by
Sarah Jaffe
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It is not due to tactics, though, that I refer to today’s troublemakers as “radicals.” I use the word here to mean those who seek to understand and change problems at their root. As civil rights icon and organizer Ella Baker put it, to think in radical terms “means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” For really changing a society where a small elite controls most of the power and resources will not be easy. There will be a lot of resistance, and tinkering at the surface is unlikely to last. It is that understanding that drives the people I spoke to for this book, and that gives me hope that they might have an effect.
saving for the ella baker quote
The financial sector had grown exponentially in the decades leading up to the crisis—to the point where it accounted for about 40 percent of all corporate profits in the early 2000s, and rebounded from the crash to around 30 percent. And yet it was not very good at doing what it was supposed to do, which is to direct capital toward the best possible investments. Stock trading had little to do with raising money to keep businesses flowing, and more to do with fattening the pockets of the already-wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Keeping the stock price of a company high was more important to the people who ran it than keeping its factories producing or its workforce paid. A J. P. Morgan executive admitted in a 2011 letter to clients that “reductions in wages and benefits explain[ed] the majority” of the increase in profits.
Just as the TARP vote worked to get Congress’s imprimatur on public bailouts for the banks in 2008, the public’s participation in the stock market gave ideological cover to whatever the stock market did: if “the people” supported it, it must be democratic and just. Yet the public’s involvement with Wall Street, while it did grow, has always been overstated: stock ownership is concentrated at the top, with 81 percent of stocks owned by the top 10 percent, and 38 percent of stocks owned by the top 1 percent. Half of all households own no stock whatsoever. Mostly, their entanglement with finance is through debt.
Outside the Walmart in Secaucus, New Jersey, on Black Friday 2013, Harris sat down in the street, a boilermaker on one side of him, a postal worker on the other, behind a banner reading “WALMART = POVERTY.” Joining the rally were Occupy activists from New York and New Jersey; fast-food workers who had also been organizing with the Fight for $15; restaurant workers; and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra marching band. Thirteen people were arrested in front of that Walmart for civil disobedience; nearly a hundred more were arrested around the country. As the police cuffed Harris’s hands behind his back, he shot me a giant grin through the crowd.
“I’ve never felt more complete in my life,” he told me later. “I’m glad that I’m here, because now I have twenty-four hours a day, and weekends if I choose to work them, to go out and organize. And not against Walmart, but for the workers. There’s a difference, because this is not an ‘Us Against Walmart’ thing; this is ‘Walmart Against Us,’ and we’re trying our best to protect ourselves.” As for his dismissal, he shrugged, saying, “We knew that was a possibility, but we didn’t care, because change had to happen. Major change only happens as a result of someone losing something. Just like in the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. People lost their lives and were imprisoned, but all those negative things actually transitioned into positive changes.”
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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.