Inspired by the civil rights era freedom rides a group of activists have caravanned to Bentonville Arkansas for this Friday’s Walmart shareholders’ meeting. The activists include so-called “ strikers” –Walmart employees who have left their jobs to make the trip. The union- backed labor group OUR Walmart organized the caravans to call attention to what it claims is the retail giant’s history of retaliation against activist workers. WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill spoke with one of the Walmart “ strikers”- Aubretia Edick. She has worked for Walmart for 13 years, first in a store in Hudson, New York, and now in Chicopee Massachusetts
Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.