When Mike Compton started working at a Walmart distribution center on the outskirts of Chicago last July, he had never really given much thought to unions. After bopping around several warehouse jobs through temp agencies, he was hired at the Walmart warehouse. And he didn’t give much thought to the bad reputation Walmart had as an employer. ‘I needed a job,’ he said.

Today, Compton is unemployed having once been fired, then reinstated, then fired again, for attempting to unionise his fellow warehouse workers. Over the course of just a few months, the lack of respect from managers, the meager pay, and the inconsistent hours inspired him to be a part of the growing rank-and-file worker movement to demand justice at the world’s largest employer. By this Autumn walkouts hit this distribution center and one in California. Workers at retail stores staged smaller walkouts.

While the company has been the bugbear of unions organising the retail sector for years, there is something different going on this time around, and it serves as a bright light for the American labor movement after a few years of crushing losses. The struggle for fair wages and respect for workers at Walmart extends beyond merely the idea of unions at the retail centers, as it shines a spotlight on all parts of the supply chain, from factories abroad to the shelves in Anytown, USA.

The fire at a factory in Bangladesh, which supplied products to Walmart, that killed more than one hundred workers, was a stinging reminder of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911, which killed 146 immigrant workers, mostly Jewish and Italian women. That incident led to tremendous reforms in safety standards in America and refocus on workers in general. That hasn’t happen this time, but the idea is to build pressure.

That’s why when Occupy Wall Street activists heard about a ship laden with Walmart goods from that country coming into port near New York City they quixotically attempted to block it from docking. Port police cut the activists early, although it is a sign that this ongoing uprising at Walmart is not just a parochial labor campaign, but a fight against the global system of labor inequality.

Case in point: On 11 December, Walmart CEO Mike Duke was in New York City, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, in light of the strikes, the allegations of the company bribing an official in Mexico, and the deadly factory fire.

‘They’re here as a corporation to advise those who set international policy,’ said protester Deborah Timmesch.

Indeed, from this angle, Walmart’s reputation of discrimination, low wages and destruction of local communities isn’t the sign of a rogue corporation but rather the standard for global capitalism.

This kind of broad scope for activists and a diversity of tactics could, hopefully, lead to a reinvigoration of the labor movement, both in the United States and elsewhere. In the states, many unions have not only lost members and settled for concessionary wage deals, while at the same time losing legal rights in traditionally labor-strong states like Wisconsin and Michigan. The bottom-up campaign at Wal-Mart could change that. One positive sign is that one of the main organising agents in the Illinois is the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a radical but often marginalised union, working with the mainstream United Food and Commercial Workers.

If workers at a Walmart retail center seek to unionise, the company can just shut down the shop. But they don’t have that option with a distribution center that serves as the nerve center for all the stores around it. Like longshore workers have secured their pay and benefits by virtue of their control of the choke points in the intermodal supply chain, Walmart workers are seizing these choke points as well.

Anti-austerity movements around the world have pointed to growing inequality as the root of the economic crisis, Walmart’s position as both a global employer and shaper of global policy should be at the center of that conversation.

For Compton, it’s an easy connection to make. ‘They set the standard,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t expect more from the biggest employer in the world?’

But the way justice is administered in the Muslim familial legal system is treating women unfairly, according to Muslim women activists. And some of them are trying to change it.

The existence of religious autonomy in family law recently came into the public spotlight in a somewhat bizarre fashion in India. In March, a Muslim Indian man, Aftab Ansari, was ruled by a village council in West Bengal to have divorced his wife because he had accidentally uttered the Urdu word for divorce, ‘talaq’, three times during his sleep.

His wife of 11 years heard him, and when the village council found out it decreed that this constituted a divorce, even though Ansari said he had no intention of leaving her.

Sameera Khan, a Mumbaibased activist and journalist, complains that according to Islamic law a husband can divorce his wife just by saying ‘I divorce you’ three times. The wife, however, does not have similar rights. Khan’s current work involves the study of the Indian public space and how it affects women. She looks to the future optimistically as there are a growing number of Muslim women’s groups in Mumbai seeking to challenge this inequality.

Hasina Khan is the coordinator of Aawaaz-e-Niswaan (Voice of the Women); her group strives to make polygamy illegal in India.

Noorjehan Safia Niaz, of the Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG), also works to secure more rights for women in India’s Muslim family law. In 2005, Niaz protested loudly against the All India Muslim Personal Law Board when it stated that Muslim law made the wife subservient to her husband.

‘Islam gives more rights to women than any other religion,’ says Sona Khan, a Muslim women’s rights attorney in Delhi.

‘But politically, Islam has dropped gender protection rights.’ Khan was an attorney for Shah Bano, whose mid-1980s Indian supreme court case ended in a ruling that a Muslim woman in a divorce could be granted maintenance, or alimony, which was different from the Muslim law.

Despite that ruling, Muslim communities in India today can still control how divorces are administered. Khan considers herself a practising Muslim, but she believes that India’s democracy is weakened by what she calls ‘regionalism’. ‘[Muslims] can’t run a parallel system of the administration of justice,’ she says.

Sameera Khan laments the fact that Muslim women in India have long been stuck in a political bind. During the British occupation, she says, Muslims were taken up with fighting colonialism. So women who may have felt slighted by inequality were discouraged from calling for change in their community, for fear that the independence movement would be splintered. She says Muslim women are in a similar situation in India today.

India is home to the second largest Muslim community in the world (after Indonesia). But Muslims comprise only 16. 2 per cent of the overall population, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), although currently in opposition, continues to promote a political platform that stands against the ‘appeasement’ of the Muslim minority. On the world stage, meanwhile, Khan believes that Muslims feel confronted by Europe and by the US. Thus, Muslim women feel that their religion is fighting for equality with other religions, so now is not the time to rock the proverbial boat.

‘When do we fight for our rights?’ Khan asks rhetorically. ‘The woman’s question is always to be answered later. It’s tough being Muslim,’ she says. ‘It’s even tougher to be a Muslim woman.’