At Wednesdays’ General Assembly members of Occupy Tampa, concerned citizens and Local Wal-Mart Associates met with Representatives from OUR Wal-Mart.

We heard heartbreaking stories of people from all across the nation and even the world about the daily struggles that workers face under the ever tightening squeeze of Wal-Mart’s labor practices while simultaneously reaping record profits in the billions of dollars. Wal-Mart’s overwhelming labor monopoly allows them to set the standard for labor practices far beyond their corporation.

According to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the low wages paid to Walmart employees drives down the salaries in other local retail outlets by as much as 5 percent. Although the opening of a Walmart in a community creates jobs, the small paychecks all but ensure the workers remain in poverty. Walmart’s ridiculously low wages and deliberate underemployment keep their workers just rich enough to not be living in a dumpster co-op, but poor enough to be eligible for food stamps.

Seeing as Walmart is the reason why countless Americans go on Food Stamps in the first place, one could say this is a low-cost orgy of irony. That’s right–Walmart pays its employees dirt, reaps enormous profits, forces its employees to enroll in social programs like food stamps, and then profits even further as its employees and all the other Americans still recovering from the economic abortion caused by the Walmarts of the world spend their food stamps.

OUR Wal-Mart is planning a national day of action for Black Friday.

One of the best ways we can offer our support locally is to simply inform and direct as many Wal-Mart associates as we can reach to the OUR Wal-Mart website

http://forrespect.org/

and allow them to contact representatives that can offer them support and help to build a local network of supporters… This can be done through a variety of channels from direct conversation to flyer drops throughout your local stores or any way that we can reach out to associates of Wal-Mart to let them know that there is a support network available to them.

— with Vesta Sue Burnett and Raymond ONeill.

And via Sudhir, who is a long way away!
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