by
Sarah Jaffe
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Near the railroad, an army base, and a prison, the warehouse was a terrifying place to work. Despite the fact that she had arrived at the job along with her boyfriend, she said, her supervisor asked her out three times before her first lunch break. The packages were covered with dust—“We called it ‘China death dust,’” she said, because it left them constantly coughing—but the gloves they were given would rip and never be replaced. Without shin guards, workers would cut themselves on pallets while unloading. And all the while, the temps were pushed to get their cases-per-hour rate up in order to be considered for direct hire so they could stay on past the holidays. “You were treated like a machine,” Hoffman said.
elwood illinois distribution center (walmart)
Without owning a single factory, Walmart is the world’s third-largest employer, after the US and Chinese armies. Add in the number of workers across the globe who work in Walmart’s supply chain, and the number is staggering. One of the most important steps OUR Walmart took was to link the retail workers’ struggle with that of workers from the supply chain, whether they were subcontractors in a US warehouse, packers at a crawfish plant, or garment workers at a factory in Bangladesh. When those workers get together, Schlademan said, “they all begin to see that each one of them is treated not as human, but as merely a cost of doing business for Walmart. It’s always explosive to watch how they support each other, stand with each other, and link each other’s struggles.”
this might be outdated but still damn
In that space, there wasn’t a lot of official business to accomplish. Executives ran down sales numbers (perhaps notably, comparing them to numbers from twenty years ago), but H. Rob Walton, while evoking his father Sam’s early challenges to his employees, cautiously refused to make any predictions for the future. The Walton family controls about 50 percent of outstanding Walmart stock, and high-paid executives a good chunk more, meaning that any challenge to family control doesn’t get very far. Rob Walton, who came onstage in one of his father’s trucker caps and placed it reverently on a pedestal as he spoke, was retiring from his position as chairman of the board. He introduced his successor, Greg Penner, with glowing words of praise for his time at Goldman Sachs, noting his commitment to the company. Oh, and “he was smart enough to marry my daughter.”
whew
For many low-wage workers, jobs are temporary. Walmart’s turnover rate for hourly employees has been estimated at between 44 and 70 percent. Workers like Venanzi Luna and Colby Harris, when let go from one retail job, most of the time simply find another. That they instead continued to fight to improve the company that cut them loose was something that Walmart should value. They were dedicated. That they stuck around, as Tyfani Faulkner said, speaks to their integrity. Their commitment should also remind us of the realities of America in the early twenty-first century: retail jobs and other low-paying service gigs are the jobs that exist, and Walmart is an industry leader. If their only options are Walmart or someplace else that takes its guidance from Walmart, then changing Walmart is really the only choice they have.
Shibata tried to turn to his union as a way to take action. He began blogging about his experiences as a teacher. Then he reached out to the editor of his union’s newsletter, offering to write articles, but got no response. A colleague of his, Jackson Potter, invited him to a meeting of like-minded educators at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers hall, the home of the union that had led the 2008 occupation of Republic Windows and Doors. The problems in the schools, they agreed, were part of a broader agenda happening across the city, one of privatization of public goods and consolidation of wealth, and the union wasn’t doing much to help. They started a book group to learn more about the issues they faced, and the first book they read together was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, in which she tells the story of neoliberal policies imposed by governments on peoples reeling from crisis.
awww
It was in the interests of the wealthiest planters to encourage as many white people as possible to own slaves; it ensured that even if they had little else, they had the feeling of belonging to the white upper class. And many others, including in places like London and New York, where slavery was abolished fairly early on, sunk their money into bonds made by securitizing slaves—humans who were still working on plantations, but who were mortgaged to raise capital by their owners in a process that historian Edward E. Baptist likened to the home mortgage–backed financial products that created the financial crisis of 2008. Companies like Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008 and kick-started that crisis, got their start providing capital to slaveholders. Slavery was not a system outside of modern capitalism; it helped to build it.
THE NUCLEAR FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN THE FOCUS OF SO MUCH HAND-WRINGING and moralizing in recent years was not a product of human nature but rather of a particular period in US capitalism. The family wage, designed to allow a male breadwinner to support a wife and children, was bargained for by the labor movement and accepted, though uneasily, by business leaders during the New Deal period. It allowed many working-class women, as well as their wealthier sisters, to stay home with their children; as discussed earlier, it built the middle class. The family wage—that is, material conditions—shaped our ideas of the male and female role in the workplace and in the home, in public and in private.
It also shaped the “moral values” of the period. Men took pride in their work and in their ability to provide for their families; women took pride in their children and in their caring skills that held the family together. The family wage helped to normalize certain ideas about women’s work and its value and about gender roles. If women were to be supported by their husbands, they didn’t need to make a living wage, and could be paid less when they were in the workplace—and despite the popular mythology, some women were always in the paid workforce. If women should be at home, social systems for child care were unnecessary, and in fact were examples of the state usurping the private rights of families.
The movement seemed as much about changing politics, the minimum-wage law in particular, as it was about organizing workplace by workplace. Since most fast-food chains operate on a franchise model, the immediate boss in most workplaces is operating on a thin profit margin, kicking back a required payment to the corporation at the top, and wringing profits out of the workers by keeping them at minimum wage or just above. By targeting the sector, and particularly the biggest names in it (McDonald’s, Burger King), the campaign was saying that the extremely profitable brand-name corporations and their exceedingly wealthy executives were in fact responsible for the conditions in their franchises. The National Labor Relations Board backed that claim up, ruling that the fast-food giants could indeed be considered “joint employers” of the workers making burgers and fries on the front lines.
“Every facet of the movement is interconnected. You have the Fight for $15—keeping people in a low-wage position is a locus of control, that’s a method to control people,” Kennard Williams said. “Using those same systems to deny people health care—that’s used to control people; if you have an oppressive racist police force—that’s obviously used to control people and keep the status quo. With the Occupy movement, power consolidated to just a small series of corporations that control other corporations—all of it is methods of control.”
This kind of power analysis is an awareness that used to be called “class-consciousness.” It has become distinctly unfashionable to say such things, but that does not make it less true; in fact, in the twenty-first century of globalized inequality, it is perhaps more true than ever. Class is not simply one of a list of possible identity categories. It is a relation of power that is shaped in part by race; in part by gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity; and by immigration status, education, and even region. In the 1960s, centrifugal social forces pulled movements apart, largely on the basis of what gets derisively termed “identity politics,” and movements splintered; in response, elites opened up a few spaces for people of color, for women, and for queer and transgender people at the same time as broader inequality spiraled out of control. Having a few representatives at the top was not enough; a few more women CEOs have not changed the fact that the face of poverty in America is largely a woman’s face. We elected the first black president, and got worse material conditions for the majority of black people.