- The nation's largest employer has long been the Holy Grail for labor organizers, seemingly impossible to organize -- until now.
- The group OUR Wal-mart has skipped traditional labor organizing in favor of broad-based campaigns for fair treatment that have drawn on the support of surrounding communities, and particularly of faith leaders.
- What Catholic bishops can learn from Hurricane Sandy
Sarah Jaffe, Religion Dispatches / AlterNet
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Photo Credit: OUR Walmart
November 26, 2012 | Last month, when strikers from Southern California arrived in Bentonville, Ark., to protest Walmart’s labor practices with reggae beats, pots and pans, and a Latin American-inflected protest culture, it became clear to onlookers that America’s superstore was no longer the small family business that Sam Walton had founded and grown in the cradle of the anti-labor culture of Southern evangelicaldom. But it’s also become clear that Walmart’s own ambitions to become a global empire -- expanding beyond southern suburbs to new regions, and continuing to erode protections for its workers -- have brought the “family values” behemoth into confrontation with another kind of religious and labor rights tradition.
Walmart has long been the Holy Grail for labor organizers. The nation’s largest retailer, it is notorious for its low wages, lack of benefits, abusive labor practices , and for leaving its workers dependent on public assistance while making the Walton family rich beyond imagination. And it has been nearly impossible to organize.
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Related:
What Catholic bishops can learn from Hurricane Sandy, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Washington (DC) Post / Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune
The bishops should understand that casting (the church) as a militantly right-wing political organization clouds its Christian message of generosity and social reconstruction visible every day in parishes such as St. Francis and in the homeless shelters, schools, hospices and countless other Catholic entities all over the nation.
November 26, 2012 | That the Church nurses a preoccupation with sex, intentional, inferred or by default, is so self-evident, given our almost daily saturation in news stories about child abuse, that damage control and cover-up are necessary. It's apparent also in the wide range of responses within the Roman Catholic world, ranging from the almost total denial displayed by organizations such as the American Catholic League, headed up by the aggressive William Donohue, to the opposite extreme occupied by the publication U.S. Catholic, which adopts an editorial stance often surprisingly critical of Catholic practice.
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