The week before Thanksgiving I started to get wind of a massive effort from Walmart workers that would accumulate in what some hoped a 1,000 strikes nationwide. I flew home to Texas after talking to organizers in California, Florida, New York, Chicago and Texas. Almost immediately after the plane had taken off the tarmac, I had my laptop out and sat in my window seat writing. I worked that night into the late hours and early the next morning of Thanksgiving day. I completed what I felt was a well-rounded report by the afternoon. The next day, Black Friday, my story was published online at the same time the strikes hit. Although it wasn’t what many organizers probably hoped, the strikes weren’t to no avail as reports on the workers’ movement has held its own in the media since.

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This Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year will also be the busiest day for labor organizing, as Walmart store associates and community supporters spend their Thanksgiving holidays on the picket lines.

Organizers announced that last week’s walkouts at Walmart locations in California, Texas, and Seattle were the first wave of an expected 1,000 protests across the country leading up to and on Black Friday. The public can expect strikes and protests in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C., as well as walkouts in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Minnesota, among other states.

Over the past year, groups including Warehouse Workers United, United Food & Commercial Workers, the National Guestworker Alliance, and OUR Walmart, a union-backed organization founded by Walmart workers, have come together to confront Walmart. Unsafe working conditions, poverty-level wages, a rise in already expensive health care premiums, and retaliation against workers’ organizing have encouraged many to join the strike instead of clocking in for the annual shopping holiday.

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