There’s a few compelling reasons to participate tomorrow in Black Friday Walmart to support Walmart workers: full-time workers earn chump change, are forced to seek government assistance for health care, & are “food insecure” (the polite euphemism for starving hungry). They are also treated in such a demeaning way that my younger brother with a learning disability refused to even apply when he couldn’t find work elsewhere.

A second reason is their central involvement in the sweatshop economy & the flagrancy of their response to catastrophes like the fire at Tazreen Fashions & collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They have not altered safety standards nor provided compensation to those who lost beloved family members.

Putting the big squeeze on Walmart puts a chokehold on their super-exploitation of human beings in their retail stores & among their suppliers. It signals the beginning–& just the beginning–of the end of sweatshop labor.

If you can’t join the picket lines around the stores, for heaven’s sake consider yourself felonious if you enter the store to shop. There are some things that are just unpardonable.