International Food Workers Week Is Coming

This week Walmart employees and supporters have started two weeks of fasting, leading up to Black Friday.

“It’s a representation of starvation labor,” explains one employee. “The fast is to show Walmart that this is what they are driving people to – hunger,” explains another.

Walmart is not only the country’s largest retail chain, it is also the largest retailer of food. Yet due to low wages and unfair scheduling practices that do not allow for predictable, full-time hours, Walmart employees often go hungry. (As we explain in our minimum wage fact sheet, as important as the fight to increase minimum wage is, it does not solve all issues for low-wage workers.

One Walmart employee has started a petition asking Walmart for its already meager 10% employee discount to apply to all food, rather than just some of it.

Next week is also International Food Workers Week. This is a week to raise awareness about and celebrate the contributions of workers throughout the food system including farmworkers, food packers, processors, transporters, servers, sellers, and kitchen workers.

Almost 20 million people work in the food system, nearly one sixth of the work force. Chances are good that if you are not currently a food worker yourself, you once were, will be in the future, or know someone who is. And we all rely on food workers every day.

Here are a few ways to get involved:

• Visit our action center to find out how to stand up for food workers by raising the minimum wage, stopping harmful trade deals, and more.
• Buy our coffee. Proceeds from the Fair Africa coffee go to support our work with Food Chain Workers Alliance.
• Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where we will be posting videos and information about food workers throughout International Food Workers week.