No More Black Fridays: All I Want for Christmas Is a Livable Future

By Jim Miller

This year it was cheering to see Black Friday greeted by a strike of Macy’s workers.  Just as the flurry of advertising was kicking into holiday high gear, urging us to unload our wallets at the altar of consumerism, hundreds of workers at one of America’s iconic stores decided it was time to remind us that the exploitation of their labor was what makes the good deals possible.  

As the Guardian reported before the action:  

• Macy’s workers are planning to strike on Black Friday, alleging unfair labor practices and the retailer’s failure to reach a new union contract deal.

• Four hundred workers at Macy’s locations in Washington state are planning the action after 96% of workers voted in favor of authorizing the strike in October.

• In 2021 and 2022, Macy’s reported profits of over $1bn. The company spent $600m on stock buybacks and paid out $173m in dividends to shareholders in 2022.

Macy’s employees in Washington staged a striking workers’ parade, got thousands of customers to sign a solidarity pledge, and generated media coverage of their complaints about safety on the job and inadequate pay.  In a strike update, the United Food and Commercial Workers noted of their weekend-long action that: 

• We knew that Macy’s could not run these stores without us. We knew it would be chaos in the stores. We knew thousands of customers would refuse to cross our picket lines. As a result of this massive show of solidarity Macy’s was pushed to announce that for the third consecutive day, on Sunday, hours will be reduced at the three locations UFCW 3000 members are on an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike.

The Macy’s workers’ rebellion is only one example of the deep inequality of our global economy that promotes the overconsumption by the affluent at the expense of equity and environmental sustainability.  Black Friday, despite the cheery TV commercials extolling its virtues, is an increasingly obvious example that we are bent on amusing ourselves to death at a historic moment that demands precisely the opposite.  

Last year, in the San Diego Union Tribune, I wrote that: 

• This ritual has come to define us as much or more as Thanksgiving, Christmas or any other holiday. Black Friday, with its frequently violent mobs of frenzied consumers trampling each other for deals on the latest “must have” items, is a bit of grim Americana that serves to underscore what we like to think of as the excesses of our mindless consumerism. But sadly, these transgressions are simply lightning flashes that illuminate a greater darkness: We are consuming ourselves to death.

• In a world where millions go to bed hungry, many of them children, North American overconsumption is a grotesque spectacle. This ongoing orgy of materialism is killing the planet, plain and simple. We need to stop.

But perhaps my use of the imperial “we” in that column was a bit imprecise.  In fact, whatever materialist excesses the masses may indulge in, the bulk of the problem is not equally created by all of us, with the top 1% of the economic elite being responsible for as much carbon output as the bottom 66%, according to an Oxfam study. 

When one considers that the poorest among us also pay a higher price when it comes to climate related maladies, it becomes even clearer that the question of our age is how to address carbon inequity in a way that doesn’t punish the poor for the excesses of the rich.  

Thus, in addition to supporting the Thoreauvian ethos of Buy Nothing Day and Buy Nothing Christmas, the politically essential task for those aiming to create a livable future for all of us is to move beyond individually-based solutions to address the deep structural inequities created by global capitalism.  That’s why economists like Thomas Piketty have suggested that the best way to prevent the populist right from co-opting anger at economic inequality is to implement policies like progressive carbon taxes and the banning of private jets that get at the heart of the climate crisis disproportionately caused by a global polluter elite.  

If we can ever get away from our current deadly distractions, addressing the question of how we can survive and prosper together on our imperiled planet might start by honoring basic human dignity and fairness.