Last year, Walmart, the country’s largest employer, announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $10 an hour for its part-time and full-time workers. But as The New York Times reports, “the employees more critical of the company say Walmart ... has found more subtle ways to keep the reins on its workers’ paychecks. The retailer has cut merit raises, for example, and has introduced a new training program that can keep employees at $9 an hour for as long as 18 months.” The development has worker advocates concerned about the company’s motives. “I fear that Walmart’s plan is more about delaying an actual wage increase than providing real training,” labor professor Stephanie Luce told the Times—a charge that the company denies. Allegations of corporate foot-dragging come at a time when the retail behemoth’s most effective counterweight thus far, OUR Walmart, struggles to find its way forward. Last year, the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the worker group’s primary backer, withdrew its funding from the operation. As Dave Jamieson reports for Huffington Post, “Whatever successes the campaign may have had, the latest incarnation of OUR Walmart still needs to figure out how to keep the lights on. A non-union group may help win raises for workers, but it doesn’t make dues-paying union members out of them.” For years, the group was successful in getting worker strikes and protests into national headlines and publicizing the plight of Walmart workers. Many attribute Walmart’s wage increases to OUR Walmart’s success. Still, even as it tries to find a sustainable funding formula, the group has continued its work—though, so far, not as prominently. Last week it sent a delegation of workers to the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Arkansas. Group members drove around Bentonville, home to Walmart’s corporate headquarters, taping petitions to executives' and Walton family members’ mailboxes, according to the Times. 
As Jamieson notes, the ability of alt-labor groups like OUR Walmart to survive without union funding is a major question for the labor movement. Even as such campaigns have breathed new life into the worker rights fight, similar union-backed efforts, like the Fight for $15, could also become vulnerable to the exigencies of union finances or the whims of union politics—especially if the campaigns fail to translate to dues-paying members.