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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.