Posts Tagged: Making Change at Walmart

“Making Change at Walmart,” has announced its first national ad campaign of 2015. The new ad campaign (which includes TV, print, and social media ads) highlights Walmart’s avoidance of American taxes through offshore tax shelters, and the fact that the average Walmart worker earns one thousand times less than Walmart’s CEO.

The TV ad campaign, entitled “Hot Dogs,” began airing on June 28th during morning shows in Washington, D.C. It aired in 10 additional cities and will take Walmart to task for using tax havens in multiple countries to avoid paying its fair share of American taxes.

It specifically cites a recent report from Americans for Tax Fairness detailing how the retailer has placed at least $76 billion worth of assets in subsidiaries located in 15 overseas tax havens, including Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and Barbados.

As part of the campaign to highlight Walmart’s failure to change, the print ad, entitled “Devolution,” will additionally run in the Bentonville market, Washington, D.C., as well as the St. Louis region – which includes cities in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. The ad makes it clear that it would take the average Walmart worker 1,117,514 years to earn what the Waltons did last year, pointing out that this is the same number of years it took humans to evolve to walk on two legs.

On January 28, Karen Casey, Senior Vice President of Labor Relations at Walmart, will testify at a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing in Los Angeles about illegal retaliation against dozens of Walmart workers around the country. Casey oversaw Labor Relations at the multi-billion dollar corporation when Walmart executives allegedly authorized the illegal firing and disciplining of workers who stood up for improvements in the workplace, such as living wages and full-time hours.

On January 15, 2014, the NLRB General Counsel issued a groundbreaking complaint against Walmart for violating workers’ rights and federal labor law. The complaint says Walmart illegally fired and disciplined nearly 70 workers, including some who went on strike in June of 2012 to speak out for better jobs.

The NLRB argues that Walmart executives deliberately planned —and oversaw implementation—of an illegal retaliation policy against workers, executed by store managers in as many as 14 states and 34 stores. The complaint—the largest ever against Walmart in both size and scale—names 63 individual store managers and former company spokesperson and Vice President of Communication David Tovar as being responsible for illegal threats made on television to employees.

A favorable decision from the NLRB in this case could be a huge win for Walmart workers across the country, providing additional protection as they call on Walmart to publicly commit to paying workers $15 an hour and grant access to full-time schedules. Workers are determined to hold Walmart accountable and protect the right of the corporation’s 1.3 million employees to speak out for change.

Hearings began in May of 2014 and have taken place in Oakland, Fort Worth, Seattle and New Orleans. Be sure to follow Karen Casey’s testimony in Los Angeles this week on the Making Change at Walmart Twitter account (@ChangeWalmart).