British pundits have remarked on the fact that we had our first "Black Friday" at the end of last week - an over-the-top shopping spree that follows the US Thanksgiving festival apparently crossed the Atlantic.

But Black Friday in the US itself had a different flavour as Wal-Mart employees demonstrated across the nation for decent pay and conditions.

Their campaign is gathering pace and the Thanksgiving demos gained big publicity for their cause.

But it hasn't stopped the avaricious monster expanding. Wal-Mart is opening its first-ever store in the capital, Washington DC, tomorrow.

There are over 4,000 Wal-Marts across the US and the retailer is the country's biggest private employer with 1.3 million staff. It's said that worldwide only the Chinese military and India's railways are bigger direct employers.

Wal-Mart tells Washington that its low prices and high staffing numbers would benefit the city.

But trade unions joined with city council members to trash those claims and block the retailer's entrance to the city.

Their campaign said loud and clear that Wal-Mart isn't the answer to unemployment problems and that the cost of welcoming it far outweighs the benefits.

"People do need jobs, but we need those jobs to be good jobs and right now Wal-Mart is driving the wage race to the bottom," said Respect DC spokesman Mike Wilson.

Respect DC warns that Wal-Mart pays "poverty wages." And the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) adds that the firm has a record of "retaliating against its employees for speaking out about low wages and poor work schedules."

Trade unions also criticise poor health insurance schemes and irregular work patterns offered by the company.

UFCW started a campaign for a higher minimum wage in Washington to protect Wal-Mart employees. And councillors approved an increase in the minimum wage for big retailers' staff in July, raising it from $8.25 (£5.05) to $12.50 (£7.65) an hour.

Wal-Mart retreated in high dudgeon, snarling that it would rethink its plan to open shops in Washington.

But the mayor used his veto on the council's proposal. Wal-Mart came back and its first two outlets in Washington will open tomorrow as planned.

But a councillors' committee voted last week to raise the minimum wage across the city to $11.50 (£7) an hour by 2016. It remains to be seen if the Wal-Mart-loving mayor will use his veto again.

Washington councillor Vincent Orange says: "We don't want to have employees working and then having to go and apply for food stamps because they still don't earn enough to support themselves."

It isn't just in the capital that Wal-Mart is attracting the ire of its workforce.

Staff have been putting their jobs on the line and getting arrested across the country for over a year to demand an end to persecution for speaking out.

And on Friday - the busiest shopping day of the year in the US - they went on strike and held protest rallies at 1,500 outlets.

Staff were enraged when one store in Ohio held a food drive for workers - or "associates" in Wal-Mart doublespeak - who couldn't afford Thanksgiving.

A notice pinned up in the staff room read: "Please donate food items here so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner."

All staff are asking for is $25,000 (£15,200) a year and the chance to work full-time.

Over 825,000 Wal-Mart staff make less than that in the richest country in the world.

The average worker makes $8.81 (£5.38) an hour or $17,000 (£10,380) a year, forcing many of them to rely on anti-poverty programmes to make ends meet.

Mind, that average was pushed up considerably by ex-chief executive Michael Duke. His annual salary of $35 million (£21.3m) paid him more per hour than his full-time shop-floor staff earn in a year before his surprise removal last week.

A congressional report for the US house committee on education and the workforce found that just one 300-employee Wal-Mart supercentre in Wisconsin cost taxpayers between $900,000 (£550,000) and $1.75m (£1.06m) in public assistance programmes for poverty-paid staff.

Wisconsin has 100 Wal-Marts of which 75 are supercentres. The mind boggles at the cost implications.

Back in 2004 a Berkeley Institute for Industrial Relations study found that California taxpayers spent $86m (£53m) a year providing health care and other public aid to the state's 44,000 Wal-Mart employees.

And according to the Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch website the firm has received more than $1.2 billion (£730m) in tax breaks, land deals, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing and grants from state and local governments.

Because they are not unionised, many of the company's workers are paying a heavy price for speaking out about this.

Campaign group OURWalmart says 80 employees have been fired for engaging in civil disobedience.

Staff who were illegally fired for speaking out have spent the past few days in freezing weather outside Wal-Mart's corporate office in Bentonville, Arkansas, calling on executives to pay a living wage and end the retaliation.

The National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) said this week that a preliminary investigation had backed complaints that the retailer unlawfully threatened California and Texas employees if they engaged in strikes and protests ahead of Black Friday last year.

The NLRB believes that Wal-Mart also illegally threatened, disciplined or fired more than 100 employees in 14 states for participating in legally protected protests over wages and working conditions.

This isn't surprising as the company is about as anti-union as you could imagine in your worst nightmares.

Wal-Mart once shut down a store in Canada after workers there won collective bargaining rights. It eliminated its entire US butchery department after a handful of butchers at one store voted to unionise.

And even among big capitalists there are people who just can't abide the firm.

Dutch pension administrator PGGM cited the company's "tense labour relations" on July 1, when it announced it would cease investing in Wal-Mart.

It's not just retail staff that the firm abuses either. The manufacturers of its clothing products get an even rougher deal.

One year after the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh, where clothes were manufactured for Wal-Mart among others, many retailers that sold garments produced there or inside the collapsed Rana Plaza plant joined an effort to compensate the families of the more than 1,200 workers who died in those disasters.

The International Labour Organisation is working with Bangladesh officials, trade unions and firms to raise compensation funds to help the families of the dead and the more than 1,800 workers who were injured, some of whom are still in hospital today.

A handful of retailers such as Primark and C&A have been involved in getting long-term compensation funds off the ground.

But to their dismay Wal-Mart is among a group of US companies that flatly refuse to contribute.

"Compensation is important because so many families are suffering - many families don't have anyone left to support them," says Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity director Kalpona Akter.

"There's been a good response from some European brands but so far none of the US retailers have agreed to pay a single penny in compensation."

Wal-Mart says it is now blacklisting Bangladeshi firms that don't meet safety standards and that it has offered loans for factory improvements.

But don't hold your breath. In June 2011 Wal-Mart said it banned garment factory Mars Apparels from producing goods for it.

However, over the past year Mars has shipped huge consignments of sports bras to Wal-Mart, according to US customs records and the Mars owners.

The most recent shipment was in late May, almost two years after Wal-Mart claimed to have stopped doing business with them.

As for the loans, many of the factory owners on Wal-Mart's blacklist say they have never even heard of them, let alone received offers.

It's not just Bangladesh at the sticky end. Aside from medieval pay Wal-Mart seems to hanker back to the days before the Truck Acts outlawed company-store systems.

On September 4 2008 the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that Wal-Mart de Mexico had to cease paying its staff in vouchers redeemable only at its own stores.

If you haven't yet grasped what sort of a firm it is, in 2011 it was discovered that the entrance to one of Wal-Mart Chile's corporate buildings had a plate mounted on the wall in homage to dictator and torturers' master - sorry, "patriot, soldier and visionary" as it termed him - Augusto Pinochet. It was only removed after a big battle.

But Wal-Mart troused $17bn in profits last year and the combined wealth of the controlling Walton family amounts to around $93bn.

So that's all right.