General Electric Lighting-Savant notified 81 workers at their Bucyrus, Ohio plant in the first week of January that they would be laid off and production would move to China. Management claimed it was necessary due to the high cost of producing LED light bulbs.

Today is Black Friday and retail giant Walmart is again dealing with a series of protests and worker strikes over the company’s unwillingness to provide its workers a living wage and benefits. This year the protests are paralleled by a week long drive to get Walmart workers food for the

Did you need more proof that Walmart’s business model is based on screwing their workers?

In April, Wal-Mart was the subject of a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after Wal-Mart closed five stores, including one where workers had been fighting for higher wages and benefits and working with a union. Last Week, Wal-Mart announced plans to reopen the stores in late October or early November, but former workers will be forced to reapply.

Late last year, in response to a series of strikes by workers and protests by activists, Walmart agreed to raise wages so that many of the company’s workers received at least a meager $9 an hour in 2015. Unfortunately, Walmart’s entire business model is based on severely exploiting workers in the US, so the order has now come down from Walmart executives to cut workers’ hours to lower company costs.

On August 19, Monica Sud, a woman from California, filed a class action lawsuit against Costco Wholesale Corporation claiming that the retailer knowingly sold prawns produced by slave labor and never disclosed these practices to customers like herself who bought the products without knowing they were produced by illegal labor.