“Our members are clearly fed up of seeing their employers make increasing profits in this sector while their wages fall behind in real terms,” Stuart Fegan, national officer for GMB, the trade union planning the strike with Unite, told The Guardian Meanwhile, there are concerns that the rush of Black Friday sales will lead to road traffic accidents, with exhausted delivery drivers working long hours and falling asleep behind the wheel. MP Frank Field recently asked for an investigation into Hermes, the delivery company used by John Lewis and Next, over complaints that its contractors are “ treated like dirt ”. According to a Guardian report , Hermes drivers, who often work six days in a row, have been asked to work this Sunday for an extra £40 to help with the unprecedented volume of deliveries expected. “It is dangerous … We end up in a position where we almost aren’t given the option to say no,” a courier told the newspaper.This spike in demand also has consequences for people outside the UK, working on the complex and murky supply chains of those products featured in flashy Black Friday ads. Big tech companies, for example, are known to hire more temporary staff and put factory workers on poor wages under immense pressure to meet greater demand at busy sales times of the year. Beyond the sweatshops and factories where these products are manufactured, workers, including children, sourcing the raw materials – from the mineral mines of the DRC to the cotton fields of Uzbekistan – are trapped in slave labour.We can’t ignore the fact that retail is an important driver of the British economy, employing 2.8 million people. But we should still hold these big companies to account and question who actually benefits from Black Friday. It’s certainly not the exhausted behind-the-scenes workers on low wages.Many people rely on sales to buy products they cannot afford at other times of the year. The rise of online retail, however, means discounting happens all year round; so building hype around a sale on a certain day, weekend, or week, is a cynical marketing ploy. In fact, consumer rights magazine Which? found that half of the Black Friday deals it tracked last year were more expensive on the day than at other times of the year, and accused some retailers of “misleading” customers.This is why on Friday many people are going to be shunning Black Friday by opting to buy nothing – participating by not participating, as Adbusters puts it . The effectiveness of boycotts is hard to prove but we all know that money talks. And every marketer has it drilled into them that they must listen to the consumer. So if we, the so-called consumers, tell them that we want better conditions for their workers, instead of multimillion-pound advertising campaigns, they should listen. Some already have by ducking out of the Black Friday madness. Choosing to buy nothing this Friday, and telling people about it, is a way to stand up for those who have no choice but to work under punishing conditions. And your wallet will thank you.