Working for Respect

Community and Conflict at Walmart

Adam Reich, Peter Bearman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547826
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers' ability to control their working conditions and their lives.

In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.

1

PATHWAYS

Almost every day of the summer, Kevin and Max—two members of the Ohio team—would drive together from their makeshift apartment in a college dorm in northern Cincinnati up I-75 to the Walmart stores in the suburbs of Dayton. They were something of an odd couple. Kevin was a white guy from Walnut Creek, California, an extroverted and slightly nerdy dude with a loop earring at the top of his right ear, who had been so inspired by the Odyssey during his first year at Columbia that he had a quote tattooed on his left arm in Greek: polytropōs or “many turns,” the first adjective that Homer applies to Odysseus. A rising senior, he had no prior activist experience. While Kevin was a newcomer to social justice activism, Max—a transgender student from New Haven—had activist roots: Max’s grandma had worked alongside Angela Davis as a Black Panther in Oakland, California. The Communist Manifesto was around the apartment when Max was growing up. This asymmetry in experience was coupled with another, more practical asymmetry: Max did not have a driver’s license, so Kevin was the one driving, and it did not go unnoticed by either of them that the white man was always behind the wheel during the three to four hours they’d be in the car every day.

The highway would take them past lush farmland and industrial buildup: The land here is so rich that a deep green tone exists every place where there is not an asphalt parking lot or a building, Kevin wrote. Max remembered driving by the factory that manufactures chemical flavorings and scents—with the car windows down it was always possible to tell which are blueberry days. A few miles outside Cincinnati they’d pass an enormous 52-foot statue of Jesus, arms outstretched, which sat astride the Solid Rock Church, one of several megachurches dotting southwestern Ohio. And as they got closer to Dayton, they’d pass another massive structure, this one crumbling and just visible from the freeway—Kevin described it as a giant vacant body…like the heart was just ripped out of the place. This structure, with its steel shell peeling white paint, its parking lot sprouting weeds, had been the General Motors Moraine Assembly plant.

On December 23, 2008, the GM plant—4.1 million square feet, larger than 70 football fields—had shut its doors for the last time. Almost 3,000 local residents had been hourly workers there. Once one factors in the jobs lost among those businesses in the vicinity of the plant, as well as those up and down the supply chain, about 33,000 people lost their jobs as a result of the plant’s closure. The closure had a devastating impact on the local economy, with a cost estimated at over $700 million per year. Local charitable organizations were stretched to their limits helping people find food and shelter.¹

In the scheme of things, though, the closing of the Moraine plant was merely one more indignity for a Rust Belt long in economic decline. Back in 1900, Dayton had had more patents per capita than any other city in the United States—the Silicon Valley of the early industrial era.² In his Dayton saloon, James Ritty had invented the cash register in 1883—“the incorruptible cashier,” he called it—as a way to prevent his employees from pilfering.³ And in their Dayton bicycle shops, around the turn of the century, the Wright brothers dreamed up their flying machine.⁴ Air conditioning, magnetic strip technology for credit cards, stealth technology for airplanes, barcode scanners, the electric wheelchair: they were all invented in Dayton. And industry followed invention. John Henry Patterson bought the patent to the cash register and built the National Cash Register (NCR) Corporation in Dayton, which would spread the machinery of commerce around the world. By the 1960s, GM, AK Steel, Delphi, Mead Paper Company, and many other manufacturers were institutions in the area, as were the large labor unions that represented the workers within them.

The decline of U.S. manufacturing, beginning in the 1970s, hit cities like Dayton particularly hard. Companies began to outsource their manufacturing, either outside the United States or to places in the country where labor was cheaper; companies also invested in technologies that made skilled manual workers redundant. NCR, for example, employed approximately 15,700 factory workers in Dayton in 1969; just seven years later, in 1976, only 2,000 workers remained.⁵ In 2009, the company moved its headquarters from Dayton to Duluth, Georgia, taking with it the remaining 1,200 jobs.⁶ As one last slap in the face, NCR—the cash register company that had been so integral to Dayton’s industrial past—has recently been producing the self-checkout devices being installed in Walmarts across the country, threatening to displace a new generation of workers.⁷ At different times, each of the other industrial giants in the area has followed a similar path, closing factories and laying off unionized workers.

In mid-June of 2014, at the Walmart Supercenter in Franklin, Ohio [#3784], a 20-minute drive from Moraine, Kevin met Jenny Molten, who worked in the photo department there. Jenny remembered the days after the Moraine plant closed: “A lot of people…came into our [Walmart] store because they were locked out of their jobs or shut out or the plant closed.” They came to Walmart looking for work, hoping to rebuild their lives: “People have lost their homes, people have lost their…their property, their assets, everything that they worked hard for in their life, it’s gone.” If they got jobs at Walmart at all, these jobs paid “basically pennies, compared to what they [used to make].” Jenny’s grandfather had worked at GM for 40 years before his retirement in 1999. Before she had her kids, Jenny had also worked in factories associated with the automobile industry, like Pioneer and Faurecia. But those jobs had disappeared. Most of the workers who reported to the Moraine Walmart Supercenter, a mile and half from the shuttered GM plant, or any of the other supercenters in the area, made less than $10 an hour.

Over the course of the summer Kevin and Max would meet others at the Franklin store with similar accounts of downward mobility. Joan Wharton had spent over 12 years working for the AK Steel Corporation. The work had been backbreaking, but she was paid more than $20 an hour and had union representation. Now, at the Franklin Supercenter, she was making $9 an hour, less than half of what she had been making before, trying to support herself and her husband, who was serving time in prison for drug possession: “I’ve got all the responsibility of a family without all my family being here,” she says. Gerald, an “old head” in Kevin’s words, who worked in the photo section alongside Jenny and would later become a central figure in the effort to organize the Franklin store, had previously been a shop steward at AK Steel as well.

These workers’ accounts of downward mobility—of the hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing and consequent dispossession among the white working class—is a story in which Walmart plays a triple role: first, as the antagonist, the dispossessor, the company that takes advantage of and speeds up the flood of cheap goods from far-flung parts of the globe; second, as the employer of last resort, the place that will pay you half as much to hawk cheaper versions of the goods you once produced yourself; and third, as a last-ditch provider, the place that will sell things cheaply enough for you to squeak by on your paltry paycheck. It is Fordism in reverse, with the same result of stoking consumer demand: rather than pay you enough to buy the car you are producing, Walmart will pay you so little that you are compelled to shop there.

As we shall see, over the course of several weeks, Kevin and Max spent time getting to know workers like Gerald and Jenny and Joan and were able to build the beginnings of an OUR Walmart chapter in the Franklin store. Many of these workers knew firsthand the benefits of labor organization—they or their parents or coworkers had been unionized before. Many of these workers were trying to support families on less than they had been paid in the past and had a clear sense of being worse off than they had been before. Against this background, OUR Walmart may have felt risky, somewhat uncertain, but it often seemed worth the fight and within the boundaries of what seemed possible. They had had secure jobs before; it did not seem preposterous to think they might have secure jobs again.

Less than 15 miles away from the Franklin Walmart is another Walmart Supercenter [#1503], this one on the outskirts of Dayton in a shopping center just across the boundary that separates the suburb of Centerville from Dayton proper. Kevin and Max tried just as hard to recruit OUR Walmart members in this store too. But they had no luck. They could barely get anyone to speak to them, much less spark interest in the OUR Walmart organization. The tension that Kevin and Max felt in the Franklin store—their sense that people were aware of things not being right—was missing here.

Their intuition was that it had something to do with the different demographics of the places. Centerville seemed fancy to them. Compared with the Walmart in Franklin, the associates at the Centerville store seemed either much younger or much older. Kevin and Max were onto something. The average household income around the Franklin store was about $46,000 in 2012, whereas it was close to $80,000 around the Centerville store. Granted, both of these figures are far above the pay of the average Walmart worker, but the difference between them is also striking. What it meant was that the people who worked at the Centerville store tended to be more socially distant from the “average” worker, locally, than those who worked at Franklin. In Centerville, Walmart workers were disproportionately high schoolers, retirees, moms working a few extra hours for pin money: people who likely thought of their jobs quite differently than those trying to provide for their families, as it seemed like many were doing in Franklin. The Centerville workers were building different kinds of careers at Walmart because they were coming from different places. And because they were doing something different, they built a different local culture there—one less oppositional to Walmart—and hence were disinterested in efforts to stand up to the company. It turned out that Max and Kevin’s intuition is substantiated in aggregate data on the OUR Walmart campaign across the country: stores located in poorer neighborhoods were, all things equal, more likely to have more people sign up for the organization.

We also see support for Kevin and Max’s intuition in the results of the Facebook survey that we conducted with Walmart workers. Those associates least happy at Walmart, as a whole, were between the ages of 22 and 50—years in which people are often looking for regular work, trying to build careers. Those under the age of 22 were happier; those over the age of 70 were the happiest of all.

This chapter makes the simple but important point that in order to understand what work means to the people who work at Walmart, one has to appreciate the diversity of people who wind up there, the range of social situations that drive them to the store, and the ways that these different reference points result in different understandings of relatively similar experiences after they arrive. We have to understand the ways that these workers understand their alternatives; the social situations they were in before they began work at Walmart; the kinds of jobs that their friends and family members have or aspire to. In short, what they actually feel is possible.

To put Walmart in perspective, if the company were its own city, it would be the seventh biggest city in the country, just behind Phoenix, Arizona. And the city of Walmart workers would be filled with people of all ages, ethnicities, and motivations—older people on the brink of retirement who are working there because they have always worked somewhere, or because their old jobs disappeared, or because they just want to have a place to be, or because they want to be close to their children and this was the only game in town. Young people who are paying the bills while they go to community college, or who are thinking they might go to college if they just save up a little more money, or who have already climbed to customer service manager (CSM) after only six months and are sure they can climb higher, or who got stoned too much in high school and may still be stoned even now as they wander somewhat aimlessly around the toy department. There are 40-something women who are trying to support their families on Walmart wages, who are comparing notes with other 40-something women in the grocery department about what kinds of dairy products they can buy with their WIC benefits;⁸ 50-something women who are bored to death at home while their husbands work and are so happy to be around other people; men who prefer pushing carts in the parking lots to anything indoors, since you don’t have to talk to customers outside, and the managers leave you alone too, and you can even (occasionally) get drunk on the clock; people who have just found a home after months of homelessness, who have recently been released from prison, who have returned from military service, who have escaped abusive relationships, who have struggled with mental illness.

In this chapter, we introduce you to some of these people. This is not only to highlight the diversity of experiences of people who work at Walmart, but also to illustrate the ways in which people’s social ties outside the store frame the way they make sense of the world inside. Just as the trace of a stable, unionized job—the memory of it, but also the familial obligations and social status that went along with it and persist after the job itself disappears—can make one acutely aware of the inadequacy of Walmart wages and arbitrariness of Walmart supervisors, so can acute loneliness make Walmart feel like home.

GOING DOWN

The story of the Moraine GM plant and the workers left behind in its wake is a story familiar to sociologists and social critics—the background for movies like Michael Moore’s Roger & Me and books like Amy Goldstein’s recent Janesville: An American Story. For those alarmed by growing economic inequality, one of the comforting aspects of this sort of story is that it appears as though critique is its natural outcome, a result of the mismatch between the life to which people are accustomed, and so imagine for themselves in the future, and the life into which they have been plunged.⁹ People have been screwed over; people should be pissed.

We did hear these sorts of stories in the field. Within the first few minutes of Kevin’s conversation with Gerald in the Franklin store, Kevin remembers, Gerald went off, calling Walmart a bunch of “labor stealing motherfuckers,” calling this or that manager an “asshat,” and expressing his frustrations with the “lunatic” half of the store that opposed advocating for themselves. The notion of Walmart stealing one’s labor does not arise out of the ether; even to conceive of one’s work as “labor” seems a throwback to a time when Marxist language was less absent from workers’ common sense than it is today. It seems likely...