Last month, a fire in a factory used by Wal-Mart killed 112 workers. There were no fire exits. Despite the fact that more than 700 Bangladeshi garment workers have died since 2005, Wal-Mart and Gap refused last year to pay higher costs for safety. Bloomberg cited comments from a document produced by Wal-mart’s director of ethical sourcing and a Gap official for the Dhaka meeting. It stated:

"Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories. It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

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“Black Ops II” took a day less to reach the $1 billion mark than last year’s entry, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.” By contrast, the fastest movie to $1 billion box office was “Avatar,” which took a poky 17 days. According to the Telegraph it’s the fourth consecutive year that Activision has claimed the biggest global entertainment product launch for a "Call of Duty" game.

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Everything.

Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. That’s why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for the 80 percent of the workforce that’s paid by the hour.

It’s also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to recover — from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line.

Many of them have jobs. The problem is that these jobs just don’t pay enough to lift their families out of poverty.

So, encouraged by the economic recovery and perhaps also by the election returns, low-wage workers have started to organize.

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Reports from organizers rallying in Times Square in support of the strike suggest that as many as 200 workers walked out Thursday to demand fair wages. The Huffington Post noted that employees, the majority from McDonald's around the city, continued to walk off the job throughout the day, making official strike numbers difficult to confirm. "At a McDonald’s on Madison Avenue at 6:30 am, 16 workers picketed. According to Raymond Lopez, one of the 16, that was almost half of the store’s total workforce of 40 people," HuffPo noted.

Radio Dispatch host John Knefel and writer Jesse Myerson, both reporting from the Times Square rally, posted the comments and chants of some one-day strikers on Twitter:

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An Associated Press reporter searching the Bangladesh factory Wednesday found these and other clothes, including sweaters from the French company Teddy Smith and the Scottish company Edinburgh Woollen Mill, among the equipment charred in the fire that killed 112 workers on Saturday. He also found entries in account books indicating that the factory took orders to produce clothes for Disney, Sears and other Western brands.

Garments and documents left behind in the factory show it was used by a host of major American and European retailers, though at least one of them - Wal-Mart - had been aware of safety problems. Wal-Mart blames a supplier for using Tazreen Fashions without its knowledge.

The fire has elevated awareness of something labor groups, retailers and governments have known for years: Bangladesh's fast-growing garment industry - second only to China's in exports - is rife with dangerous workplaces. More than 300 workers there have died in fires since 2006.

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Wal-Mart conducted a review last year of the Bangladeshi factory in which a fire on Saturday led to the death of 112 people. Despite the retailer determining the factory to be a high fire risk last year, Wal-Mart said this week that  it did not know whether it was still buying products made in the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. plant, where there were no emergency exits and workers were forced to jump out of windows to escape from the blaze.

As the AP reported:

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The Black Friday walkout is being organized by the Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Walmart), a group of Wal-Mart employees formed last year that works closely with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, or UFCW. OUR Walmart, which organized walkouts in October, is pushing for better working conditions, benefits, and an end to alleged retaliation by management.

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What would she do? I asked. Would the family wait dinner for her?

"No," she said. "I'll eat leftovers when I get home from work. It's what I did last year, too."

And I was so angry on her behalf. But she needed her job, and she couldn't say no without the risk of being fired, and so a mother who should have been spending time with her child on our most family-friendly day was shipping off to help sell cheap flat-screen televisions to the masses.

How did this happen?

Thanksgiving used to be a time to be grateful for what you already had. Back when George Washington declared it a national holiday, almost all work came to a stop. I’m still moved by Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover, depicting a family's simple joy. The painting was called “Freedom From Want.”

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Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

There are many reasons for the difference – including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.

But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits.

At the peak of its power and influence in the 1950s, the United Auto Workers could claim a significant portion of GM’s earnings for its members.

Walmart’s employees, by contrast, have no union to represent them. So they’ve had no means of getting much of the corporation’s earnings.

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"Black Friday," wrote Eidelson, "workers have pledged -- barring concessions from the company -- will bring their biggest disruptions yet." Walmart employees across the country have a host of grievances including unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, excessive hours, forced labor and low pay. Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC flagged a leaked internal document (first obtained by HuffPo) that revealed that base pay  at Walmart's Sam's Place stores can be as low as $8 an hour (or $16,000 per year), with wage increases in increments as low as 20 or 40 cents per hour. To put this in context, Gawker recently highlighted a Demos study that says that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

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This was part of what made Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign so electrifying: he seemed like a man who spoke our language and called many if not all things by their true names. Whatever caused that season of clarity, once elected, Obama promptly sank into the stale, muffled, parallel-universe language wielded by most politicians, and has remained there ever since. Meanwhile, the far right has gotten as far as it has by mislabeling just about everything in our world -- a phenomenon which went supernova in this year of “legitimate rape,” “the apology tour,” and “job creators.”  Meanwhile, their fantasy version of economics keeps getting more fantastic. (Maybe there should be a rectification of numbers, too.)

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“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Wal-Mart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tired of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.”

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The civil disobedience also brought attention to the strike, which has continued for weeks with no media fanfare. Workers cite unsafe conditions and low wages as fueling their industrial action, along with complaints about long shifts with no breaks and sexual harassment. Micah Uetricht reported for Labor Notes on Monday's march, the strike and the reasons underpinning it:

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Speaking at his eighth annual Clinton Global Initiative summit on Sunday, he challenged Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke to open a store in the troubled region to create jobs and foster international cooperation.

"If the new president of Libya asked you to open a store in Tripoli, would you consider it?" Clinton asked Duke (a panelist at the event).

Clinton's yearly summit is intended to encourage business leaders, NGOs and politicians to brainstorm and make pledges in the name of global investment and humanitarianism --  the sort of humanitarianism  that sees more Wal-Mart stores and jobs as a solution.

Renowned in the past decade for a string of overseas labor abuses, Wal-Mart recently won praise from Clinton on "The Daily Show" for its sustainable energy efforts. Watch the clip below, in which Clinton also tells Jon Stewart about his CGI guest list:

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Last June, nearly 100 Wal-Mart employees announced the formation of a new membership organization called OUR Walmart, which demanded improvements on the job. Though backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, it hasn’t sought union recognition (UFCW also backed a previous non-union organization of Wal-Mart workers in 2005). OUR Walmart currently claims thousands of Wal-Mart workers in hundreds of stores as dues-paying members. As its efforts have escalated, OUR Walmart leaders say Wal-Mart has targeted them for punishment.

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Take C.J.’s Seafood, which provided seafood sold at Wal-Mart subsidiary Sam’s Club. Last month, some C.J.’s workers in Louisiana – non-union temporary guest workers from Mexico – went on strike. They charged the company with violating wage laws and locking them inside the plant. The National Guestworker Alliance helped workers organize and bring a complaint to the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor-monitoring organization. The WRC found that employees worked up to 24 consecutive hours, were paid less than 60 percent of minimum wage and lived in vermin-infested trailers on company property. One worker told the WRC, “It was forced work. They would come to the trailers and make us go back to work … We were screamed at and had to go to work. I felt like a slave.” According to the WRC, workers’ complaints to management were met with threats of deportation or violence.

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One has to pity poor Bloomberg reporter Andrew Frye, squelched by the constraints of his employer's by-the-book writing guidelines from expressing his natural aghast incredulity at Castro-Wright's well-compensated sinecure as "a member of MetLife's Governance and Corporate Responsibility Committee."

MetLife's governance committee "oversees the management and mitigation of risks related to failure to comply with required or appropriate corporate governance standards," the insurer said last month in a proxy statement. Castro-Wright, who also served on the compensation and investment committees, was paid $259,124 for his work at the insurer last year, including $145,000 in cash and $112,502 in stock awards, the filing shows.

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That’s according to a new analysis by Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics.

The calculation is based on data from 2007, the most recent round of the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which measures the net worth of Americans. (The extensive survey is performed once every three years, and the 2010 edition is expected to be released next year.)

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