Walmart pulls in billions every year but barely pays its workers a living wage. Not only that but they’ve aggressively resisted efforts among workers to unionize. Walmart’s slogan is Save Money, Live Better. As Vikki Gill, a former Walmart store manager in Illinois says, the company is saving money and living better at the associate’s expense. In this documentary from Walmart Workers for Change, employees discuss their fight for a living wage, union representation, and decent benefits. Walmart’s union busting tactics are notorious but Union Federation Change to Win has been turning up the heat lately and says efforts to unionize are underway at over 100 stores.

Do you know any unsung progressive heroes?  Well, you can nominate them now for The Maria Leavey Award.  Last year, this award went to our own Jim Gilliam for his tireless efforts working on OutFoxed, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and loads of other Brave New Films campaigns.  Using online tools that Jim designed, these campaigns helped organize thousands of progressives across the country.  Watch Jim’s impassioned acceptance speech from last year’s ceremony.

Submit your nomination by April 7.  The Maria Leavey Award will be presented at this year’s America’s Future Now! conference, which will take place June 1-3 in Washington DC.

$1.8 billion in taxpayer subsidies to cover employees' medical expenses. Lost wages for 1.6 million women. Untold numbers of jobs sent overseas. Wal-Mart continues to turn a profit while America's middle class foots the bill.

The latest ad from Wake Up Wal-Mart.

For more, check out this week's Meet the Bloggers on the problems with our consumer culture, and of course, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.

Wal-Mart Watch is attributing the death of Jdimytai Damour, trampled last Friday at a Long Island Wal-Mart, to the company's utter failure to provide adequate working conditions for its employees.  In a statement released Tuesday, Wal-Mart Watch Executive Director David Nassar said:

"Unfortunately, this disregard is not an isolated situation, but an everyday occurrence. In fact, we receive disturbing workplace accounts from Wal-Mart workers every day and post them on our walmartspeakout.com website. Over the last three and a half years we have exposed the company’s poor treatment of its workers and tried our best to get Wal-Mart to hear the message that the company was putting its workers at risk."

How many Jdimytai Damours will it take before Wal-Mart provides safe working conditions?  How many Wal-Mart workers have to suffer before Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott stops declaring, "We like driving the car and we're not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us," and starts supporting his employees' right to unionize?

Perhaps it will take a highly publicized lawsuit.  Damour's family is suing Wal-Mart, claiming the mega-retailer did not provide enough security to handle the Black Friday crowd and used advertising techniques specifically designed to "create an environment of frenzy and mayhem."  Wal-Mart issued a statement that read, "We consider Mr. Damour part of the Wal-Mart family."  So, not only is this how Wal-Mart treats employees, it's also how they treat "family members."

For more on the ugliness of Wal-Mart and our consumer culture, check out Meet the Bloggers tomorrow with Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping.

I’m used to reading about the high price of U.S. consumerism in the form of environmental devastation or economic inequality, but those ideas remain rather abstract and are measured in charts, graphs and lengthy academic articles. Last Friday, however, we saw the price paid in the much more intimate, familiar and tragic terms of a human life: Jdimytai Damour.

From New York’s Newsday newspaper:

A stampede of shoppers in a Valley Stream Wal-Mart on Friday morning left one worker dead and at least three patrons injured after an impatient crowd broke down the store doors and trampled the seasonal employee, Nassau police said.

Jdimytai Damour of Jamaica, Queens, was pushed to the ground by the 2,000-plus crowd just before 5 a.m. as management was preparing to open the store, which is located across from the main Green Acres Mall building. Hundreds stepped over, around and on the 34-year-old worker as they rushed into the store.

Being Haitian, Damour’s family has probably seen its share of tragedy expressed through violent mobs, but how do you explain to this man’s parents that their son died because a reasonably healthy and well-fed (by global standards) Long Island mob just couldn’t wait to get its hands on a $69 Samsung digital camera?

The murder of Damour is a failure of values at the largest and smallest scales of society.

On one end, we have encouraged, and our economy has become dependent on, unsustainable levels of growth in consumer spending for products and services whose net value (post-accounting for “externalities”) is questionable. We have generally proven that beyond basic necessities, more money and more consumption do not increase happiness, yet our addiction is overwhelmingly enabled by billions of dollars and stimuli demanding that all we need to solve our deepest psychological needs is one more product.

On the other end, most people responsible for this act failed to respond with one ounce of compassion.

According to the New York Times:

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

In the middle of these grand- and small-scale failures sits Wal-Mart. The largest employer in the world, and one of the few prospering during these collapsing economic times, saw fit to have a temporary worker open the store and completely failed to protect its employees and customers from a dangerous situation that was forseeable.

My heart goes out to Damour’s family, and I urge all of you to be careful. His life, and all of our lives, are so clearly worth more.

This video is part of a new project from Wal-Mart Watch – called “Wal-Mart Employees Speak Out” – that launched earlier today. The site, which features stories and video from current and former Wal-Mart employees, is dedicated to giving Wal-Mart’s workers a chance to talk about how the company’s low-wage, poor-benefits business model has impacted their lives. Check it out at: http://walmartspeakout.com

Wal-Mart employees often face retaliation for speaking out about the many problems at the company. The new website is a chance for them to discuss these issues – anonymously, in many cases – without fear of being fired or demoted.

Their stories come at a time when working Americans are suffering more than ever, but while Wal-Mart reaps record profits as the largest corporation in the world. News also broke today that Wal-Mart has just shut down a tire shop in Quebec where workers recently unionized. This news only reinforces the need for sites like Walmartspeakout.com, and is a prime example of how Wal-Mart's business practices hurt workers who try to stand up for their rights.

With unreasonably poor health and safety standards and a 70% rate of products imported from China, can we afford to shop at Wal-Mart any longer?