basement prices," said LeResche. "The industry could continue drilling and producing as normal for decades even with no new leases."
The postponement represents a correction of BLM's longtime practice of "blindly" leasing public lands for oil and gas drilling "without actually understanding the impacts of development," said Peter Hart, an attorney with Wilderness Workshop.
"Now the agency is working to reevaluate its oil and gas management and to assess impacts, like those that new development will have on the climate," he added. "It just makes sense to pause new leasing until the program is brought into this century, and it is well within the agency’s authority."
In response to organizing efforts, "the $122 billion-dollar corporation has fought their workers every step of the way, including refusing to bargain a first contract in good faith, delay tactics, and a significant escalation in union-busting."
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Tuesday invited Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about the coffee giant's "lack of compliance with federal labor laws."
All 10 Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) joined Sanders, who chairs the panel, in inviting Schultz to a hearing scheduled for March 9.
The letter—signed by Sanders and Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—gives Schultz until February 14 to confirm his attendance at the hearing.
"We greatly appreciate your assistance to the HELP Committee," the lawmakers told Schultz, whose wealth increased by $800 million during the pandemic to nearly $4 billion.
\u201cToday, I joined with my Democratic colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to invite Starbucks CEO @HowardSchultz to testify at a hearing on his company's labor practices.\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1675884960
Since December 2021, when baristas in Buffalo made history by forming the first unionized Starbucks in the United States, workers at nearly 280 of the coffee chain's locations nationwide have voted to unionize. Organizers have won more than 80% of their campaigns despite the company's unlawful intimidation and retaliation tactics.
In response to mounting demands for better wages, benefits, and conditions, "the $122 billion-dollar corporation has fought their workers every step of the way, including refusing to bargain a first contract in good faith, delay tactics, and a significant escalation in union-busting," Sanders' office noted in a statement.
"There have been 500 unfair labor practice cases filed against Starbucks and its affiliates," the statement continued. "The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued 75 complaints in response to those charges and has sought emergency preliminary injunctive relief in five cases in the federal courts."
"Sanders has sent three letters to Schultz in the last year calling on the CEO to end the egregious union-busting campaign the company has deployed against its own workers," the Vermont Independent's office added. "Schultz has not yet responded to or provided the documents requested in the most recent letter Sanders sent in January 2023."