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When you think
of the many things wrong with 21st century U.S. capitalism - low wages, dead-end
jobs, bosses’ dictatorship and the super-exploitation of Asian workers to make
cheap products for sale to impoverished workers here - one company almost always
comes to mind: Walmart. At $8.90 an hour for the average “associate,” Walmart
pays some of the lowest wages in the U.S. while employing a larger share of U.S.
workers than any other private company.
Perhaps because of this, it finds millions of dollars every year to spend on
vicious anti-union lawsuits and worker intimidation programs. Throughout its
50-year history, Walmart has remained union- and strike-free, providing a
bastion of the “open shop” for post-1970s, neoliberal America. But in recent
months, this has started to change. Walmart workers are beginning to stand up
for their rights.
Largest Actions against Walmart on Black Friday
On November 23,
“Black Friday,” the largest wave of demonstrations and walkouts ever to hit
Walmart took place. The actions were led by OUR Walmart (Organization United for
Respect at Walmart), an organization of Walmart workers set up by the United
Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. OUR Walmart has grown to thousands of
members in more than 40 states by campaigning against the brutal conditions
workers face and using the limited rights non-union workers have. This includes
the right to collectively organize and strike over working conditions and
retaliation by management.
A small but heroic number of Walmart workers have since taken the bold step
of walking off the job. Following the historic strikes at Walmart warehouses in
Illinois and California in September - and numerous rolling strikes of small
numbers of workers at stores throughout October – on Black Friday, up to 1,000
of the company’s stores in 46 states were picketed, disrupted or struck. The
vast majority of actions involved a single worker walking out of work in
protest. But in Paramount, California, as many as 19 workers took strike action.
In Secaucus, New Jersey, 400 Occupy and union activists picketed in front of
a combined Walmart/Sam’s Club complex for three hours, flagging down carloads of
customers as they entered and getting strong support. Socialist Alternative
members participated in the actions. We also went in the store. Using a
flash-mob tactic that’s hard for managers to predict or control, groups of
activists gathered throughout the store at exactly 1:30 and called out
Occupy-style “mic checks,” highlighting the embarrassingly low wages Walmart
pays, standing for the need for an end to anti-union terror, and calling on
workers to join the campaign to defend their rights.
We passed out information to workers and customers - many of whom were amused
and supportive - and then split up to avoid the anxious managers and security
guards roaming the floor and pushing mic-checkers out the door. Once outside, we
staged a rally in front of the main entrance for a good half hour before local
cops pushed us back, sending us on a loud and winding march through the massive
Walmart parking lot.
Unions Pursue New Strategy
Actions like this took place across the
country. They consisted not only of Walmart workers and OUR Walmart staffers,
but of many community activists who simply wanted to take a shot at the dominant
low-wage corporation. They broadcasted the plight of Walmart workers and the
need for change to a large number of customers and helped support the 100-plus
Walmart employees already on strike since September. What these actions didn’t
do, it seems, was negatively affect the company’s bottom line. Walmart - of
course - claims the protests had little impact, but less biased sources, like
The Huffington Post, also reported minimal detraction from shopping. At
this stage of the game, however, it is arguable that direct economic damage is
not the primary goal. Far more important is the confidence that workers are
gaining by standing up for their rights in Walmart workplaces.
Having tried unsuccessfully for over a decade to organize Walmart stores, the
United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) - America’s largest retail union - is
clearly pursuing a new strategy. U.S. labor law and employers’ vicious
anti-unionism make the chances for organizing a union and winning a first
contract at any given workplace according to official “rules” less than 1 in 4 -
and probably much lower if campaigns are counted that withdraw before elections.
At spread-out service firms like Walmart - or McDonald’s, Target, Taco Bell,
Home Depot, etc. - it is even harder to organize lasting unions on this model,
since successful campaigns can be met with store closings due to the relatively
low cost of investment in any given outlet.
Given this environment, it is unsurprising that ten years of sporadic UFCW
campaigns have yielded a big fat zero on the membership charts. Organizing
retail - and low-wage service jobs generally - requires going beyond the narrow
and ineffective channel otherwise known as the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB).
New Organizing Forms
One way to break out of this corral is to
build associational power outside the workplace. This can happen either
through the formation of open-membership worker organizations, like OUR Walmart,
or the mobilization of social justice, anti-racist, and immigrant rights groups
along with other community support networks, as was the case in the famous
Justice for Janitors campaigns in the 1990s and many smaller campaigns since.
The UFCW has clearly learned from these efforts and from the hundreds of
open-membership workers’ centers sprouting up around the country. In 2011 it
founded OUR Walmart as a separate organization that any Walmart worker can join.
OUR Walmart is not legally a union: It cannot, for example, bargain with the
company over wages and working conditions. What it can do, however, is educate
workers about the limited rights they can use and provide workers with an
organizing umbrella for ongoing campaigns that may result in formal
unionization, as several smaller efforts by the similarly non-union - but
union-affiliated - Retail Action Project have already done in New York City.
Another way to break the NLRB deadlock is through the flexing of key workers’
structural power in the supply chain. The success of Walmart and other
big-box firms is largely a function of their centralized and sophisticated
logistics systems. Store-level inventories are replenished through just-in-time
deliveries from regional distribution centers, which in turn depend on shipments
from huge national transport hubs in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York
metro areas. Many of these warehouse workers are not employed directly by
Walmart, but by multiple layers of shady subcontractors that exercise the most
brutal - and blatantly illegal - forms of labor exploitation on predominantly
immigrant workers.
But it is precisely these workers, in contrast to their store-level
counterparts, who could shut down big portions of the company through concerted
strike action - not unlike the sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan who brought
GM to a screeching halt in the winter of 1937. Crucially, the UFCW has begun to
build this form of worker power in its campaign against Walmart: Warehouse
workers at the Los Angeles and Chicago-area transport hubs courageously walked
out in September to protest inhuman working conditions.
These were not random, spontaneous actions, but the products of several
years’ organizing by immigrant workers with the help of local workers’ centers:
Warehouse Workers United (WWU) in L.A. and Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ)
in Chicago. New Jersey’s warehouse workers have also been organizing under the
framework of the New Labor workers’ center, but they have as yet been unable to
take strike action.
At present, both forms of real worker power - associational and
structural - are in processes of formation among Walmart workers, with
coordination coming from the UFCW, OUR Walmart, and local workers’ centers. This
kind of bold, movement-building approach is a positive step by the leaders of
UFCW and other Change to Win (CtW) unions - one which, if consistently pursued
over the past 30 or 40 years, might have prevented the colossal decline in
unions, wages, and living standards we’ve seen since then.
The Role of the Unions
But we also have to be clear that the UFCW
and its CtW brethren - SEIU, the Teamsters and, to a lesser extent, UFW - are
top-down, bureaucratic organizations with track records of squelching union
democracy when it conflicts with the objectives and privileges of paid union
officials. Not to mention that the leaders of these organizations are bound at
the hip to the Democratic Party, funneling millions to them every election
season despite the party’s continued anti-worker, anti-union,
pro-business policies.
Some on the left might claim that these factors make unions like the UFCW
useless for building worker power in U.S. society or at companies like Walmart.
Others might take a wholly uncritical approach, delegating all decision-making
power and moral authority to the leaders of UFCW and OUR Walmart. But these are
no reasons not to aggressively begin serious organizing efforts. The first
argument ignores the potential for workers to win meaningful material gains
even under the framework of unions that are bureaucratic and, initially,
class-collaborationist - as the histories of both the Teamsters and the
Steelworkers bear out.
The second argument is a recipe for long-term defeat, since the source of
worker power under capitalism consists not in contracts or slick negotiating
skills – or, for that matter, in employer largesse or middle-class sympathy -
but in the ability of workers, when they act collectively in their own
interests, to shut down key sources of capitalist money-making. The left
needs to get involved in these organizing efforts, while at the same time
arguing for the maximum power to rest with the workers themselves. At the same
time, the left should be putting forward effective, dynamic strategies to help
arm a new layer of worker activists at Walmart, who will play the main role in
winning the decisive battles to come.
Mobilize Millions for Workers Rights
Despite the small number of
workers who actually struck, the OUR Walmart campaign and the actions taken by
hundreds of heroic Walmart workers represent important steps forward. With over
1.4 million workers working in brutal conditions for pitiful wages, the
potential for explosive developments cannot be ruled out. Ultimately, winning
living-wage jobs, respectful working conditions, and a union for all Walmart
workers will require the mobilization of millions.
It is absolutely crucial that the activity of Walmart workers themselves be
at the heart of any strategy. This includes democratic decision-making by the
workers, as opposed to the top-down models that currently dominate the labor
movement. The lessons of the 1930s labor battles will be crucial. Mass strikes,
picket lines of thousands, occupations, and other militant tactics will be
crucial for effective action by the powerful ranks of Walmart workers.
While the current strategy to avoid the normal NLRB channels and use the
limited existing laws for non-union workers can provide an important start,
ultimately the law is stacked against workers. Organizing at Walmart should be
combined with broader campaigns and movements to advance workers rights. While
we should take advantage of every single legal opening we can get, we should not
acquiesce to the limitations of a draconian legal system designed by corporate
politicians to make effective action by workers nearly impossible.
Any meaningful change for the 1.4 million workers at Walmart will require
mobilizing millions to demand our rights in spite of the law – and in defiance
of it. Previous struggles have shown that unjust laws can be defeated through
massive mobilizations of workers’ power. Otherwise, there would be no unions
today, and racist segregation laws would never have been overturned. This would
also mean mobilizing active support among the pubic and the community in defense
of these organizing efforts.
If a non-union, low-wage Walmart epitomizes much that is wrong with
contemporary capitalism, a unionized, living-wage Walmart would point more
clearly in the direction of what is really needed: the public ownership and
democratic control by workers of all key sectors of the economy, from
manufacturing and finance to education, health care and, yes, even retail.
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