An Ohio Walmart is asking its underpaid employees to donate food so their struggling coworkers might enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner.

The store on Atlantic Boulevard in Canton put out plastic bins in an employees-only area with the sign: “Please donate food items here so Associates in Need can enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner.”

The in-store food drive was described as “another element in the backdrop of the public debate about salaries for cashiers, stock clerks and other low-wage positions at Walmart, as workers in Cincinnati and Dayton are scheduled to go on strike,” Olivera Perkins wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The newspaper interviewed one local resident, Norma Mills, who said she felt “anger” after learning what Walmart was doing.

“Then I went through the emotion of compassion for the employees, working for the largest food chain in America, making low wages, and who can’t afford to provide their families with a good Thanksgiving holiday,” Mills, an organizer with Stand Up for Ohio, which is active in foreclosure issues in Canton, told the Plain Dealer. “That Walmart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers—to me, it is a moral outrage.”

A Walmart spokesman, Kory Lundberg, said the food drive demonstrated that company workers care about each other.

“It is for associates who have had some hardships come up,” he told the newspaper. “Maybe their spouse lost a job.”

“This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships,” Lundberg added.

But not all Walmart workers agree with that. One longtime Canton store employee—who requested her name not be used for fear of being fired—found the Walmart campaign “demoralizing” and “kind of depressing.”

“Why would a company do that?” OUR Walmart strike organizer Vanessa Ferreira said to the Plain Dealer. “The company needs to stand up and give them their 40 hours and a living wage, so they don't have to worry about whether they can afford Thanksgiving.”

Canton store associate Erica Reed countered that a past Walmart food drive helped when her ex-husband went to jail and stopped sending child support payments for their four children. “It took a burden off me,” she told the newspaper. “I didn't have to worry about how I was getting my turkey to feed them Thanksgiving dinner.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff, Danny Biederman

To Learn More:

Is Walmart's Request of Associates to Help Provide Thanksgiving Dinner for Co-Workers Proof of Low Wages? (by Olivera Perkins, Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Walmart Store Holding Thanksgiving Charity Food Drive -- For Its Own Employees! (by Rick Ungar, Forbes)

6 Members of Wal-Mart Family Have More Money than Poorest 90 Million Americans (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)