Our debts to others on this project start sometime around the end of January 2014. At the time, Adam had been collaborating with Audra Makuch, then working for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) as the executive assistant to the regional director, on a project designed to study the structure of social change activism in New York City. One afternoon, as Audra and Adam were driving to an interview on the East Side of New York, they got to talking about how that summer would be the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Summer campaign. It occurred to both of them that a project that got college students into the field, organizing on behalf of people working in low-wage jobs, might be able to make an impact.
Walmart seemed the obvious target, and although Audra wasn’t working on Walmart, she knew Andrea Dehlendorf, then the field director of the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), a voluntary association of current and former Walmart associates. OUR Walmart is not a labor union, in that it is not seeking to have Walmart recognize or bargain with the organization as a representative of Walmart’s employees. As its codirector Dan Schlademan put it, “Labor has given up lots of its power by living inside the idea that the only way workers could have a union is if the employer permits it or the government blesses it…. We weren’t going to wait for the government or Walmart. The goal now is a worker-supported, sustainable organization of and for workers.” At the time we came into contact with OUR Walmart, it received funding and staff support from the UFCW. It is now an independent project of the New World Foundation.
Andrea began working with OUR Walmart after having spent years organizing hotel workers in Las Vegas, janitors in Los Angeles, and airport, security and other service workers across California. She was a good choice to lead OUR Walmart’s organizing effort, as she had been a key figure in the some of the most successful organizing efforts of the previous two decades.
Sometime in February, Audra and Adam were able to get on Andrea’s schedule. They made the pitch for a student engagement program modeled after Freedom Summer. Andrea was already planning a summer organizing program and had already come up with a catchy phrase: the Summer for Respect. It seemed like an easy fit. Andrea, and the other leaders of the OUR Walmart campaign, had long realized that new strategies were critical to building a base of people willing to challenge the country’s largest corporate employer. A program modeled after Freedom Summer—also a new strategy for the time—fit the bill.
Throughout the summer project and since, Audra, Andrea, and a whole host of OUR Walmart staff and worker-leaders—Dan Schlademan, Eric Schlein, Eddie Iny, Angela Williamson, Girshriela Green, Cindy Murray, Colby Harris, to name only a few—have been tremendously supportive of the work we have been doing. It is rare for a labor organization to be as open and interested in academic work as we have found OUR Walmart to be, which we think is a testament to these leaders’ creativity and commitment. We are grateful for their help and for their trust.
Back at Columbia in the spring of 2014, Adam worked with INCITE, a research center that Peter directs and with which Adam is affiliated, to figure out what we could reasonably do, and how much it would cost, and who would run the program, and whether it was going to be okay with Columbia University. Michael Falco, associate director of INCITE, did the heavy lifting here. If Falco didn’t already know all the answers, he quickly figured out how to know them. Terrell Frazier, then the communications director at INCITE, helped to design the training we would offer to students. By early March, legal counsel at Columbia provided the framework for ensuring that we had a strong firewall between our intellectual products and the UFCW and OUR Walmart, which protected us from having to obtain the union’s consent for papers and books (like this book) that we thought we might write. Around the same time, a budget had been created and forwarded to Andrea, who sent it through the UCFW budgetary process as a grant to INCITE.
While the UFCW was doing its thing, INCITE recruited students. Adam met with a student group at Columbia, Student-Worker Solidarity, thanks to a tip from our colleague Shamus Khan. Adam also wrote to friends at other universities who were connected to the labor movement. INCITE advertised the program on Idealist.com. By the middle of April, after reviewing résumés and interviewing candidates, Adam had found 20 students willing to give over their summer to the project. The work was important, interesting, and challenging. It didn’t hurt that the UFCW was paying them the weekly equivalent of the $15 per hour for which OUR Walmart and others had been advocating as a just wage.
Meanwhile, back at INCITE, Peter had just finished a paper on the neural bases of popularity that came from a new kind of group-based fMRI research design put into place by Noam Zerubavel. Once the students were enrolled, we realized we could replicate and extend our first fMRI study by getting longitudinal scans. At the time, we thought we could learn whether participation in change organizations changed people. That turned out to be more difficult to measure, and maybe less interesting, than what we ultimately discovered about the neural bases of solidarity—discussed in chapter 5. In less than a month, Zerubavel and Bearman designed a study, navigated the IRB process, and secured fMRI space and time at the hospital. Falco came up with the $40,000 we needed for the scans somewhere in the recesses of the INCITE budget. The whole project—from the conversation in the car with Audra to the first night of the program in May—took less than four months to put together. We thank Michael Falco, Noam Zerubavel, and Terrell Frazier for all their help in those early months.
Our biggest debt, of course, is to the associates at Walmart and the students and organizers whose experiences make up the bulk of this book. Given our abbreviated time frame and lack of experience with this sort of organizational collaboration, students faced a lot of uncertainty—about their jobs and when their first checks would arrive, about where they would be staying, about how to respond to situations that arose in the field—that demanded patience, creativity, and open-mindedness. The fact that the summer went as smoothly as it did, which as we shall see was not entirely smoothly, is a testament to the students’ hard work and commitment and good humor. And many of the students have continued to be involved in the project since they returned from the field, reflecting on their experiences in ways that have greatly enriched the final product.
From start to finish, Suresh Naidu, an economist at Columbia, has been a key collaborator in the broader project of which this book is a part. The first week of the Summer for Respect, he gave the students a primer on the economics of the retail industry and the challenges and opportunities facing the labor movement. In the years since the students returned from the field, Suresh and Adam have together been working with OUR Walmart and other worker organizations to figure out how social science might contribute to strengthening movements among those working in low-wage jobs. Many of the analyses included here were conducted with Suresh’s intellectual and technical support.
Several graduate students and colleagues have contributed in ways large and small to this project. Adam Storer, now a doctoral student in sociology at Berkeley, helped us obtain and analyze the Glassdoor and Yelp data. Mark Hoffman distinguished the neural signatures of instrumental versus affective relations. As noted earlier, Noam Zerubavel ran the fMRI and network components of the study that figure prominently in our understanding of the development of community among students discussed in chapter 5, and Terrell Frazier ran the oral history components of the project from start to end. Michael Jaron helped us obtain the data from the discussion board, and Jean-Philippe Cointet generated the maps of the conversation structure of the board.
Other friends and relatives contributed in many ways that they may not precisely recognize, but that shaped the unfolding of the manuscript. For Peter, these include Alessandra Nicifero, Ben Bearman, and Mike Eigen. For Adam, they include Teresa Sharpe, Umberto Crenca, Marshall Ganz, and Michael Burawoy.
We also thank all of the people who helped provide the intensive training to students at the beginning of the summer. Mary Marshall Clark, the director of Columbia’s Center for Oral History Research, offered students a crash course in oral history interviewing. Amy Castenell, then with Color of Change and now at Fission Strategy, gave a training in social media. Melissa Goldman and Vincent Peone gave the students a lesson in videography. Hilary Klein, then at Make the Road New York and now with the Center for Popular Democracy, discussed the history of U.S. social movements. Andrea Dehlendorf, Colby Harris, and Cindy Murray taught students about Walmart and organizing at Walmart.
In terms of our own process, one of us took the lead on some chapters, the other on other chapters. We would each rewrite what the other wrote. At a certain point we couldn’t remember who wrote what, and that is the version you are reading. We owe an institutional debt to INCITE for providing research space and a community with whom to explore and develop new ideas. Bearman acknowledges a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation that facilitated the completion of this work.
Teresa Sharpe, Mitch Duneier, Christopher Muller, Cat Turco, and Yinon Cohen helped move our thinking in very important ways and we are greatly indebted to them. We have also benefited from comments provided by Robert Reich, Benjamin Rohr, Rebecca Breslaw, Audrey Augenbraum, Charlotte Wang, Michael Falco, Sam Lutzker, and Bill McAllister. Finally, we thank Eric Schwartz at Columbia University Press for his grace and goodwill.