Rock on: "America’s biggest retailer may be in for an unexpectedly painful holiday season."

The Hostess Twinkie extinction stories are mere empty calories compared with the real action. Bloomberg Businessweek provides the overview.

Labor

Wal-Mart Workers' Black Friday Strike

By Elizabeth Dwoskin on November 16, 2012

 

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America’s biggest retailer may be in for an unexpectedly painful holiday season. Protesting low wages, spiking health care premiums, and alleged retaliation from management, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) workers have started to walk off the job this week. First, on Wednesday, about a dozen workers in Wal-Mart’s distribution warehouses in Southern California walked out, followed the next day by 30 more from six stores in the Seattle area.

The workers, who are part of a union-backed employee coalition called Making Change at Wal-Mart, say this is the beginning of a wave of protests and strikes leading up to next week’s Black Friday. A thousand store protests are planned in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., the group says.