INTRODUCTION: THE REAL, REAL WALMART
1. A note on quotation practice: Throughout this book, quoted matter from writings (discussion boards, forums, and the like) is in italics; quoted matter from oral communications (as in this note) is in quotation marks. Quotations from published sources are attributed in the notes.
2. Donald Soderquist, The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World’s Largest Company (Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson, 2005), 97.
3. A 2005 poll conducted by Pew found that while 81 percent of respondents considered Walmart a good place to shop, far fewer (56 percent) believed it was a good place to work (see Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Wal-Mart—A Good Place to Shop but Some Critics Too,” December 15, 2005). Even among those who regularly shop at Walmart, many feel ambivalent about it. As Charles Fishman reports in his book The Wal-Mart Effect, the advertising firm Foote, Cone & Belding once created a typology of Walmart shoppers based on research in Oklahoma City. The agency found that 15 percent of shoppers were what they labeled conflicted shoppers. This group made regular shopping trips to Walmart—more than once a week—but felt guilty about it because of the company’s corporate practices. Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect (New York: Penguin, 2006), 219–220. For a thorough account of the moral-market struggle between advocates and the company, see Rebekah Peeples Massengill, Wal-Mart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
4. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 104.
5. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 297–299.
6. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 33.
7. McAdam, Freedom Summer, 40.
8. McAdam, Freedom Summer, 116.
9. McAdam, Freedom Summer, 146.
10. McAdam, Freedom Summer, 117.
11. McAdam, Freedom Summer, 118–126.
12. David Stark, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
13. Some of the most well-known “new” union leaders, like Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and John Wilhelm of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), were Ivy League graduates themselves.
14. Doug McAdam discusses the important role of “biographical availability” in explaining students’ involvement in social protest: “Students, especially those drawn from privileged classes, are simply free, to a unique degree, of constraints that tend to make activism too time consuming or risky for other groups to engage in. Often freed from the demands of family, marriage, and full-time employment, students are uniquely available to express their political values through action.” McAdam, Freedom Summer, 44. Parenthetically, this freedom from relational constraints also seems to work pretty well as an explanation for young people’s disproportionate involvement in crime.
15. Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 132.
16. See also Daisy Rooks and Robert A. Penney, “Outsiders in the Union: Organizing, Consent and Union Recognition Campaigns,” Social Movement Studies 15, no. 5 (2016): 498–514.
17. Nella Van Dyke, Marc Dixon, and Helen Carlon, “Manufacturing Dissent: Labor Revitalization, Union Summer and Student Protest,” Social Forces 86, no. 1 (2007): 193–214.
18. Nelson Lichtenstein, “A Race Between Cynicism and Hope: Labor and Academia,” New Labor Forum 10 (2002): 71–79.
20. Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: Norton, 2007), 300.
21. This concept of freedom, about which we will say more, draws on the idea of “republican freedom” that has been articulated eloquently by political philosophers like Philip Pettit and Elizabeth Anderson. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–337.
23. Michael Burawoy, “The Extended Case Method,” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 4–33, p. 14.
24. Bethany Moreton. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 42. See also Deane Simpson, “Nomadic Urbanism: The Senior Full-Time Recreational Vehicle Community,” Interstices 34 (2009): 34–46. Simpson writes of the policy, “RVers have a free, relatively safe, accessible and reliable network of locations in which to stay overnight, with access to bathrooms and store supplies; and in return, Walmart maintains a large number of loyal customers who occupy parking lot space only during the overnight off-peak period” (41–42). Not insignificant to Walmart, the RVers also provide free security.
26. The night before, we had parked the RV in the center of Binghamton, New York, looking for somewhere to eat. A middle-aged couple who said they had lived there for the previous 20 years, couldn’t recommend a single place within walking distance, telling us that there used to be restaurants here, but that they have all moved to the malls on the outskirts of the city. (That said, we looked on Yelp and found the Lost Dog Café right downtown; it seemed hip to us and the food was delicious).
27. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
28. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Grove, 1959).
29. Having students interview each other served both as training for the oral histories we hoped they would collect and a way to build connections with one another.
30. Ignoring the inaccurate report title, according to a Pew study, 89 percent of Americans surveyed considered themselves some version of “middle class,” “upper middle class,” or “lower middle class” in 2012, relatively unchanged from the 91 percent who considered themselves a member of one of these categories in 2008. Rich Morin and Seth Motel, “A Third of Americans Now Say They Are in the Lower Classes,” Pew Research Center (2012), www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/09/10/a-third-of-americans-now-say-they-are-in-the-lower-classes.
34. In Freedom Summer, McAdam discusses the ways in which the booming economy of the 1960s helps to make sense of the volunteers’ enthusiasm about the project. He quotes one volunteer: “ ‘There was this general feeling that you were invulnerable; there would always be a job for you. Jobs or material success—all that stuff—were sort of a given. So I never felt it was one or the other [a job or participation in Freedom Summer]’” (17).
35. Discussed in more detail later, employers are always confronted with the problem of turning purchased labor power—i.e., workers’ time—into actual labor or productive work. Walmart draws on elements of many different management strategies, but the core of what we will call Walmartism still rests on the “simple control” structures prevalent in late nineteenth-century manufacturing, in which workers’ investments are minimal. One downside for the company is that many workers have very low commitment to its success; but the upside is that disgruntled workers often leave rather than fight. See Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic, 1979).
36. Carole Cain, “Personal Stories: Identity Acquisition and Self-Understanding in Alcoholics Anonymous,” Ethos 19, no. 2 (1991): 210–253.
37. Those who took our survey were fairly representative of Walmart workers by geography and race, though our sample had somewhat older respondents and more female respondents than the population of Walmart workers. We estimate the geographic distribution of Walmart workers based on the distribution of Walmarts nationwide (by square footage). We estimate the race and gender composition of Walmart’s labor force using the Walmart 2016 Culture, Diversity & Inclusion Report, accessed September 14, 2017, https://cdn.corporate.walmart.com/8c/08/6bc1b69f4a94a423957d4c2162db/wm-cdireport2016-v27-reader-pages.pdf. Walmart does not report the age of its workforce, but we approximate the age distribution of Walmart associates using the 2011–2015 American Community Survey five-year estimates, which allow us to estimate the age distribution of those working in the “department store” industry of which Walmart is a part.
38. John Creswell, Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2007); and R. Burke Johnson, Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, and Lisa A. Turner, “Toward a Definition of Mixed Methods Research,” Journal of Mixed Methods Research 1, no. 2 (2007): 112–133.
39. The quote, often paraphrased, comes from Marcel Proust: “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.” Proust, The Captive: The Fugitive, vol. 5 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993[1992]), 343.
40. Burawoy, “The Extended Case Method,” 14.
41. Massengill, Wal-Mart Wars.
1. PATHWAYS
1. Richard McCormack, “A GM Factory with 2,100 Workers Closes, and 33,000 Other People Lose Their Jobs—Impacting 120,000,” Manufacturing and Technology News 17:1, www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0112/GM.html; and Marian J. Krzyzowski and Lawrence A. Molnar, “Impacts of the Automotive Industry’s Restructuring” (presentation before the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, 2009).
2. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “The Significance of Ohio in the Early American Republic,” in The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 4; and Krissy Clark, “America’s Forgotten Forerunner to Silicon Valley,” BBC News Marketplace, March 20, 2015.
3. Hal R. Varian, “Computer Mediated Transactions,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 1–10.
4. Peter L. Jakab, Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990).
5. Richard S. Rosenbloom, “Leadership, Capabilities, and Technological Change: The Transformation of NCR in the Electronic Era,” Strategic Management Journal 21 (2000): 1083–1103, p. 1098.
8. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is a federal welfare program for low-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and children under the age of five. WIC benefits entitle participants to a specific “package” of food determined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/wic-benefits-and-services, accessed February 5, 2018.
9. Pierre Bourdieu calls this “hysteresis,” when people’s dispositions are “confronted with conditions of actualization different from those in which they were produced. This is true in particular whenever agents perpetuate dispositions made obsolete by transformations of the objective conditions.” Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 [1997]).
10. Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
11. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
13. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Picador, 2010[2009]), p. 78. This strikes us as a weirdly idealized image of what farm women did, and it is not at all clear to us that better roads made wage work more attractive or that agricultural reorganization made farming untenable, but whatever the motives, the point that retail work provided a supplement (rather than the core) to family income is correct.
14. Arlie R. Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan, 1997).
15. The trend had actually begun somewhat earlier. Women had begun to enter the paid workforce during World War II, when they had been actively recruited into wartime manufacturing. See Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Even after the war, when traditional family norms reasserted themselves, many working-class women sought part-time clerical and service work so their families might fully partake in modern consumer society. As Alice Kessler-Harris writes, “Homes and cars, refrigerators and washing machines, telephones and multiple televisions required higher incomes…. Higher real wages of male breadwinners could pay for some of these, but as the level of consumer aspiration rose, wives sought to aid husbands in the quest for the good life. The two-income family emerged.” Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 302. In turn, women’s increasing workforce participation may also have increased the U.S. labor supply in ways that reinforced the declining real wages of the working class overall. See Daron Acemoglu, David H. Autor, and David Lyle, “Women, War, and Wages: The Effect of Female Labor Supply on the Wage Structure at Midcentury,” Journal of Political Economy 112, no. 3 (2004): 497–550.
17. Lillian B. Rubin, Families on the Fault Line: America’s Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 81.
18. Claudia Goldin, “Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 96, no. 2 (2006): 1–21. Goldin makes the compelling observation that the field of labor economics itself developed in reference to women’s labor market participation: “It would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that women gave ‘birth’ to modern labor economics, especially labor supply. Economists need variance to analyze changes in behavioral responses, and women provided an abundance of that” (3).
19. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989).
20. Daniel Schneider, “Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation,” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 4 (2012): 1029–1072.
21. Milt Freudenheim, “More Help Wanted: Older Workers Please Apply,” New York Times, March 23, 2005.
22. Michael A. Smyer and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, “The Meanings of Work for Older Workers,” Generations 31, no. 1 (2007): 23–30.
23. Donald Soderquist, The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World’s Largest Company (Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson, 2005), 74–75.
25. Viviana Zelizer, “The Social Meaning of Money: ‘Special Monies,’” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 2 (1989): 342–377.
26. Video games for young men especially may provide a sense of community, and may also help to account for the exceptionally high unemployment rate (22 percent) of unskilled men age 20–30. Eric Hurst, “Video Killed the Radio Star: How Games, Phones, and Other Tech Innovations Are Changing the Labor Force,” Chicago Booth Review, September 1, 2016, http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/article/video-killed-radio-star.
28. In each case, this was true even after controlling for factors like pay, age, race, gender, how many years one had worked at Walmart, and how one rated Walmart as an employer. That said, this result could also be an outcome of an endogenous process.
31. For instance, when work requirements were first proposed in Wisconsin as part of Wisconsin Works in 1995, a year before national welfare reform (modeled on Wisconsin) was passed, representatives from the Restaurant Association and other low-wage employers spoke in favor. See Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer, Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 56.
32. Jane Collins writes, “The connection between Wal-Mart’s profits and poverty became clearer to me in 2004, when I was collecting the work histories of forty women who were losing access to welfare in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin. Wal-Mart figured prominently in nearly every narrative. A large proportion of the women I spoke with had worked at Wal-Mart at one time or another and told stories about their experiences…. An even larger proportion of the women—virtually all of them—shopped at Walmart. What is more, they saw shopping at Wal-Mart as crucial to making ends meet—the only way they could afford to buy clothing and diapers for the children.” Jane Collins, “The Opposite of Fordism: Wal-Mart Rolls Back a Regime of Accumulation” (paper prepared for What’s Wrong with America? conference at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., May 26, 2006).
33. Was Walmart doing something different during this time? Certainly, the company was expanding during this period, but it was not expanding any more rapidly than it had been in the years previously. If anything, store openings slowed slightly during the second half of the 1990s.
34. Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block, “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 260–287.
35. For a beautiful description of the loss of community that follows a Walmart closing, see Ed Pilkington, “What Happened When Walmart Left,” The Guardian, July 9, 2017, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happened-when-walmart-left. Equally interesting, some aspects of welfare reform, especially the earned income tax credit (EITC), were perceived positively by beneficiaries. Jennifer Sykes and colleagues, for example, argue that EITC recipients see the credit “as a springboard for upward mobility. Thus, by conferring dignity and spurring dreams, the EITC enhances feelings of citizenship and social inclusion.” Jennifer Sykes, Katrin Križ, Kathryn Edin, and Sarah Halpern-Meekin, “Dignity and Dreams,” American Sociological Review 80, no. 2 (2014): 243–267.
36. Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 22910, Cambridge Mass., 2016).
38. All salary estimates below are based on reports from Glassdoor.com, accessed May 15, 2017.
39. Estimates made using the Current Population Survey. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey dataset (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984-2017).
40. Richard Fry, For First Time in Modern Era, Living with Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18-to 34-Year-Olds (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, May 2016).
41. Maurice Emsellem and Michelle Natividad Rodriguez, “Advancing a Federal Fair Chance Hiring Agenda” (National Employment Law Project, New York, January 2015).
42. Dylan Minor, Nicola Persico, and Deborah M. Weiss, “Criminal Background and Job Performance” (Working Paper, May 4, 2017), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2851951, accessed June 15, 2017. They conclude, “Our estimates suggest that the average customer service worker with a criminal record is a better deal for the employer than the average worker without a record” (19). See also Jennifer Lundquist, Devah Pager, and Eiko Strader, “Does a Criminal Past Predict Worker Performance? Evidence from America’s Largest Employers,” Social Forces 96, no. 3 (2018): 1039–1068. and Autumn Spanne, “Can Hiring Ex-offenders Make a Business More Profitable?,” The Guardian, February 4, 2016, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/04/us-prison-system-ex-offenders-employment-walmart-target-civil-rights.
43. In an examination of military service among people with criminal records, Lundquist et al observe, “The scarcity of stable employment for felons is likely to generate greater commitment to an employer who is willing to take a chance on them” (Lundquist, Pager, and Strader, “Does a Criminal Past Predict Worker Performance?”, 21). Those who had felonies (and who had received felony waivers to serve) were more likely to be promoted than those without records; they were also more likely to die in service. See also Gretchen Purser, “ ‘Still Doin’ Time’: Clamoring for Work in the Day Labor Industry,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 15 (2012): 397–415.
2. THE SHOP FLOOR
1. Paco Underhill, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
2. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
3. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
4. Taking such labor-surveillance technologies one step further, Amazon recently patented designs for a wristband that it may require its distribution center employees to wear. More than merely tracking the locations of workers bodies, the bands “would use ultrasonic tracking to identify the precise location of a worker’s hands as they retrieve items” and would “vibrate against the wearer’s skin to point their hand in the right direction.” Olivia Solon, “Amazon Patents Wristband that Tracks Workers’ Movements,” The Guardian, January 31, 2018.
5. Our analysis extends the conclusions of Stuart Tannock, who rejects the conventional wisdom that large chain stores create routinized and standard experiences for employees. In an examination of three stores in one fast-food chain, he writes that workers “almost universally insist on the distinctiveness of the individual outlets in which they work.” Stuart Tannock, Youth at Work: The Unionized Fast Food and Grocery Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 61.
7. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Moreton writes, “Walton’s biography of finance, inherited security, and public inputs was hardly the stuff of a convincing Horatio Alger tale, but a host of mythologizers relentlessly forced Walton’s personal history into the threadbare rags-to-riches plot line” (45).
8. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 14–17.
9. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 37.
10. See Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect (New York: Penguin, 2006), 30. Thanks also to Dan Wang at Columbia Business School for his insights into the company’s corporate culture and its diffusion.
11. In our survey, white workers report having more than seven friends at work, compared with fewer than five among non-white workers.
12. In the economics literature this is known as “monopsony.” It operates like monopoly in reverse. Instead of raising prices and lowering product quality and quantity to increase profits, profits are increased by lowering wages and staffing levels, worker effort, and employee retention.
13. Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Chicago: Aldine, 2006 [1962]).
14. The idea, developed by classical economists like David Ricardo and Adam Smith but popularized by Karl Marx, is that the value of a product derives from the amount of labor time (specifically, the amount of “socially necessary” labor time) it takes to produce it. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2011 [1906]), 46.
15. See Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 55–56.
16. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, 49.
17. For some Walmart workers this feeling is a bit more literal. Walmart once had a habit of locking overnight employees in its stores—a practice it rationalized as necessary to keep criminals out, though one that was likely instituted to prevent employees from walking out with merchandise. Back in 1988, in a store in Savannah, Georgia, a worker collapsed and died on the floor of a Walmart after the paramedics were unable to get in. Steven Greenhouse, “Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart,” New York Times, January 18, 2004.
18. Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), 63.
19. Alex Gourevitch, “Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 591–617, p. 607.
21. Dina Bakst, Elizabeth Gedmark, and Cara Suvall, “Pointing Out: How Walmart Unlawfully Punishes Workers for Medical Absences” (A Better Balance, New York, June 2017).
23. One can imagine a whole study of the euphemistic language that Walmart popularized. Workers are “associates.” Discipline is “coaching.” One earns “points” for violations. “Flex scheduling” means part-time work. “Full-time” is 34 hours a week, almost a full day shorter than full-time work in the past.
24. These policies may violate the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. A report prepared by the advocacy group A Better Balance, in coordination with OUR Walmart, alleges just this: “Simply put: Giving a worker a disciplinary ‘point’ for being absent due to a disability or for taking care of themselves or a loved one with a serious medical condition is not only unfair, in many instances, it runs afoul of federal, state and local law.” Bakst et al., “Pointing Out: How Walmart Unlawfully Punishes Workers for Medical Absences,” 2. See also Rachel Abrams, “Walmart Is Accused of Punishing Workers,” New York Times, June 1, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/business/walmart-workers-sick-days.html.
26. In turn, Walmart contributed approximately $3.6 million, the Walton Family Foundation contributed $4 million, and the Walmart Foundation contributed $2 million. Internal Revenue Service. 2013. Form 990. “Wal-Mart Associates in Critical Need Fund.” A case was brought to the Federal Election Commission when it was discovered that Walmart was offering to “match” any dollar donation to Walmart’s Political Action Committee with a $2 contribution to the Associates in Critical Need Fund. The case was dismissed. See Craig Holman, Stephen Spaulding, Evelin Cruz, and Cynthia Murray. September 22, 2014. “Re: Complaint Against Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.,” https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/fec-walmart-complaint.pdf.
3. THE STRUCTURE OF DOMINATION AND CONTROL
1. See, for instance, Thomas J. Holmes, “The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density,” Econometrica 79, no. 1 (2011): 253–302.
2. See Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect (New York: Penguin, 2006), 75–76; and Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Picador, 2010[2009]), 68–69.
3. See Nelson Lichtenstein, “In the Age of Wal-Mart: Precarious Work and Authoritarian Management in the Global Supply Chain,” in Globalization and Precarious Forms of Production and Employment, ed. Carole Thorney, Steve Jefferys, and Beatric Appay (Northampton, Mass.: Elgar, 2010), 10–22.
4. Markek Korczynski, “The Customer in the Sociology of Work: Different Ways of Going Beyond the Management-Worker Dyad,” Work, Employment & Society 27, no. 6 (2013) NP1–NP7, https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017012464424; Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Steven Henry Lopez, “Workers, Managers, and Customers: Triangles of Power in Work Communities,” Work and Occupations 37, no. 3 (2010): 251–271; and Holly J. McCammon and Larry J. Griffin, “Workers and Their Customers and Clients: An Editorial Introduction,” Work and Occupations 27, no. 3 (2000): 278–293.
5. It is likely true that people try to find autonomy and community, and chafe against arbitrary authority, wherever they work, in which case these structural features of service work exacerbate and reinforce more general patterns of worker aspiration and irritation.
6. These examples are all drawn from the Walmart associates’ discussion board.
7. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 128. See also Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic, 1976).
8. In a rich comparative case study, Peter Ikeler compares work at Macy’s, a traditional department store, with the big-box chain Target. He argues that Macy’s relies on an “eroded craft” system of control, in which salespeople are responsible for having a deeper familiarity with a particular set of products and for engaging in more emotional depth with customers than their counterparts at Target. This department-specific knowledge presumably limits the extent to which workers at Macy’s can be reallocated to different positions to match customer demand; it thus presumably also leads to slack time, because workers are anchored within slow departments. Peter Ikeler, Hard Sell: Work and Resistance in Retail Chains (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016).
10. The closest analogy that comes to mind for those who don’t go to Walmart is flying. The airlines have figured out that customers are willing to tolerate the most amazing forms of degradation to save the tiniest fraction of money. No one is even remotely happy about abysmal legroom, the absence of basic amenities, impossibly crowded overhead bins, limited food and drink, poorly paid and miserable staff, and surcharges for everything under the sun. Yet people really want to pay a few dollars less for their tickets, and so this is where the action is for the airlines. (In this case the temporal distance between buying a ticket and flying may have something to do with the reasons why customers fail to recognize the role they play in their own unhappiness.)
12. Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, “CPI Bias from Supercenters: Does the BLS Know that Wal-Mart Exists?” (NBER Working Paper 10712, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., August 2004).
15. Rebekah Peeples Massengil, Wal-Mart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
16. For example, it assumes that worker productivity would not increase (and turnover would not decrease) in response to better wages and working conditions, contradicting ideas now widely accepted in economic theory. Carl Shapiro and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device,” American Economic Review 74, no. 3 (1984): 433–444. It also assumes that the company’s only option in the face of higher labor costs would be to pass them on to customers, rather than to suppliers, financiers, landlords, and shareholders. Finally, even if such costs were all passed on to customers, they would likely be quite small, “dispersed in small amounts among many consumers across the income spectrum,” as one analysis put it. Ken Jacobs, Dave Graham-Squire, and Stephanie Luce, “Living Wage Policies and Big-Box Retail: How a Higher Wage Standard Would Impact Walmart Workers and Shoppers” (research brief, Center for Labor Research and Education, University of California, Berkeley, April 2011). Customers could still save a lot, even if workers were paid a living wage. One might also make the converse argument to see its absurdity: If low prices are more important than decent wages and benefits, why pay workers anything at all? Think of all the savings!
17. Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk.
18. Peter Bearman, Doormen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
19. Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Rachel Sherman, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
20. Joshua Sperber, “Yelp and Labor Discipline: How the Internet Works for Capitalism,” New Labor Forum 23, no. 2 (2014): 68–74.
21. See, for example, Linda Fuller and Vicki Smith, “Consumers’ Reports: Management by Customers in a Changing Economy,” Work, Employment & Society 5, no. 1 (1991): 1–16; and Sperber, “Yelp and Labor Discipline.”
22. Alex Gourevitch, “Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 591–617.
23. Edwards, Contested Terrain, 29. This is, of course, one of those classic motifs about the “old days” that cannot possibly be entirely true.
24. Edwards, Contested Terrain, 33.
25. Edwards, Contested Terrain, 58–61. See also William Carwardine, The Pullman Strike (New York: Arno, 1969 [1894]).
26. Edwards, Contested Terrain.
27. Peter Ikeler (Hard Sell) describes the labor process at Target and other big-box stores as “service Toyotism,” a model of post-Fordist flexible specialization that he contrasts with the “eroded craft” at Macy’s. While this formulation captures aspects of work at Walmart, it seems to overstate the degree to which companies like Target actually invest in their workers and allow workers control over the labor process. For a good summary of post-Fordism in theory and practice, see Steven Vallas, “Rethinking Post-Fordism: The Meaning of Workplace Flexibility,” Sociological Theory 17, no. 1 (1999): 68–101.
28. As a company that rose to power through the innovations it introduced in the logistics of retail, and as a key intermediary between manufacturers and consumers, Walmart may well embody post-Fordism: “a form of flexible accumulation where capital moves detached from the spatial confines of local labor forces and consumption patterns.” David Karjanen, “The Wal-Mart Effect and the New Face of Capitalism: Labor Market and Community Impacts of the Megaretailer,” in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (New York: New Press, 2006), 162. As a workplace, however, it does not.
29. See Stuart Tannock, Youth at Work: The Unionized Fast Food and Grocery Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 53.
30. See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). Bateson develops the theory of the double bind as inducing schizophrenia and autism; here one realizes as well that unresolvable orders at work produce disengagement as a reaction.
31. Tannock calls this peer pressure “concertive control” (Youth at Work, 73).
32. Nelson Lichtenstein (“In the Age of Wal-Mart,” 19) cites Michael Bergdahl, who describes the advantages of high turnover: “It’s hard to believe, but turnover drops millions of dollars to the bottom line in cost savings for the company. When an experienced associate leaves the company he or she is replaced by an entry-level associate at a lower wage. Turnover of associates, for this reason, actually appears, from an expense standpoint, to be a competitive advantage.” Michael Bergdahl, What I Learned from Sam Walton: How to Compete and Thrive in a Wal-Mart World (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004).
33. Barbara Ehrenreich beautifully describes the range of tests she was required to take in order to get hired by Walmart. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (New York: Holt, 2002).
34. “In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford’s strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart’s stingy compensation policies…contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Walmart.” Liza Featherstone, “Down and Out in Discount America,” The Nation, December 16, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/down-and-out-discount-america.
35. In a compelling theoretical article, Elizabeth Anderson asks, “What is the point of equality?” Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–337. She argues that recent egalitarian theorists have focused too heavily on equality of opportunity, in turn accepting “the justice of whatever inequalities result from adults’ voluntary choices” (291). She continues that such a conception of equality, what she calls “luck egalitarianism,” “underwrites a hybrid institutional scheme: free markets, to govern the distribution of goods attributable to factors for which individuals are responsible, and the welfare state, to govern the distribution of goods attributable to factors beyond the individual’s control” (308). In other words, these theorists emphasize the importance of giving individuals equal chances to occupy certain social roles or positions in society, but—she argues—neglect that the “primary subject of justice is the institutional arrangements that generate people’s opportunity over time” (309). For her, what matters is not just how people are allocated to places in a distribution, but the shape of the distribution itself and what this distribution implies about how people relate to one another. And so she proposes that egalitarians ought to focus on what she calls “democratic egalitarianism,” or creating social conditions in which people are able to live without being dominated by others, a “collective self-determination by means of open discussion among equals, in accordance with rules acceptable to all” (313).
36. W. Lloyd Warner and John Low, The Social System of the Modern Factory: The Strike: A Social Analysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947). Warner and Low report an interaction in which a worker in a shoe factory, absent because of illness, returns and is put to work on another machine and asks “Where is my machine?” The foreman says, “Your machine? Did you buy it? Maybe you would like to. Maybe you could buy the factory, too. What do you mean, your machine?”
1. Eric Leifer, “Interaction Preludes to Role Setting: Exploratory Local Action,” American Sociological Review 53, no. 6 (1988): 865–878.
2. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
3. Adrian Mayer, “The Significance of Quasi-groups in the Study of Complex Societies,” in The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies, ed. Michael Banton (New York: Praeger, 1966), 97–122.
4. Richard B. Freeman, “What Can Labor Organizations Do for U.S. Workers when Unions Can’t Do What Unions Used to Do?,” in What Works for Workers? Public Policies and Innovative Strategies for Low-Wage Workers, ed. Stephanie Luce, Jennifer Luff, Joseph A. McCartin, and Ruth Milkman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 67–68.
5. See, for instance, Kate Bronfenbrenner and Robert Hickey, Blueprint for Change: A National Assessment of Winning Union Organizing Strategies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 2003). Electronic version, https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/monograph/5/, accessed February 6, 2018.
6. In their classic study What Do Unions Do, Richard Freeman and James Medoff find that unionized workers tend to be quite happy with the ways that unions enhance wages and benefits and handle grievances, but much less happy with the ways that unions give workers a say on the job or help to make the job more interesting. Richard Freeman and James Medoff, What Do Unions Do (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 144.
7. This is a particularly egregious example of the handling of a tension that is, in subtler ways, difficult to avoid in the relationships between paid union staffers and worker-leaders. Teresa Sharpe, “Democratic Spaces and Successful Campaigns: The Dynamics of Staff Authority and Worker Participation in an Organizing Union,” in Reorganizing Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement, ed. Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 62–87.
8. Bruce Western, “A Comparative Study of Working-Class Disorganization: Union Decline in Eighteen Advanced Capitalist Countries,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 2 (1995), 182–183.
9. Robert E. Baldwin, The Decline of U.S. Labor Unions and the Role of Trade (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2003); and Tali Kristal, “The Capitalist Machine: Computerization, Workers’ Power, and the Decline in Labor’s Share Within U.S. Industries,” American Sociological Review 78, no. 3 (2013), 361–389. The current failure of the self-checkout line provides some indication of the limits of worker replacement by machines, though it is possible that “smart stores” may eliminate most of the front-end workers within the next decade. Steven Lopez, Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 243n32.
10. Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); Kate Bronfenbrenner, “No Holds Barred—The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #235 (2009); John Logan, “The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 44, no. 4 (2006), 651–675; Morris M. Kleiner, “Intensity of Management Resistance: Understanding the Decline of Unionization in the Private Sector,” Journal of Labor Research 22, no. 3 (2001), 519–540; Richard B. Freeman and Morris M. Kleiner, “Employer Behavior in the Face of Union Organizing Drives,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 43, no. 4 (1990), 351–365.
11. Bronfenbrenner 2009, 3.
12. Bronfenbrenner 2009, 3.
13. See Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
14. See Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38.
15. Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism; and Fantasia and Voss, Hard Work, 36–39. Fantasia and Voss cite Michael Mann, who reports that between 1871 and 1914, between 500 and 800 workers were killed in labor disputes in the United States, compared with 7 in England, 35 in France, and 16 in Germany. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
16. Fantasia and Voss, Hard Work, 26; and Robert Zeiger, American Workers, American Unions (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1994).
17. Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Fantasia and Voss, Hard Work, 19–25.
18. Peter Bearman and Kevin Everett, “The Structure of Social Protest, 1961–1983,” Social Networks 15 (1993): 171–200.
19. Penny Lewis (2013) complicates the stereotype of the working-class “hard hat,” offering a sophisticated analysis of the roles of race, class, and party in the anti–Vietnam War movement. She upends the conventional wisdom by demonstrating the extent of working-class opposition to the war, yet supports the argument we make here by showing how this opposition tended not to find expression in the conservative mainstream of the American labor movement at the time. Nor did this working-class opposition, for that matter, make it into popular understandings of the anti-war movement then or ever since. Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013).
20. Stuart Tannock, Youth at Work: The Unionized Fast Food and Grocery Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), part 3.
21. Fantasia and Voss, Hard Work, 64; and Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement (New York: Verso, 2014).
22. Epitomizing this view was AFL-CIO president George Meany who, in 1972, responded to a reporter’s question about declining union membership rates by answering, “Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not appear to want to be organized?” See Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 196.
23. In a comprehensive review of the literature, Jake Rosenfeld makes a convincing argument that economic, institutional, and political changes explain the decline of traditional labor unions more than “the relative zeal with which contemporary unions are seeking to expand their memberships.” Jake Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 14. He observes that, since the mid-1990s, a few large unions have invested tremendous resources into increasing membership, with little effect. On the other hand, Jane McAlevey also makes a compelling case that organizational strategy matters, and that a failure to engage in strategic organizing “is the main reason why modern movements have not replicated the kinds of gains achieved by the earlier labor and civil rights movements.” Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 10.
24. Union membership rates in retail are estimated from the Current Population Survey. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey dataset (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984–2017).
25. Kim Voss and Rachel Sherman, “Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Union Revitalization in the American Labor Movement,” American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 2 (2000): 303–349, p. 331. Voss and Sherman divide their cases into “fully revitalized” and “partially revitalized” union locals. Whereas 50 percent of the SEIU locals and 40 percent of the HERE locals were “fully revitalized,” none of the UFCW locals were.
26. Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below (New York: Verso, 2007), 233.
27. Ruth Milkman, “Win or Lose: Lessons from Two Contrasting Union Campaigns,” Social Policy 35, no. 2 (2004–2005): 43–47.
28. Nelson Lichtenstein, “Wal-Mart: A Template for Twenty-First-Century Capitalism,” in Walmart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (New York: New Press, 2006), 3–30. Lichtenstein writes that this collection of essays actually emerged as a result of the strike.
29. Voss and Sherman, “Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy.”
30. See Milkman, “Win or Lose.”
31. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, now part of UNITE HERE, may be the union that today gets closest to this evangelism.
32. Here it is worth noting that the most important union campaigns of the last decades have been in such sectors. That is not accidental: the structuring of employment is increasingly driving workers into settings (like home health care) where working to rule as a strategy for resistance is likely fruitless.
33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 517.
34. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1971]); Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
35. Steven Greenhouse, “Wal-Mart Plays Down Labor Protests at Its Stores,” New York Times, November 23, 2012.
36. Josh Eidelson, “The Great Walmart Walkout,” The Nation, December 19, 2012.
39. Of course the encounter wasn’t exactly serendipitous; the organizer was quite purposefully working through her existing networks to find possible recruits.
40. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
41. Kelly Services, one of the oldest temp agencies in the country, was founded in Detroit in 1946, soon after the end of World War II, by William Russell Kelly, who paired a need among employers for “Kelly girls,” a flexible workforce of young women who would provide secretarial services on demand, with a pool of young women, many of whom had been recruited into full-time work during the war and chafed at again being consigned to traditional prewar gender norms. See, e.g., Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). According to Kelly’s obituary in the Times, an early advertisement for the company exhorted, “The next time you get fed up with the household routine, join the Kelly Girl Service,” and Kelly himself had discussed how “we had our employees view a filmstrip to help them explain to their husbands or fathers why it was all right for a woman to be working.” Leslie Eaton, “William Kelly, 92, Founder of Temporary Jobs Company,” New York Times, January 8, 1998, accessed October 16, 2015, www.nytimes.com/1998/01/08/business/william-kelly-92-founder-of-temporary-jobs-company.html.
42. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
43. Tannock, Youth at Work, 113.
44. In his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James Scott discusses how his analysis of domination is complicated in situations in which there is some room for exit, and that the case of the contemporary working class shows “how essential the existence of some choice is in raising the possibility of hegemonic incorporation.” Nevertheless, he points out, “Even in the case of the contemporary working class, it appears that slights to one’s dignity and close surveillance and control of one’s work loom at least as large in accounts of oppression as do narrower concerns of work and compensation.” James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 22–23.
45. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 27–29.
46. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 77.
47. What did it mean to sign up? Workers who signed up as members committed to paying $5 per month to OUR Walmart. Members were not necessarily public about their membership, but signing brought one into the network of others who were known to Walmart management as OUR Walmart members. Members were also expected to participate in regular meetings and to plan and execute local actions. And signing put one at risk of being identified as anti-Walmart by supervisors who were hypersensitive to any signs of potential resistance.
48. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415–444.
49. The one clear deviation from the trend was between the fifth and sixth signing, which has a much higher marginal signing time than those on either side of it. (This may very well be coincidental, given the small number of stores with 50 signers, but is consistent with classic research on small groups that suggests an optimal size of five. J. Richard Hackman and Neil Vidmar, “Effects of Size and Task Type on Group Performance and Member Reactions,” Sociometry 33, no. 1 (1970): 37–54.
50. See, for instance, Mark Granovetter, “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 6 (1978): 1420–1443; and Pamela Oliver, Gerald Marwell, and Ruy Teixeira, “A Theory of the Critical Mass. I. Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity, and the Production of Collective Action,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 522–556.
51. The relationship between one’s support for joining a labor organization and being in a customer-facing role is not always positive, as it is at Walmart. In hotels, for example, front desk workers tend to be the hardest to organize, because they tend to be on a different, management track. Conversation with Teresa Sharpe.
52. Selection on personality (broadly construed) could influence their role in the campaign. Fitting-room associates, while likely to sign up for the organization, were relatively unlikely to be a “first signer” in a store—only one out of 26 fitting-room associates (3.8 percent) was a first signer. In contrast, 17 of the 124 cart pushers (13.7 percent) were first signers. Organizers might reach cart pushers first, or cart pushers might be more independent-minded than other employees. A mix of both processes is probably in play, and either way, cart pushers are more likely to be the first movers. Walmart workers don’t precisely select their jobs, of course, but they do have opportunities to put themselves in different settings. While not all cart pushers, for example, want to be cart pushers, those who want to be will have no trouble being assigned to work outdoors, as the job is generally undesirable.
53. For a more detailed exploration of this relationship, see Suresh Naidu and Adam Reich, “Collective Action and Customer Service in Retail,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review (2017), https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793917748601.
54. Several economists have used “distance from Bentonville” in combination with year fixed effects to instrument the presence of Walmart in a region. See, for instance, David Neumark, Junfu Zhang, and Stephen Ciccarella, “The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets,” Journal of Urban Economics 63 (2008): 405–430.
55. Admittedly, such hot shop organizing—organizing where there is the most expressed worker interest—has to be integrated with the overall aims of a movement. One can jump from hot shop to hot shop willy-nilly and find that the movement is weaker because effort is scattered across space and unable to fuel itself.
5. SOCIAL TIES AND SOCIAL CHANGE
1. Bruce Nissen, “Alternative Strategic Directions for the U.S. Labor Movement,” Labor Studies Journal 28, no. 1 (2003): 133–155; and Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below (New York: Verso, 2007).
2. Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907; and Shamus Khan, Privilege: The Making of An Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). In case there is any doubt, they also still sequester themselves in privileged hamlets.
3. As we have suggested, this outcome was not preordained. OUR Walmart had succeeded in pushing Walmart to a breaking point on the eve of the 2012 Black Friday strikes. By the summer of 2014, however, this momentum had largely dissipated.
4. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Picador, 2010[2009]), 182.
6. Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic, 1976). See also E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden, 1960).
7. Lichtenstein (2010[2009]), 184–196.
8. In addition to accounts of being terminated on the basis of video capture, associates report, for example, that store managers watch the tape, observe who is talking to whom, and then ask about the content of those conversations.
11. Hyojoung Kim and Peter Bearman, “The Structure and Dynamics of Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 1 (1997): 70–93.
12. That feels like the all too common academic experience of spending all day writing and discovering the next morning that you added a single comma.
13. There are roughly 147 million workers in nonfarm occupations in the United States. Walmart employs 1.4 million workers, or 1 percent. Central Florida has many retired people, and they live in houses. It follows that the chance that someone working at Walmart was behind one of the closed doors that the students knocked on was absurdly low, about 1 in 150, just about the same as winning $5 in the Florida Gold Rush Double scratch-off lottery.
14. The idea that class overlies and is consolidated with other social cleavages rather than crosscutting them. See Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998): 62–82; Leslie McCall, Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771–1800.
15. The difference in how sites were organized may reflect whether or not the lead staffers were OUR Walmart hires or UFCW assignees. When the latter were running the show, as in Chicago and Los Angeles, creativity in developing new organizing strategies, care for inclusiveness, and sensitivity to feelings seemed less prevalent.
16. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); for a useful summary, see Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (Stamford, Conn.: Ray Freiman, 1978), 94–100.
17. William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1982).
6. OUR WALMART ON THE LINE
1. Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, (New York: New Press, 2006).
The article documented support for campaigns like OUR Walmart and the Fight for Fifteen, and then asked: “What if it never turns protestors into dues-paying members? Actually winning elections at giant employers like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, which have gone to great lengths to deter unionization, appears nearly impossible. What if the unions’ return on that organizing investment, besides the satisfaction of having helped workers more broadly, is essentially zero?”
10. Steven Greenhouse, “Wal-Mart Plays Down Labor Protests at Its Stores,” New York Times, November 23, 2012.
11. Robert H. Zieger, The CIO 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); and Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970 [1969]).
12. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1971]), 105.
13. Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 201.
14. This is Louis Althusser’s exposition on the religious teachings of Blaise Pascal. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006[2001]), 83.
15. Kim Voss and Rachel Sherman, “Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Union Revitalization in the American Labor Movement,” American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 2 (2000): 303–349.
16. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 93.
17. David Brody, Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
18. Kate E. Andrias, “A Robust Public Debate: Realizing Free Speech in Workplace Representation Elections,” The Yale Law Journal 112, no. 8 (2003), 2415–2416; and Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Picador, 2010[2009]), 159.
19. For example, in both N.L.R.B. v. Babcock & Wilcox, Co. (1956) and Lechmere, Inc. v. N.L.R.B. (1992), the Court reasoned that workers’ organization rights needed to be balanced against a company’s property rights, and so it was within an employer’s right to ban nonemployee organizers from “trespassing” by handing out literature in or around a company parking lot. Scholars have suggested that such redefinitions contributed to a decline in union election victories in the years after Babcock. Sarah Korn, “Property Rights and Job Security: Workplace Solicitation by Nonemployee Union Organizers,” The Yale Law Journal, 94, no. 2 (1984), 383; see also Paul Weiler, “Promises to Keep: Securing Workers’ Rights to Self-Organization Under the NLRA,” Harvard Law Review 96, no. 8 (1983), 1796–1827.
20. Voss and Rachel Sherman, “Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy”; and Ruth Milkman, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).
21. Granted, even this sort of interactive freedom is not guaranteed. Employers can try to limit the types of interactions that organizers (and others) have with employees—primarily through the enactment and enforcement of “no solicitation” policies. Such policies are technically legal, so long as they do not enforce the policy discriminately against unions, and provided that employers do not establish them for the “sole purpose” of thwarting an organizing drive (Andrias [2003], 2441; N.L.R.B. v. St. Francis Healthcare Centre [2000]; G. Harrison Darby and Margaret Bryant, “When Unions Knock, How Should Employers Answer?,” HR Magazine 42, no. 7 (1997), 124–129. Current law tends to uphold bans on the distribution of literature and requests for signatures at the workplace. In a 2003 decision, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) wrote that the presentation of a card for a worker to sign crossed the line into solicitation, because it “prompts an immediate response from the individual or individuals being solicited and therefore presents a greater potential for interference with employer productivity if the employees are supposed to be working” (Wal-Mart Stores, 340 NLRB 639). But it seems to leave open other kinds of conversation about worker organization—those that do not involve explicit appeals for support and do not “disrupt” worker productivity.
23. Brett Caraway, “OUR Walmart: A Case Study of Connective Action,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 7 (2015): 1–14.
24. Na Sun, Patrick Pei-Luen Raw, and Liang Ma, “Understanding Lurkers in Online Communities: A Literature Review,” Computers in Human Behavior 38 (2014): 110–117.
25. Peter Bearman, Doormen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
26. Alix Rule, Jean-Philippe Cointet, and Peter S. Bearman, “Lexical Shifts, Substantive Changes, and Continuity in State of the Union Discourse,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 35 (2015), 10837–10844; Mark Hoffman, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Philipp Brandt, Newton Key, and Peter Bearman. “The (Protestant) Bible, the (Printed) Sermon, and the Word(s): The Semantic Structure of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660–1780.” Poetics (Forthcoming), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2017.11.002.
27. Pamela Oliver, Gerald Marwell, and Ruy Teixeira, “A Theory of the Critical Mass. I. Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity, and the Production of Collective Action,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 522–556.
28. Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 154–156.
29. Marshall Ganz discusses how the United Farm Workers incorporated principles of mutual aid into its organizing before it became a powerful collective movement. See Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
30. Think Kickstarter or GoFundMe, but organized around collective action, e.g., “I agree to strike if and only if 60 percent of my coworkers also agree to strike.”
32. See, for instance, Mai-Ly N. Steers, Robert E. Wickham, and Linda K. Acitelli, “Seeing Everyone Else’s Highlight Reels: How Facebook Usage Is Linked to Depressive Symptoms,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33, no. 8 (2014): 701–731. The findings here could also quite easily be an artifact of a more complex selection process; people with nothing else to do spend more time on Facebook than those with alternatives, and the absence of alternatives is depressing. Or it could be because on Facebook, as in real life, one’s friends have more friends than one does, on average, and this might make one feel less desirable. Or it may be that Facebook encourages a certain kind of vacuity simply because the expectation is for a short post, and it is hard not to be vacuous in just a few sentences, and prolonged exposure to vacuous content is ultimately quite depressing.
33. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). Thanks to Chris Muller and Sammy Zahran for discussions about this idea.
7. OUR WALMART
1. Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit, Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice (New York: Century Foundation, 2012).
5. We cannot say definitively that the reunion deepened students’ commitment; it may be selection, in that the groups that felt most committed to the project sent delegations because of their commitment. That said, distance from Tougaloo is probably a better explanation for variation in attendance, since it was the longest drive from Chicago and Los Angeles.
9. Scheiber, “Nissan Workers in Mississippi Reject Union Bid by U.A.W.”
12. Scheiber, “Nissan Workers in Mississippi Reject Union Bid by U.A.W.”
14. Scheiber, “Nissan Workers in Mississippi Reject Union Bid by U.A.W.”
17. This may be one of the reasons, as an aside, for the failed outcomes of a wide array of Facebook mobilization revolutions. It is often observed that a key difference between the relative success of the Tunisian incarnation of the Arab Spring and the Egyptian incarnation, for example, reflects the fact that while for both movements Facebook was critical for getting people into the streets, the capacity to resist the resurgence of dictatorial control in Tunisia uniquely arose from the fact that the ties that bound individuals together were deeply associational, linked to secondary associations far more robust than those of their Egyptian counterparts.
APPENDIX: THE NEURAL SIGNATURES OF GROUP LIFE
1. Pierre Bourdieu, The Bachelor’s Ball: Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage, 1972); Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
2. Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972): 151–164; John Levi Martin, “Power, Authority, and the Constraint of Belief Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 4 (2002): 861–904; and James A. Davis, “Clustering and Hierarchy in Interpersonal Relations: Testing Two Graph Theoretical Models on 742 Sociomatrices,” American Sociological Review 35, no. 5 (1970): 843–851.
3. Peter Bearman, “Generalized Exchange,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 5 (1997): 1383–1415; Alvin W. Gouldner, “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement,” American Sociological Review 25, no. 2 (1960): 161–178; and Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950).
4. Luke Dittrich, Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets (New York: Random House, 2016).
5. Hal Blumenfeld, Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 2010).
6. For a review, see Matthew D. Lieberman, “Social Cognitive Neuroscience: A Review of Core Processes,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 259–289.
7. Noam Zerubavel, Peter S. Bearman, Jochen Weber, and Kevin N. Ochsner, “Neural Mechanisms Tracking Popularity in Real-World Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112, no. 49 (2015): 15072–15077.
8. Zerubavel et al., “Neural Mechanisms Tracking Popularity in Real-World Social Networks.”
9. Suzanne N. Haber and Brian Knutson, “The Reward Circuit: Linking Primate Anatomy and Human Imaging,” Neuropsychopharmacology 35, no. 1 (2010): 4–26.
10. Zerubavel et al., “Neural Mechanisms Tracking Popularity in Real-World Social Networks.”
11. Martin A. Nowak, “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 314 (2006): 1560–1563; and Peter Bearman, “Generalized Exchange,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 5 (1997): 1383–1415.
12. Denise Anthony, “Cooperation in Microcredit Borrowing Groups: Identity, Sanctions, and Reciprocity in the Production of Collective Goods,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 496–515.
13. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); for a useful summary, see Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (Stamford, Conn.: Freiman, 1978), 94–100.
14. William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1982).
15. As an aside, this may be one of the reasons that having kids (sharing an instrumental project) does not save marriages that have gone awry with respect to reciprocal affect.