4-12-05, 9:06 am

From UFCW

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The UFCW announced recenly that it is launching a new grassroots, community-based campaign to wake up Wal-Mart. The campaign’s website “” and the campaign’s blog “” will be at the center of this new grassroots movement that will lead and revolutionize the national fight to change Wal-Mart. “This is a new day and a new strategy in the fight against Wal-Mart,” stated Paul Blank, the new campaign director for the Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign. “Wal-Mart’s greed puts profits before people. Today, we are forming a grassroots movement to empower millions of Americans to ask Wal-Mart to put people first.”

The rise of Wal-Mart as the world’s largest retailer has come at a high cost to our society. Traditional organizing campaigns are too limited for a greedy, global company who is willing to cut its nose to spite its face rather than do the right thing and stand up for people.

For too long, Wal-Mart’s business practice has been to lower our wages, pressure suppliers to ship our jobs overseas, shift their health care costs onto American taxpayers and ask communities to give over $1 billion in subsidies for their expansion.

“All across America, consumers and taxpayers are waking up to the high cost of Wal-Mart’s poverty wages, reliance on taxpayer funded state health care programs and devastating impact on communities. Wal-Mart’s values are not America’s values,” stated Blank. “There is only one force powerful enough to change the largest corporation in the world, the largest retailer in the world and the largest employer in the world—the American people. We are Wal-Mart’s consumers and it is time for Wal-Mart to wake up and start doing what is right for its employees, our families, and our country.”

The Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign will give people the tools they need to join together in common purpose in order to change the largest corporation in the world. The campaign will utilize an array of organizing strategies, innovative media, a blog and other internet tools that have been used successfully in previous political and grassroots campaigns.

The website, WakeupWalMart.com, will offer concerned citizens, community leaders, activists, and workers an online vehicle where they can learn the truth about Wal-Mart’s record, as well as become an active member in this new grassroots movement. The “Take Action” center of the website will even feature a new tool for community leaders to Adopt-A-Store and begin forming community coalitions around every Wal-Mart location in the United States.

The website will also be used to form a new group of current and former Wal-Mart employees called the Wal-Mart Veterans Association. This will be a place for former and current employees to join together and share their Wal-Mart experience.

In addition, the website will feature a blog about Wal-Mart that will be updated throughout the day on news and stories related to Wal-Mart. It will become a vital resource for the millions of Americans who believe Wal-Mart needs to be changed.