Originally published in Liberation Newspaper, April 2015
Last month, Walmart announced that it will raise the starting wage, improve scheduling and allow new “advancement opportunities” for its workers. Walmart is the largest private employer in the United States, and the raises are expected to affect 500,000 workers. So why has Walmart, a company known for its terrible pay and treatment of workers, which for decades has insisted its minimum wages are necessary for the company’s success, suddenly reversed course? They have not had a change of heart.
In an online video addressed to Walmart workers, CEO Doug McMillon said, “… we really care about you as associates and appreciate the work you do every day.” This is a lie. These increases are still completely inadequate to allow Walmart employees to live with dignity. Current workers will see their pay increase to $9 an hour, and those same workers will see an automatic raise to $10 in February 2016. But workers who start next year at Walmart must go through a six-month “training course” before receiving the $10 an hour wage.
Walmart’s decision to raise wages above state and federal minimums does, however, represent a major retreat for a massive corporation that has grown rich paying rock-bottom wages.
This is a response to the actions of the Walmart workers themselves.
For the past few years, Walmart workers have held mass job actions and rallies that have increasingly put pressure on the corporation.
The workers are organizing largely as part of the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), which receives support from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. OUR Walmart has long been demanding a $15 an hour “living wage,” full-time hours and improved working conditions at stores.
They have been joined by a movement of low-wage workers across the country, primarily in service industry jobs, that has gained considerable strength in recent years demanding “$15 and a union.” This struggle has raised the national profile of the crisis of inequality and the lack of decent-paying jobs.
Walmart’s billionaire and millionaire executives clearly hope this move will take the heat off of them, prevent further job action and cool the militancy of their employees.
But workers need to draw the opposite lesson. Waiting for corporations to do the right thing will not work. To win real justice, workers need to continue organizing and expanding this movement.
The fight to improve the lives of 1.3 million workers at Walmart and their families is crucial for all workers in the United States because of the power and influence the company has over the capitalist system as a whole. Unionizing Walmart could shake up the entire working class in the same way the industrial union drives did in the 1930s.
The fact that a few unelected billionaires can determine, with the stroke of a pen, whether millions of people remain in poverty ultimately shows that this “democratic system” is in fact a dictatorship of the rich. A new socialist society would seize the Walton family’s billions, earned on the backs of their low-paid workers, and put their enormous enterprise under collective control to serve people’s needs.
