Following the release of a claim from Anonymous that Walmart would be targeted, we received the following secret internal documents on Walmart’s attempts to thwart workers who are mobilizing for basic rights and a decent wage. These documents go a long way in revealing just how scared Walmart is of its own workers standing together for change.

FACT CHECK: OUR Walmart is not a union nor is it seeking union recognition. OUR Walmart is simply a group of Walmart hourly workers who have come together to address issues in their stores.

FACT CHECK: Walmart falsely claims that OUR Walmart is seeking union recognition and trying to build a union, because under US labor law, this would take away some of the rights of striking workers. OUR Walmart workers have gone on strike to stand up to Walmart’s retaliation against workers when they have come together to speak out about issues like decent pay, respect in the workplace and getting enough hours to survive. These are legally protected unfair labor practice strikes. Walmart wants people to believe that these are strikes for union recognition so that it can freely fire and target workers, rather than be forced to obey the law and respect their right to speak up.

FACT CHECK: OUR Walmart and UFCW are not seeking to represent Walmart workers.

FACT CHECK: Some of the materials claim that Walmart “takes care” of its own associates. Walmart actually costs tax-payers $900,000 a store in subsidies because they care so poorly for their associates. Recently, a store Walmart held a food drive, for its own workers who can’t afford to eat.

FACT CHECK: Of course workers organizing does not guarantee any result, but we’ve already seen the result of doing nothing and you can guarantee that nothing will get better if people don’t stand up to bullying tactics, insufficient hours and low pay.

FACT CHECK: Walmart claims to have open lines of communication through its “open door policy.” This is really a divide-and-conquer tactic, in which the company makes a single worker bring issues to management alone. This means the “open door” is closed to groups who wish to raise issues together and is one way Walmart seeks to deal with people individually, instead of collectively in a stronger group.

FACT CHECK: Walmart claims to be transparent, but doesn’t even supply its workers with a policy manual. They have to access company policies at work on the company network, without time to fully review, rather than having a clear understanding of what is required and allowed.

FACT CHECK: OUR Walmart is a group of Associates who are speaking and representing themselves.

FACT CHECK: What this graph doesn’t tell you is what happened to wages and the middle class when union membership dropped.

via Huffington Post

FACT CHECK: OUR Walmart dues are $5/month and goes to support the organizing work of OUR Walmart. Workers are still welcome to participate if they do not pay dues or are unable to continue paying dues.

FACT CHECK: Making Change at Walmart is the UFCW-led coalition that works in solidarity with OUR Walmart, much like Occupy Wall Street.

FACT CHECK: Walmart workers, in most other countries, have union representation – the United States is an anomaly. When asked why that is the case, then International Chief Executive and soon-to-be Walmart CEO said “We have a local philosophy. It’s our intention to demonstrate that we are a great corporate citizen.”

FACT CHECK: Despite Walmart’s acronym “TIPS” Walmart has recently gotten into trouble for breaking most of the rules outlined in the acronym.

Here is a report documenting the company’s recent systematic worker abuses

The report also documents how Walmart has tried to silence communities along with workers through:

• Restraining orders against protesters
• Selective enforcement of company policies in order to provide a pretext for disciplining or terminating
  activists
• Selective enforcement of the company’s solicitation policies in order to limit workers’ access to information
  about the benefits of organizing
• Illegal threats that workers would face serious consequences if they organized, including economic losses
• Illegal manipulation of store staffing in order to dilute support for organizing and union representation in the run-up to a union election
• Illegal information gathering including coercive interrogation, eavesdropping, and remote monitoring of
  workers via security cameras

The National Labor Relations Board has found merit in workers’ claims of intimidation and illegal action on Walmart’s behalf. After workers went on strike over retaliation in 2013, Walmart responded by firing around 20 workers and disciplining 40 more to scare workers out of standing up for their rights.

FACT CHECK: Note that the union card on page #34 does not say anything about Walmart. OUR Walmart doesn’t sign representation over to UFCW.

FACT CHECK: Unions partner with local groups to help them hold Walmart accountable. This is not meant to harm the company, but to call on Walmart to be a good neighbor and keep its promises to the community. Walmart often makes promises about wages and jobs when it comes to a community, but there is nothing to hold them accountable. This work is all done in solidarity with the workers.

If you are a Walmart worker, there is no time like the present to start organizing your workplace. Go to: http://ChangeWalmart.org

If you are an occupy activist and you would like to help with the effort, go to: http://ChangeWalmart.org and tell them we sent you.

Laura Schlegel, a mother and active community member in Portage Park, Chicago, is facing eviction by the Cogsville Group, a private equity firm in New York City. The family is one of thousands of families now renting homes owned by massive private equity firms and hedge funds. Capitalizing on the foreclosure crisis, these Wall Street investors have purchased 200,000 homes across the country — mostly in cities hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

Laura is struggling with chronic pain due to nerve damage and needs to be close to her doctors in Portage Park. She could be evicted any day, and she has nowhere for her, her son and her dogs to go.

Instead of putting them out on the street, the Cogsville Group should at least offer her and her family a new lease that allows them to stay in the home they previously owned.

Why this is important:

As the banks enjoy record-breaking profits and the 1% steal a bigger share of annual income than ever, the 99% have learned that this so-called economic recovery is nothing more than a big fat lie.

Tens of thousands of people are still being evicted each month through foreclosure, and now private equity firms and hedge funds are executing a massive land grab in cities across the country.
In some cities, like Phoenix, there are already Wall Street-owned homes on every single block by the hedge fund Blackstone.

These Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms are pretending to help by renting out these vacant houses — but we know that they are just trying to make more money off the banks of the 99%. One of these private equity firms has even released a new risky security backed by rental payments — which is just like the mortgage-backed securities that destroyed the economy in 2008.

The story of Laura and her family show how we must stop this land grab and demand that housing be enshrined as a human right, not a means to make a short-term profit.

Laura, her son and 3 small dogs have lived in their Portage Park home for the last seven years. With the help of a partner, she bought the home in 2006 for nearly $400,000. After the market crashed, they attempted to refinance the mortgage. Following the bank’s instructions, Laura and her partner missed three months of their mortgage payments to qualify for a loan modification. But instead of working with the family, Bank of America put the home in foreclosure, using the highly controversial process of “dual tracking” in which banks simultaneously put families in the process of modifying their loans and put the loan in the foreclosure pipeline.

In Laura’s case — as with so many other homeowners across the country — the foreclosure process won.

Her home was sold at an auction and bought back by the government-owned mortgage giant Fannie Mae — which then allowed a private equity firm, The Cogsville Group, to buy the right to manage her house and collect rent from the family. But when her home flooded this past spring, the company did not help her with clean up, mold remediation or repairs.

In efforts to pressure Cogsville to assume responsibility for its property management, Laura’s partner stopped paying the rent. But instead of negotiating under the circumstances, the family received an eviction notice.

Laura and her family are asking that the eviction be dropped, and that the Cogsville Group offer Laura a new lease with an option to buy.

Help us stop Laura’s eviction — and send a message to Wall Street that they can no longer exploit our human needs for their short term profits!

Sign this petition to demand that Laura and her family are allowed in their home.

This article originally appeared on Occupy Our Homes

The era of a New York City run by and for the 1% is coming to a close and it’s time for us to take to the streets and demand Bloomberg and his friends get out of the way.

Join with community activists, union members, students, teachers, fast food workers, faith leaders and many others for a massive citywide mobilization in Foley Square. We are demanding the Robin Hood Tax, universal pre-K for all children, good wages for all workers, affordable housing, quality healthcare, an end to inequality and the tale of two cities and the start of One New York that works for #AllOfUs. We are not broke, we are twisted, and all the resources are in front of us, if the 1% will agree willingly to step away from their hoarding in favor of a sustainable world.

Meet us:

When: Thursday December 5th at 4pm
Where: Foley Square, Manhattan, NY
Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/359450277532091/

View Larger Map

We have done a lot of work in battling the propaganda of the 1% and raising issues of inequality, but it is not enough. This is why we continue the work that brought us to Zuccotti. We continue to fight and raise our voices with the 99% of this city who are tired of the greed of big corporations, Wall Street, and the rest of the 1%.

It is our hope that we will serve as an example for the rest of the world. We want New York City to be the model for communities in which class war is carried out in lack of funding for education, racial profiling, food insecurity, and lack of housing.

For too long working people have been disregarded. But this is our moment. Last month we made our voices heard and our message was clear. We want an end to the tale of two cities. We want a New York that works for all of us.

Tweets about “#allofus”

A full year after Hurricane Sandy battered the eastern seaboard, we can begin to glean valuable insight into the community-led relief network that sprung up in response, also known as the Occupy Sandy network. In late October 2012, as the “Superstorm” was approaching, Occupy Wall Street participants focused social media and interpersonal networks in preparation. By the following morning, the group had already begun to use social media and network-based communications to amplify the relief efforts in some of the the hardest-hit communities across New York City and New Jersey.

In the days and weeks that followed, Occupy Sandy helped create and connect a complex, nimble, and oftentimes haphazard relief network. Donation centers, mutual aid hubs, open-source needs assessments, and volunteer assignment systems sprung to life, seemingly overnight. Drawing on the strengths of network-based organizing, these efforts were often more effective than the work of traditional, top-down aid organizations like the Red Cross.

One of the tens of thousands of people who came together to make this network thrive was Sofía Gallisá Muriente, who spent the last year organizing in Rockaway Beach. Listen to her share her experiences from the effort and her thoughts about the future promise and latent perils that the Occupy Sandy network now faces.

Organizing during disasters is becoming an increasingly important role of the social justice movement, particularly as climate change threatens to wreck havoc upon nations and people who are the least responsible for the pollution and exploitation of the earth. Today, tens of thousands of residents of the Philippines are organizing to survive amidst the devastation wrought by the most recent typhoon. So-called elected leaders refuse to address this crisis, evidenced by the utter failure of last week’s climate summit in Warsaw. Since politicians and the powerful continue to work for the fossil fuel industry, we must work for the people — both to slow climate change by forcing an end to consumption and fossil fuel burning, and to organize survival networks that protect ourselves and our fellow humans against the climate genocide.

As this talk demonstrates, this work has already started. Now, we must amplify it.

Walmart workers are mobilizing to take action on Black Friday in your area and they need you to support them directly, in the streets.

Even Ashton Kutcher gets it.

Can you join them and attend a direct action training? Companies throughout the world have followed Walmart’s example, creating low-pay, low-security jobs. We have all seen our friends, family and neighbors struggle as they are forced to take jobs they know can’t cover their bills. We’re all paying the price for the Walmart economy.

But there is hope for change. All around the country, Walmart workers are standing up. They have gone on strike in Dallas, Cincinatti, and Southern California to protest Walmart’s attempts to silence them by firing and disciplining those who stand up for their coworkers’ rights. They’re tired of looking their children in the eyes and having to explain why there’s no food in the cabinets while they work for one
of the most profitable companies in the world.

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year, they’ll be holding protests to call
on Walmart pay a real wage of $25,000/yr for fulltime work and to end the retaliation against those who speak out.

Workers in YOUR CITY are planning to act. Making Change at Walmart is holding a quick course in how you can support them and mobilize for action. Can you attend a protest training this week to learn
how you can get more involved?

If you’re interested in supporting Walmart workers as they let companies know that
Walmart-style jobs aren’t good enough for our country, RSVP and
get more information.

Earlier:
Show Your Solidarity While Supporting the #WalmartStrikers
#BlackFriday Practical Protest Techniques: Using Your Body and a Few Simple Tools

Seattle City Councilmember-elect Seattle City Councilmember-elect Kshama Sawant
told Boeing machinists her idea of a radical option, should their jobs be moved out of state.

“The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine,” Sawant announced to a cheering crowd of union supporters in Seattle’s Westlake Park Monday night.

This week, Sawant became Seattle’s first elected Socialist council member. She ran on a platform of anti-capitalism, workers’ rights, and a $15 per-hour minimum wage for Seattle workers.

On Monday night, she spoke to supporters of Boeing Machinists, six days after they rejected a contract guaranteeing jobs in Everett building the new 777X airliner for eight years, in exchange for new workers giving up their guaranteed company pensions.
Now Boeing is threatening to take those jobs to other states.

“That will be nothing short of economic terrorism because it’s going to devastate the state’s economy,” she said.

Sawant is calling for machinists to literally take-possession of the Everett airplane-building factory, if Boeing moves out. She calls that “democratic ownership.”

“The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do,” she said.

Sawant says after workers “take-over” the Everett Boeing plant; they could build things everyone can use.

“We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she told KIRO 7.

Sawant says she was referring to “drones” when speaking of war machines. Still, she says even as they work on the lines, building airplanes daily, she believes Boeing workers are under siege.

“Workers have to realize, they have more power than they think,” she said.

Original story from KIROTV

full infographic here