CHAPTER THREE

WALMART, WALMART, YOU CAN’T HIDE, WE CAN SEE YOUR GREEDY SIDE

THE FIRST TIME VENANZI LUNA WENT ON STRIKE MADE HISTORY.

Luna was one of about forty employees across several Southern California Walmart stores who went out on the first-ever strike at the world’s largest retailer on October 4, 2012. “You didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “You didn’t know how management was going to react, how the associates were going to react, but it was really emotional that we actually did it. We noticed that we can do this, we can do a lot of things.”

Walmart was and is the nation’s largest private employer, and it is known for paying low wages, but up until that point, labor unions’ attempts to crack the retail giant had met with nothing but failure. Luna was part of a new organization, though, one that functioned more or less like a union but had several key differences. The Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) was backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and its first one-day strike kicked off a new set of tactics for labor in the face of the growing service economy.

Luna was one of OUR Walmart’s first members. Her niece’s stepmother recruited her to the new organization in 2010. “I said, ‘I’m sold, let’s do this,’” she told me. “Fear is always going to be there, but if you don’t take a stand on it you’re never going to know.”

She found out quickly why Walmart employees were afraid to organize. “When the company ended up finding out about the organization, that I was organizing the store, they started recording me—who I talked to, how long I took my lunches—every little move I made, Walmart was on top of me,” she said. She was written up twice for minor infractions, but when they tried to give her a “third strike,” she had had enough. “I said, ‘I’m not going to sign the paper, you just messed with the wrong person.’”

OUR Walmart helped her file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Regardless of whether workers are officially union members, organizing to improve the workplace is protected activity under federal labor law—but before this, Luna and many of her coworkers didn’t know the law. Now, she did. And right after she filed the complaint, she said, human resources at Walmart wanted to talk to her, and made her write-ups go away. People at the store still called her “the union girl,” but after her coworkers saw what happened to her, she was able to get more of them to join OUR Walmart and to join that first strike.

Across the country in Laurel, Maryland, Cynthia Murray became another of the earliest OUR Walmart members. She had taken a job at Walmart in 2000, and at first she found it a decent place to work. There were little benefits that made her and her colleagues feel appreciated, like getting “good job” pins when she went above and beyond, which she could trade in for a share of company stock when she got three of them. Occasional merit raises also helped. But about eight years ago, she said, things started to change. It was gradual, but she no longer felt like Walmart valued the workers.

Murray decided to do something about it the day a young coworker walked past her desk in tears. On her way by, the girl told her, “They’re coming for you next.” She didn’t believe it at first, but the next day she was called into personnel and told that she was going to have to start doing more heavy lifting. Murray had an old injury that had caused nerve damage; her doctor had given her strict limitations on what she could lift. She offered to have her medical records sent over, but she was totally unprepared for the manager’s reaction. “She leans up on the desk and spit’s coming out of her mouth and she’s screaming at me, ‘What are you doing threatening me?’” Murray said. “At that moment, while she’s screaming, I thought, ‘No.’ My upbringing tells me that this isn’t right. This isn’t the way any company should be run.”

As Murray made her way back to her workstation in the fitting rooms, someone handed her a palm card from the UFCW. “I think God is good and he puts everything into motion and in action,” she said. She sat down at her station and considered her options. “God said, ‘Call the UFCW.’ And I did.”

Murray decided to be a voice for the other workers at her store who were being intimidated by management. But Walmart had already put so much effort into scaring the workers away from unions—she recalled being brought into a small room with her coworkers and lectured about the evils of unions—that she figured they needed to do something different. The new organization gave them the freedom to try unorthodox tactics and to take action without waiting to sign up every worker at every store; it also, Murray said, gave some workers the freedom to be “secret” members, planning strategy and supporting the others but not yet risking their jobs by making their membership public. They flashed a hand sign—three fingers raised, thumb and forefinger making a circle—to signal support to one another while at work.

Murray’s favorite moment with OUR Walmart came shortly after the first strikes, on October 10, 2012, when a hundred OUR Walmart members from all across the country brought their demands to Walmart’s Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas. It really drove home to her the fact that everywhere across the country, Walmart workers were facing the same problems. “Walmart would say to you, ‘That’s just happening in your store.’ But a hundred of us from across the country? What was happening to me was happening in California, Texas, you name it; wherever there was a Walmart. This was a practice that we knew was coming from Home Office,” she said. “We did a survey, and the workers from across the country said the first thing that they wanted was respect.”

Venanzi Luna was there that day, too. Wearing bright green OUR Walmart T-shirts, and amplifying one another’s voices using the Occupy “people’s mic” technique, Murray, Luna, and fellow workers confronted a suited representative of Walmart in the parking lot outside of the long, low building that houses Walmart’s deeply centralized corporate operations. “We are on strike against retaliation,” Luna, leading the people’s mic, announced.

“We are more than happy to allow you the opportunity to speak one-on-one with some of our HR team,” the Walmart representative told them. “We are not here individually, we are here as a group,” the crowd replied in unison.

“I think we all thought at that defining moment, here you are with the same crutch,” Murray said. “They want to see who they can break down and intimidate. That’s how Walmart operates. And at that moment we were all like, ‘You can’t intimidate us! There’s a hundred of us standing here together today, telling you that we will no longer take your intimidation. When they realized that they couldn’t break us down and make us do a one-on-one, they said they didn’t have enough room. We said, ‘Take twenty of us.’ We were willing to take twenty leaders and send them in together, but we were not going to let them intimidate any of us one on one.”

Over the course of nearly four years covering the unrest at Walmart, the company repeatedly refused my requests for comment. In statements, Walmart consistently argued, “The crowds are mostly made up of paid union demonstrators and they are not representative of our 1.3 million associates across the country.” One Walmart manager, who spoke anonymously to a reporter out of fear of retaliation from the tightly managed company, said that he tried to handle complaints from his workers when he had the time, but that he faced a lot of pressure from above because the company was cutting staff. “I think it’s important for the associates to know that not all managers are monsters,” he said, though he conceded that “there are some people that are certainly bad managers out there.” He added: “There are a lot of managers–and I’m, you know, personally speaking to managers at my store and managers at other stores—that are unhappy with the direction that the company’s going. It’s a lot different when you’re working at a store than when you’re sitting behind a desk in Arkansas.”¹

Colby Harris wasn’t at the protest in Bentonville; he first went on strike on Black Friday, 2012, in Lancaster, Texas. The day after Thanksgiving was the biggest retail shopping day of the year, and it became central to the OUR Walmart protests—a way for what was still a small organization to maximize the impact it had on the store’s bottom line. Like many of the other Walmart workers who got involved in the organization, Harris spoke first about others: about the inadequate scheduling and pay faced by the mothers who worked at his store and their struggles to find child care; about the sexual harassment complaints; and about the pallet jacks used for offloading the trucks full of merchandise that arrive from Walmart’s massive distribution centers daily—part of the company’s famed “just-in-time” distribution system—which some workers claim are often broken and can cause injury. And despite Walmart’s lip service to the value of the associates (its term for employees like Harris, Murray, and Luna), he said, managers didn’t treat them like equal partners in the success of the store.

There were quite a few members of OUR Walmart at Harris’s store, but when it came time to walk off the job, he said, most of them were too afraid of being fired. “It was eye-opening to see how fearful people that really had issues were of Walmart,” he said. “It just really showed how important it was for me to be out there, because I felt like a lot of people, not just in my store, but all the stores surrounding my store, had these issues.”

Harris had always wanted to do some kind of activism—“I’ve always had a passion for people,” he said—and so he felt like he found something important by becoming part of OUR Walmart. Even when the retaliation started in earnest, when he was “coached” (Walmart’s somewhat Orwellian term for getting written up) and his family started to express fears that he would lose his job, he kept going. “I felt like we were only getting ‘coached’ because public perception was changing,” he said. “I felt like it was a sign that things were working. They were scared of workers coming together and doing what we had the legal rights to do. So I was more motivated after being ‘coached,’ because I knew it wasn’t right.”

Harris was fired in September 2013, purportedly for “absenteeism.” He and OUR Walmart, contending that it was illegal for Walmart to fire him and the other strikers, filed a complaint with the NLRB. And instead of leaving the campaign, Harris became a full-time organizer.

Outside the Walmart in Secaucus, New Jersey, on Black Friday 2013, Harris sat down in the street, a boilermaker on one side of him, a postal worker on the other, behind a banner reading “WALMART = POVERTY.” Joining the rally were Occupy activists from New York and New Jersey; fast-food workers who had also been organizing with the Fight for $15; restaurant workers; and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra marching band. Thirteen people were arrested in front of that Walmart for civil disobedience; nearly a hundred more were arrested around the country. As the police cuffed Harris’s hands behind his back, he shot me a giant grin through the crowd.

“I’ve never felt more complete in my life,” he told me later. “I’m glad that I’m here, because now I have twenty-four hours a day, and weekends if I choose to work them, to go out and organize. And not against Walmart, but for the workers. There’s a difference, because this is not an ‘Us Against Walmart’ thing; this is ‘Walmart Against Us,’ and we’re trying our best to protect ourselves.” As for his dismissal, he shrugged, saying, “We knew that was a possibility, but we didn’t care, because change had to happen. Major change only happens as a result of someone losing something. Just like in the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. People lost their lives and were imprisoned, but all those negative things actually transitioned into positive changes.”

THE IMAGE CONJURED BY THE TERM “WORKING CLASS” IN THE UNITED States has been one of mostly white men toiling in a factory, wearing hard hats and those oft-evoked blue collars. Our labor policy was shaped around those men and the assumption that workers get health insurance from their jobs, have a pension on which to retire, and make a “family wage” that allows them to support a wife, who stays home to take care of the kids and the cooking and cleaning.

And yet with each year, that picture becomes less and less reflective of reality. The working class never was all white or all male, but now, more and more, the real story of the working class is the story of people like Colby Harris and Venanzi Luna, black and Latina, working in retail, restaurants, or another form of service work. The real story is not that women and people of color have moved into positions of power, but that more men are in “casualized”—that is, in temporary, part-time, or presumably “unskilled” service jobs.

The occupations projected to add the most jobs between 2012 and 2022 are retail sales, personal care and home health care, nursing, and food service workers, including fast food. Except for nursing, those fields have a median annual income of around $20,000. That’s less than half, adjusted for inflation, of the family-sustaining wage paid to unionized factory workers in their heyday.²

The story of outsourcing—of plant closures and “free”-trade deals and managers swaggering into the shop and announcing that the jobs were ending—has been well told elsewhere. We have also been told a story of our brave new information economy, where knowledge will prevail. But the fact remains that even as Americans go into debt for advanced degrees to get those technical jobs, they’re more likely to end up in the service industry. The choice to call what we have a “knowledge economy,” rather than a service economy, was just that—a choice, one that sounded more exciting than the reality of low-wage feminized service work for the majority.

Service jobs as a share of US working hours increased 30 percent between 1980 and 2005, and their prevalence has only grown since the Great Recession. One 2012 study found that although two-thirds of the jobs lost during the recession were mid-wage jobs, 58 percent of the jobs regained by the time of the study were instead low-wage, paying less than $13.84 per hour. Retail sales alone added well over 300,000 jobs in this period, at an average wage of $10.97 an hour; just behind was food prep, paying an average of just over $9 an hour. The trend had begun before the crisis, but after the crisis hit, it was impossible to pretend that something fundamental hadn’t changed.³

There could be, and have been, plenty of decent jobs in service industries; to assume otherwise is to mistake the historical conditions that produced stable jobs and high wages in manufacturing for intrinsic characteristics of the industry. In 2014, I spoke with Rosa Ramirez, a temp worker who had been shuffled through multiple factories outside of Chicago, sometimes for just a couple of days at a time, doing work that was once done by unionized full-time workers. Her experience and that of thousands of others like her should remind us that there’s nothing inherently good or bad about any type of work; safe conditions, regular hours, decent pay, and respect can do a lot to improve even the worst job.

The rise of customer service work and its attendant demand for “people skills,” such as patience and communication—which are typically associated with women, and often assumed not to be skills at all—created a crisis for the old masculine producer narrative. Service labor certainly was not new, but it had long been ignored by a labor movement mostly focused on industrial work. When that industrial work began to fade, labor’s lack of a foothold in the growing service sector made it harder for it to withstand increasing attacks. Labor had failed to recognize and value service work, leaving the door open for the conditions in service jobs to creep into the rest of the economy. Factories that had employed full-timers with benefits could drive wages down by employing temps like Rosa Ramirez, temps who were easily fired and were paid less than permanent employees. Even the once-strong automobile industry is now rife with lower-paid temporary workers.⁴

Women were commonly assumed not to need full-time jobs because they would have a husband who worked; women were presumed to prefer part-time or short-term gigs that would allow them to be home with the family while making a little “pin money” for themselves. Those assumptions continued to be held even in the 2000s. Women who joined the Dukes v. Walmart sex discrimination suit reported being told by their managers that male coworkers made more money because they had to support their families.⁵

The emotional labor that went into a day’s customer service work—managing irate customers, soothing wounded egos, spending hours helping people find just the right item—was likewise not seen as skilled work. Skills were valued—or perceived at all—based on how much power the workers who had them wielded in society, not the tools they wielded on the job. The men who built the labor movement in the skilled trades and on factory floors won power for themselves, but they had their own incentives for not helping women workers build power of their own—incentives that wound up dovetailing with the interests of the boss. Leaving women and their work out of the labor movement wound up hurting the movement and working people as a whole; this is one of the reasons why organizing service workers like those at Walmart is so important.⁶

Retail workers used to be excluded from federal minimum-wage laws—John F. Kennedy made their low wages a campaign issue in 1960, though Walmart founder Sam Walton famously simply refused to pay the new wage when it first passed. Today, while retail is governed by wage and hour laws, other service workers still fight to be covered by them—and service workers who get tips, from waiters to the people who push wheelchairs in the airport, are legally mandated a minimum of only $2.13 an hour by federal law.⁷

A study by economist Catherine Ruetschlin found that a wage floor of $25,000 a year for a full-time worker in retail would affect more than 5 million retail workers and their families. More than 95 percent of those workers were over twenty, not teenagers, and more than half of them were responsible for providing at least half the family income. Such a raise would actually grow the economy and create new jobs, not kill them, as is commonly claimed. Low-paid workers spend nearly everything they make; if they had more money to spend, they would be much more likely to spend it than their bosses, who make far more than they can spend at any time.⁸

Scheduling, too, became a central issue in retail and food service work. Once, manufacturing workers fought for the eight-hour day; their battles shaped the workday and workweek that we now think of as normal, resulting in the Fair Labor Standards Act and time-and-a-half pay for overtime for waged workers. But restaurants and retail shops are open at different times—in part so that those working a nine-to-five day in other sectors of the economy have time to eat and shop—and make different demands on their employees’ time.

In somewhat of a nasty coincidence, computerized scheduling systems entered the retail world around the same time as the financial crisis was wiping out jobs around the country. In an already weak job market, workers are less likely to push back on encroachments made by the boss, and so few challenged a system that rapidly worsened. Patricia Scott, a sixteen-year Walmart associate in Federal Way, Washington, had had a set schedule for ten years. This regular schedule allowed her to make plans in advance, and she was able to count on a certain amount of work each week. But when the computers came in, her hours changed. “They always tell me, ‘Well, it’s not us, it’s the computer!’” she told me. “I’d say, ‘Tell the computer to fix it!’”⁹

Walmart might have been the leader in computerized scheduling, but other firms quickly followed. The software saved managers time they would otherwise have to spend making up the schedule, but it also wrung every last dime in labor costs out of the system. It calculated staffing needs based not only on availability, but also on sales numbers, so that stores would be staffed with just enough people to get the job done throughout the peaks and valleys in sales during the workweek. Computerized scheduling systems prioritize workers who have unlimited availability, but that makes it hard for workers to get a second job. And if you have children to care for, forget it. Many of the women who populate these industries struggle to find child-care options that are flexible and affordable; one low-wage field feeds another as more workers, mostly women, do the child care, often for less than minimum wage. “Just-in-time” scheduling means workers’ needs come last, their hours sliced and diced as hours and minutes are shaved off of shifts. The money adds up.¹⁰

The eight-hour day movement demanded fewer working hours, but post-2008, workers were often fighting to get more. Involuntary part-time employment, when workers can only find part-time jobs but would prefer full-time, spiked in the recession years (from 644,000 in 2006 to 1.5 million in 2010), and retail workers made up 18 percent of those who were involuntarily working part-time jobs. Fifty-eight percent of those making up the involuntary part-time retail workforce in 2015 were women. That means there are a whole lot of adults who would like to have a full-time, steady job with a schedule they can rely on and a paycheck that can feed their families, but who instead are making do on eight or nine dollars an hour, twenty hours a week. That doesn’t add up to a living.¹¹

The slack for all these low wages and insufficient hours is being picked up by all of us in the form of government programs that provide food assistance, health care, housing, tax credits, and more. A 2013 congressional study estimated that Walmart alone costs taxpayers between $3,015 and $5,815 per worker. That’s money that we should understand as a subsidy to Walmart, not to the workers—it allows Walmart to save billions in wages and benefits by pushing those costs onto the rest of us. And those Walmart and McDonald’s workers are taxpayers, too.¹²

Bene’t Holmes, a twenty-five-year-old single mother, told me, “Recently I was forced to apply for food stamps just so my son and I don’t starve. Walmart is the country’s biggest beneficiary of food stamp dollars, and many of those dollars are coming from its own workers, like me.” She was right—some $13.5 billion every year in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds are spent at Walmart. After Bill Clinton, from Walmart’s home state of Arkansas, signed welfare reform into law, most welfare benefits for mothers like Holmes became short-term, yet Walmart continued to pocket welfare dollars, without a deadline.¹³

Retail and the restaurant sector both have “upscale” and “downscale” markets, and while “upscale” dining or shopping doesn’t guarantee the workers are getting a bigger cut of the cash, it is certainly true that Walmart and fast-food restaurants cater to people at the lower end of the income scale. It is this argument that is used to claim that raising wages is impossible because it will drive up prices, even though profits at large chains have returned to prerecession levels and executives and shareholders continue to be compensated handsomely. But the service economy is no more required to be filled with low-wage, unstable jobs than the manufacturing sector was before it. It was shaped this way through particular historical and political circumstances.

“THE ECONOMIC VISION WE CALL NEOLIBERALISM, THATCHERISM, Reaganomics, or free-market fundamentalism could also claim the title of Wal-Martism,” according to Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart. The influence of the world’s largest retailer is impossible to overestimate, and the influence through it of a particular set of values has helped to create the economy in which we now live. If Wall Street is half the story, the other half is Walmart.¹⁴

Walmart was born in Populist country, in a place steeped in the values of that movement, in its critique of an elite-dominated capitalist economic system coupled with a faith in the ordinary people to reform it. It was also, of course, the Bible Belt, where preachers were regular features of both campaigns for economic justice and paeans to big business. Sam Walton was able to evoke these traditions to win support for his discount chain even when it made him fantastically wealthy—and when he didn’t share the wealth.¹⁵

In 1962, the first Walmart was born in a practically all-white part of northwestern Arkansas. Walton staffed his stores with Christian women, most of them in their first jobs off the farm, who didn’t expect high wages but took a deep pride in giving good service. Walton learned from his employees and customers to value service work and to link it with spiritual values. Service work in a store didn’t carry the same stigma as domestic service, which was still associated with black women and, particularly in the South, with slavery. Being part of Walmart was different. They were all part of the (Christian) family. The idea of Walmart as a family business may seem like a stretch now that it employs 1.5 million Americans, but many of the longtime workers I spoke to, like Cynthia Murray, still felt a connection to the family.¹⁶

Paying lip service to the emotional labor and people skills of the women who worked its entry-level jobs was easier than paying them higher wages, and as Walmart’s earliest employees weren’t accustomed to receiving wages of any kind, they were unlikely to complain. The families who shopped at Walmart had little in the way of disposable income, so they appreciated Sam Walton’s rock-bottom prices and familiar atmosphere. Walmart had adapted capitalism to conservative Christianity and rendered women’s work outside the home unthreatening.¹⁷

Its down-home image, though, concealed a massive, high-tech distribution system that allowed the company to simultaneously save money and control the conditions of production without owning a single factory. “Logistics,” as these distribution systems are now called, became the heart of its business and Walton’s chief innovation. Walton invested in “distribution centers,” which existed not to store goods long-term but to process and ship them out as quickly as possible in Walmart’s famed just-in-time system. Walmart collects enough information from bar-code scans to fill a data warehouse comparable in size to that of the National Security Agency.¹⁸

All that information is used to determine what Walmart will buy and who it will buy from. Most of its products come from China, where its world buying headquarters are located. Walmart sells enough of any given product to be able to demand its own price, and manufacturers bend over backward to meet its demands. The working conditions of the laborers who make the electronics, clothing, and toothpaste that line Walmart’s shelves may not be directly under Bentonville’s control the way the thermostats in its stores are, but downward pressure on prices has meant that manufacturers cut costs wherever they can, and “labor costs” are often the first costs to slice.¹⁹

Walmart actively denies responsibility for overseas labor conditions, famously refusing to sign on to a labor rights accord developed after the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 workers, some of whom had worked on jeans destined for Walmart’s shelves. Walmart instead announced its own safety plan, which Scott Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium called “nonbinding and unenforceable.” Yet the amount of data Walmart has on workers in its own stores indicates that it could, if it wanted to, do a much better job keeping an eye on the people who make its products. The company has an “Office of Global Security,” set up by a former official with the CIA and FBI, and a “Threat Research and Analysis Group,” which recruits from military intelligence and keeps an eye on bloggers and activists who might pose a threat. A 2015 story revealed that Walmart had hired Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest defense contractors, to monitor activists, and coordinated with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Such surveillance helped the company keep abreast of any worker organizing in its stores and maintain its unblemished union-free record.²⁰

Walmart’s much-vaunted stock option program, too, served a purpose. It created the illusion that low-wage associates had as much riding on the continued success of the company as did the surviving Waltons, who own about half the existing Walmart stock. (They also control more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of the US population does.) But the high turnover rate for associates guarantees that most of them are unable to build up much equity, and low wages mean that even the company’s matching policy—15 percent of the first $1,800 of stock purchased—doesn’t get them much. Some of them even find themselves selling stock back to cover the gaps in their household budget.²¹

Walton and his wife and heirs spent a lot of money making sure that the United States—and the world—remained hospitable to Walmart’s business model. Their donations through the Walton Foundation to charter schools and other organizations that aim to make public schools run more like a business are well known, as is their support for politicians who promote their particular views of trade and the market economy. They invested in business programs at Christian colleges, promoting a particular brand of “Christian free enterprise” and seeding a generation of already loyal graduates from which to choose management trainees. Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) existed to train young activists as champions of the free market. One Walmart executive explained that the company supported SIFE because “young people today are being given an opportunity to understand really—not what capitalism is, because I cringe a little bit with the word ‘capitalism,’ but what free enterprise is and how it fits with the democracy that we enjoy in these United States.”²²

Walmart contributed, then, not just economically, but also politically, to the new consensus around globalization that formed after the end of the Cold War. Capitalism was ascendant, free trade the order of the day, and in the United States, both parties were loudly singing the praises of the market. These supporters were led by President Bill Clinton, the former Arkansas governor, whose wife, Hillary, had been the first woman on the Walmart board. The view has circulated in recent years that working-class people voting for conservative, pro-business politicians were doing so against their own wallets, often because they were won over on “social issues.” The Walmart ideology of Christian free enterprise, though, expertly blended those social issues into a campaign to convince people that its policies were, in fact, in their economic best interests.²³

The company’s best argument for its low wages has been that they are necessary to keep its prices low so that newly strapped Americans can afford to buy microwaves, designer knockoff jeans, and DVDs. Former Walmart CEO H. Lee Scott bragged in 2005 that the company’s low prices were equivalent to a raise for hardworking people, and that the company “act[ed] as a bargaining agent for these families—achieving on their behalf a power, a ‘negotiating power’ they would never have on their own.” In other words, it was sort of like a union.²⁴

Walmart’s corporate populism dovetailed nicely with market populism: both caught the public’s attention in the 1990s, the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the idea that there was some competition for capitalism in the world began to fade. Masquerading as nonpartisan, and indeed nonpolitical, market populism turned wealthy elites like Sam Walton into heroes for the little guy and decried as elitist anyone who called for a raise in the minimum wage, advocated regulations on business practices, or stood in the way of trade deals.

In the Walmart brand of market populism, the consumer, not the producer (who might be a worker who would have a claim on the company’s profits), is the everyman to be championed. Other companies embraced this framing, too, though few to the extent that Walmart did. The rise of consumer identity marked a change in populist rhetoric but still purported to promote the many, the People, against the interests of the few. When consumerism is what we have in common, the workers disappear from the picture entirely, a worthy sacrifice to the greater good.²⁵

At the end of the 1990s, Walmart’s populist image faced its most serious crack yet, from the same underappreciated, underpaid women workers who had built the company’s massive wealth. Dukes v. Walmart was a landmark class-action sex discrimination lawsuit representing 1.6 million women. The suit charged Walmart with discrimination in promotions, pay, and job assignments in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Arguing that Walmart’s highly centralized command structure made it likely the discrimination was systemic and dictated from the top, the Dukes plaintiffs aimed to change the company’s patriarchal culture and expressed disappointment, like many OUR Walmart members, with the shattering of the company’s Christian family-friendly image. Though the retail giant had expanded far outside of its base in the Ozarks and women at work were no longer a new phenomenon, Betty Dukes and her co-plaintiffs had much in common with the “Walmart Moms” at the core of the company’s image. Sam Walton’s dream employees had turned against his company.²⁶

The US Supreme Court dismantled the suit, ruling in 2011 that the workers did not qualify as a class; like the Walmart spokespeople, the Court majority argued that the workers should address their grievances individually. Nevertheless, the case had put cracks in the company’s reputation, cracks that would only get bigger when Walmart workers joined the wave of post-2008 unrest. The workers, it seemed, weren’t done trying to resolve their problems as a class.²⁷

WHEN I ASKED DAN SCHLADEMAN, CODIRECTOR OF OUR WALMART, for one sentence that summed up what made its efforts different from prior attempts to organize Walmart workers, he said, “Walmart workers lead.” It was a nod to the hard work of associates like Colby Harris, Cynthia Murray, Patricia Scott, and Venanzi Luna, and also an acknowledgment that earlier attempts to organize the retailer had been driven more by desperation, the understanding that wages and conditions for other workers, some of them union members, were being driven down by Walmart, and that if things didn’t change there, the unions would be unable to counter the tide. As Walmart went, so went America.

Unions and worker organizations often face the charge that they are self-interested groups that only want workers’ dues. A Walmart antiunion video that leaked to the Internet informed viewers that “unions are businesses, multimillion-dollar businesses that make their money by convincing people like you and me to give them a part of our paychecks.” A more accurate criticism would be that they have often failed to adapt to a changing workforce, clinging instead to a fading model developed decades ago in massive factories. Today’s working class is more likely to be serving burgers and fries or folding shirts and stocking soap at Walmart. “Anytime that 94 percent of private-sector workers can’t access the model, it’s time to start looking for something else,” noted David Rolf, president of Service Employees International Union Local 775. “This is a system that has been less and less accessible to workers in the private sector every year in each of the fifty states since 1958.”²⁸

The UFCW, the union that backed OUR Walmart at first, had made several attempts at organizing Walmart stores. “We have the luxury of being able to learn from so many of the different approaches out there,” Schlademan said. Mostly, they were able to learn from previous failures. Unless the management of a business willingly agrees to bargain with its workers, unionization is a process that requires a lengthy struggle and an election certified by the NLRB, then a usually arduous negotiating process that leads to a first contract. (This is, in part, why labor had staked its future on the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would have made unionization easier. Labor spent big on Barack Obama in the 2008 elections in the hope that he would prioritize this bill but did not challenge him much thereafter, and the legislation died.) Nearly 80 years after the unionization process was set down in law, companies have gotten very good at beating unions by dragging out the process, especially by holding (perfectly legal) meetings where antiunion consultants give speeches, and often make threats, to a captive audience. As Venanzi Luna described, they also spy on known pro-union staffers. The NLRB process, Schlademan noted, often does not allow workers to really lead, as the path is scripted for them.

If the meetings aren’t enough, Walmart has used other tactics to undermine the process of unionizing. In 2000, when the UFCW was attempting to gain a foothold through organizing one department at a time, eleven meat cutters at a Texas Walmart Supercenter actually won an NLRB election. Walmart responded by eliminating meat cutters in 180 stores, across six states. The UFCW briefly tried to organize workers at multiple Walmart stores across Las Vegas, a union-heavy town that the union figured might be a good place to launch a citywide campaign. Walmart’s response, Schlademan said, “included heavy surveillance of organizers in their hotels.” What did not happen was a win.²⁹

The next attempt came in the Canadian province of Quebec, where labor law is generally more worker-friendly. Workers in 2005 voted to unionize at a Walmart in the city of Jonquière. This time, Walmart shuttered the entire store. In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the closing violated Quebec labor law and ordered that the workers be compensated, but the store never reopened.³⁰

There were outside pressure campaigns that aimed both to block Walmart’s expansion and to demand better wages and conditions for Walmart’s workers. In the mid-2000s, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and UFCW worked with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Florida to organize Walmart workers into a dues-paying, nonunion movement with some success. “We’re the gumbo of all of these different strategies,” Schlademan said. “We were able to really look at and see what was working, what wasn’t, how the company reacted, and it really helped us as we were thinking about it.”

As the organization that would become OUR Walmart was coming together, unrest was also creeping up and down Walmart’s supply chain. Guestworkers from Mexico, who worked at C. J.’s Seafood in Louisiana preparing crawfish for distribution in Walmart stores, went on strike in 2012 after they were locked into their workplace, denied breaks, and threatened with beatings. “Some of us work from 2:00 in the morning ‘til 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening and get no paid overtime,” Marta Uvalle, one of the strike leaders, told me at the time. Brought into the country temporarily, guestworkers are particularly vulnerable to threats, since they depend on getting their jobs renewed year after year. This pressure made their 2012 strike even more remarkable. Working with the National Guestworker Alliance, these workers targeted Walmart specifically in their actions, demanding that the ultimate beneficiary of their labor require better of its suppliers. Saket Soni, director of the Guestworker Alliance, asked, “If Walmart can’t guarantee safety and meet the complaints of eight workers in a small town in Louisiana, how is it going to guarantee the standards of literally hundreds of thousands of workers across the country?”³¹

The next strikes came one step up the supply chain, at distribution centers in Southern California and Elwood, Illinois. The distribution centers were also run by subcontractors, yet these workers, too, stressed that Walmart was the company that was ultimately responsible for their plight.

Elle Hoffman (not her real name) was working at the Elwood distribution center at the time. She was hired as a temp in the fall of 2012 for the holiday rush, and remembered the first time she had walked into the massive building. “I think the reason they required experience is so when you saw pallets and boxes on boxes teetering on these metal spears you weren’t like ‘Oh, we’re going to die,’” she joked.

Near the railroad, an army base, and a prison, the warehouse was a terrifying place to work. Despite the fact that she had arrived at the job along with her boyfriend, she said, her supervisor asked her out three times before her first lunch break. The packages were covered with dust—“We called it ‘China death dust,’” she said, because it left them constantly coughing—but the gloves they were given would rip and never be replaced. Without shin guards, workers would cut themselves on pallets while unloading. And all the while, the temps were pushed to get their cases-per-hour rate up in order to be considered for direct hire so they could stay on past the holidays. “You were treated like a machine,” Hoffman said.

The strike began in Elwood with a petition for dust masks, gloves, and shin guards, which workers presented to management. The workers who had complained were punished, and a group of them walked out. They stayed out for three weeks before the company conceded to all their demands. Leah Fried, who had been part of the Republic Windows and Doors occupation, was one of the organizers who helped support the warehouse workers.³²

After the strike, Hoffman remembered, “there was this shift in power. Our bosses would come to us and say, ‘Do you need anything?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I need gloves,’ and they’d go get gloves. ‘Do you need anything else?’ ‘Yeah, I need shin guards. I heard some guy got stitches.’ They started waiting on workers instead of ignoring people.”

Neither the guestworkers nor the warehouse workers had been members of a union; in neither case did every worker walk off the job. Many of the workers at the warehouses were also immigrants or formerly incarcerated—people who were the most vulnerable to having their rights violated. Yet these workers managed to bring about change through their strike actions, a technique that OUR Walmart would accelerate.

Without owning a single factory, Walmart is the world’s third-largest employer, after the US and Chinese armies. Add in the number of workers across the globe who work in Walmart’s supply chain, and the number is staggering. One of the most important steps OUR Walmart took was to link the retail workers’ struggle with that of workers from the supply chain, whether they were subcontractors in a US warehouse, packers at a crawfish plant, or garment workers at a factory in Bangladesh. When those workers get together, Schlademan said, “they all begin to see that each one of them is treated not as human, but as merely a cost of doing business for Walmart. It’s always explosive to watch how they support each other, stand with each other, and link each other’s struggles.”

Schlademan credited Occupy with helping to lay the groundwork for the campaign to take off and helping the Walmart activists think about new tactics. “In many ways, the conversation that we can have about the Waltons really was much harder to have before Occupy,” Schlademan said. “Walmart would always position itself as the ‘Protector of Customers,’ and whatever we wanted was going to raise prices on their customers. It became impossible for them to make that argument when Walmart has created the single richest family on earth.” Similarly, Black Friday Walmart protests incorporated Black Lives Matter activists in 2014 after police shot John Crawford III, a young black man, while he shopped at the Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. “We’re in a place now where everybody’s understanding that at the foundation, what’s wrong is pretty similar: the abuse of power that’s happening in our country,” Schlademan said.

OUR Walmart was designed from the beginning for something very different from an NLRB election campaign. It was an organization that did not rely on winning a majority at any one store in order to be effective; it was meant to spread horizontally across the country, to allow workers to take action in different ways, and to encourage them to act on their own without the supervision of an organizer. Horizontalism allowed workers to feel as though the organization was theirs; it didn’t mean the movement was leaderless or existed without professional, full-time organizing staff, but that anyone who wanted to be a leader could be one. The leaders who emerged included workers who had believed in Walmart and wanted it to live up to its promises, workers who had been natural leaders in their stores, and workers who wanted to stand up for their coworkers who were afraid.

The strategy of minority unionism, of acting like a union without waiting for a majority vote, also allowed workers to act without inconveniencing their customers, making it easier for customers to side with them. It’s a tactic particularly suited to a low-wage retailer that trumpets the value its low prices bring to its customers. Walmart pits customer against worker; OUR Walmart wanted to pit customer and worker against a massive, global corporation squeezing both for its bottom line.

The labor movement’s biggest successes were often kicked off by a small group of workers who managed to disrupt business as usual and inspire others to join them. OUR Walmart tapped into that history at a time when unions had been shrinking for decades. Although only a few workers might strike at any given store, there was nearly always a willing crowd of supporters to accompany them in protest and to walk them back to work the next day.³³

Walmart’s expansion from its Ozarks heartland into the cities and suburbs on the coasts also helped the workers challenge its image as a Christian company. Although the Walton vision of Christian populist free enterprise might have had some traction in Arkansas, in workers like Colby Harris and Betty Dukes Walmart confronted a very different spiritual tradition. In Catholic churches connected to Latin American liberation theology, or in black churches with civil rights movement ties, Christian values connected easily to fights for economic justice. “A lot of us do have some type of faith, or specifically, some type of Christian faith,” Colby Harris said. “Our issues go right along with what a lot of faith groups believe in, that people are supposed to be treated with respect. It’s all interconnected. The pastor goes in and shops at Walmart, too. And so does the congregation. So we’re all tied in together.” Inequality, for Harris, was a moral issue.

The first Walmart strikes, in Southern California, took place far outside of Walmart’s home turf, in an area with a history of labor and social justice organizing. “If you want to expand into these places,” Bethany Moreton told me, “those are currents that are going to come all the way back to Bentonville.”³⁴

The final key to OUR Walmart’s success where previous efforts had failed was its online organizing. Jamie Way, an organizer with the campaign, told me frankly, “We’re never going to match them in terms of resources, we’re never going to have an organizer or a community supporter on the ground in every one of their [more than] 4,000 Walmarts.” What they did instead was build a network online that connected organizers with Walmart workers, using Facebook to find new workers through targeted advertising and worker-led groups. An example was the LGBT worker group moderated by OUR Walmart member Lucas Handy, who had been motivated to join the organization because of a manager’s homophobic slurs.³⁵

Colby Harris, who spent a lot of time doing online work, said the Internet allowed fearful associates to get comfortable sharing their problems and move toward taking action in their stores. “It has really allowed us an opportunity to make sure that we’re not missing out on anybody,” he said. “Because everybody’s on social media, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter . . . something.”

Schlademan agreed that social media is critical. He acknowledged that there is still plenty of skepticism from people who think online work is merely “clicktivism,” just signing an online petition that disappears into the ether. But OUR Walmart considered it “online-to-offline” work: that is, they were using social media to distribute tools to workers and supporters to help them hold their own actions in their own towns. It allowed OUR Walmart to punch far above its weight class in terms of both paid staffers and actual worker members who were willing to strike, enabled it to learn from workers who might not yet be willing to risk their jobs, and educated people who saw Walmart as the epitome of a flawed system about how to step up and support the people most affected by the company, rather than protesting in ways that harmed the workers.

Campaigns like OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15 relied on unions’ willingness to spend their money on workers who were not and might not ever become dues-paying members; the $5 monthly that OUR Walmart members paid in was not enough to sustain an organizing campaign, so outside funding was needed. In 2015, change came to OUR Walmart when the new leadership at UFCW cut the budget for the Walmart campaign by more than 50 percent. Dan Schlademan and cofounder Andrea Dehlendorf were let go from the union’s staff. The UFCW shifted toward an advertising-heavy strategy, rolling out big targeted ads just before Thanksgiving.³⁶

OUR Walmart regrouped, reached out to funders and to the network of labor and community groups with which it had allied in the past, and relaunched in the fall of 2015, determined to continue organizing Walmart workers. Groups like National People’s Action and New York Communities for Change, think tank Demos, and online organizations Color of Change and CREDO, Jobs With Justice, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance joined the partnership. “OUR Walmart has always been focused on the workers, and giving us a voice, so it’s always been independent and worker-led, but we did always have a large support of funding from UFCW,” Tyfani Faulkner, a Sacramento, California, OUR Walmart member, told me. “They decided that they were going to change the direction, and so this caused the workers to be more on the front lines and be more in control of our own organization. We’re all stepping up and taking on the responsibility to make that happen.”

OUR Walmart counted victories not in union contracts, or even in raw membership numbers, but in its ability to get a reaction from Walmart. The announcement from Walmart in April 2015 that it would raise its wage floor to $9 an hour that year and $10 an hour in 2016 was the biggest win for the campaign, but there were others—a change in the company’s policy for pregnant workers, and some concessions on scheduling, for example—that came about through the work of a relatively small group of active workers. In January 2016, an NLRB administrative law judge ruled that Colby Harris and fifteen other OUR Walmart members had been illegally fired and ordered them reinstated with back pay; the company also had to post notices in thirty-one stores and hold meetings in twenty-nine stores informing workers that they have the right to strike and vowing not to discipline them for doing so. Walmart, of course, planned to appeal.³⁷

There were setbacks aplenty, from the layoffs of workers to the closing of stores to the UFCW’s shift back to an advertising-heavy strategy. The important lessons, for a still-struggling labor movement and for the millions of workers who didn’t have a union, came from a confrontational strategy that trusted workers to lead and didn’t wait to win an NLRB election in order to act like a union. “Nobody can say that these campaigns have not had a huge impact,” Schlademan said. “We are demonstrating that there is a different path here to victory for workers.”

IT STARTED IN THE AIRPORT.

As I waited for my flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, to be called, the one that would connect me to my flight to Bentonville to go to the Walmart shareholders meeting June 5, 2015, the gate agent announced that they would need to check carry-on bags. I got up and stood in line behind a lanky young man, who handed the gate agent his boarding pass to check his bag. “You’re going to Walmart,” the gate agent said, looking at the young man’s ticket. I started to laugh, partly because we were both going to the same place, partly because one glance at our tickets was enough for this Philadelphia airline employee to know that most of us who were flying through the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport were going to Walmart’s home office. When I asked, he explained, “They own everything. They paid for the airport.”

It started in the airport for the OUR Walmart workers, too. Tyfani Faulkner told me, “We were on a plane full of store managers. It’s very interesting, the people you end up on planes with when you come here. You definitely have to be on your Ps and Qs.”

Ray Scott, a department manager at the relatively new Chicago Walmart, echoed her. “Since I got on the plane I have felt nothing but hatred toward OUR Walmart,” he said. “I can feel the presence of this being Walmart’s turf. Right now we’re behind enemy lines.”

From the planes full of management to the busloads of associates from all over the world to the signs on local banks and Chick-fil-A stores welcoming Walmart shareholders, the Bentonville area was certainly Walmart’s turf. It’s one of the few remaining company towns, and you can feel the money suffusing it when you cross the city line. Big houses with white pillars lined one side of the street that I took to find my way to the Walmart Museum, while the other side was still weathered one-story homes. Less well-known is how beautiful the landscape is, with rolling hills, trees, and rich red dirt. I could see why the Waltons kept their empire based there.

The Walmart Museum, located on the Bentonville town square, was blocked off by a bus when I reached it. A gray-haired man with an impressive handlebar mustache greeted me and told me the shop and the ice cream parlor were closed, but I could go into the museum. This very spot was the birthplace of Walmart—it’s where Sam Walton opened his first five-and-dime store.

Walmart’s corporate populism was on full display inside. In a video, new CEO Doug McMillon explained that the purpose of Walmart was to help people save money and have a better life. Another video showed George H.W. Bush awarding Sam Walton the Medal of Freedom and recognizing him for sponsoring scholarships for students from Latin America. In yet another, Sam was dancing a hula on Wall Street. The museum displays included his old truck, his baseball caps, a collection of the products sold in the original Walmart, and full-page ads for Walmart’s discounts. Walton’s old office was preserved behind glass, complete with a hat on a chair, piles of magazines, and family photos. “Ours is a story about the kinds of traditional principles that made America great in the first place,” declared a pull-quote from Walton emblazoned on one wall.

Walmart’s Home Office was just a five-minute drive from the museum. I arrived just in time to hear the tail end of the famed Walmart Cheer, inspired by a trip to Korea that Sam Walton once took. “Give me a W! Give me an A! Give me an L! Give me a squiggly! (This a reference to the now-defunct dash or star in the company’s name.) Give me an M! Give me an A! Give me an R! Give me a T! What does that spell? Walmart!” The people doing the cheer, presumably Walmart associates, had just streamed off one of several buses in front of the long, low building.

Patricia Scott had been part of the first OUR Walmart delegation to Bentonville in 2012. “It was different compared to what I thought,” she laughed. “You always hear about Home Office, you think this big castle in the sky, and then you get there and it’s just this little flat building. It’s like, that’s Home Office?”

Scott was there the day I arrived, too, part of a group of OUR Walmart workers standing on the sidewalk in front of the big blue Home Office sign. They held a neon green sign of their own calling for $15 an hour and full-time schedules. Dressed in matching bright green OUR Walmart T-shirts, the workers had a response to the Walmart cheer: “We don’t want no squiggly,” they chanted. Venanzi Luna grabbed a bullhorn and called for her colleagues to get louder. Even on Walmart’s turf, they got a few supportive honks and waves from passing cars. A small phalanx of police watched them from the other side of the parking lot, apparently to ensure they remained on public property and didn’t try to step on Walmart’s grounds. Arkansas is one of several states in which Walmart has succeeded in obtaining a legal injunction preventing employees of OUR Walmart or the UFCW from setting foot on its property—except in order to shop.

Inside Home Office, the workers were likely being feted. Outside, the group of workers marched down the sidewalk, waving to the associates who were pouring off the buses, and ended their rally with a chant of “We’ll be back!”

That year, OUR Walmart had brought a smaller group of workers to the meeting, but, Faulkner said, they had more people scheduled to speak inside than ever before. There were still enough of them to create a visible presence on the street across from the University of Arkansas on the morning of the shareholder meeting. Holding their green sign, they waved to the shareholders who sat in stop-and-go traffic on their way to the Bud Walton basketball arena on the university campus.

Music was already playing when I walked up to the arena and presented my proxy statement. (I was denied a press credential for the meeting, and so the UFCW helped to connect me with a shareholder who was willing to allow me in as a nonvoting proxy.) I sat next to Patricia Scott and one seat down from Tyfani Faulkner. Colby Harris was in the row behind me. Venanzi Luna and Cynthia Murray were down below, where the presenters of the shareholder resolutions waited their turn to speak. Other presenters were Mary Watkines, a colleague of Scott’s in Federal Way, Washington, and Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, who would be speaking on behalf of OUR Walmart member Mary Pat Tifft.

At the center of the arena was a massive, triangular stage with three screens, all lit in blue. Seated section by section around the arena were Walmart associates dressed in color-coded shirts: yellow for Sam’s Club, green for logistics and supply chain, blue vests for retail associates, red for e-commerce, colored hats and flags for international. On that stage, Reese Witherspoon, star of such films as Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama, and the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, greeted everyone with a big grin and a played-up southern accent as the host of that year’s meeting. (In previous years, Tom Cruise and Hugh Jackman had graced the stage.) Musicians Bryan McKnight, Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, and in the big finale, Rod Stewart, would all take the stage, but not before a group of Walmart employees performed their own musical number.

In that space, there wasn’t a lot of official business to accomplish. Executives ran down sales numbers (perhaps notably, comparing them to numbers from twenty years ago), but H. Rob Walton, while evoking his father Sam’s early challenges to his employees, cautiously refused to make any predictions for the future. The Walton family controls about 50 percent of outstanding Walmart stock, and high-paid executives a good chunk more, meaning that any challenge to family control doesn’t get very far. Rob Walton, who came onstage in one of his father’s trucker caps and placed it reverently on a pedestal as he spoke, was retiring from his position as chairman of the board. He introduced his successor, Greg Penner, with glowing words of praise for his time at Goldman Sachs, noting his commitment to the company. Oh, and “he was smart enough to marry my daughter.”

“They call it the Walmart family,” Ray Scott commented to me. “I do give them credit on that. They do make a family. We’re not part of their family, but they do make a family.” He had joined OUR Walmart when the managers at his store told him that in order to get a promotion, he would need to help them fire several of his coworkers. “Wasn’t it you guys that were just saying that we were a family? Family doesn’t do that to each other,” he said.

Reinforcing that family atmosphere was what the shareholder meeting was all about, though. Clips of Sam Walton praising his associates were interspersed with inspiring stories of associates who went above and beyond and a cutesy clip of Witherspoon clumsily learning to be a Walmart retail worker. Walmart’s US CEO Greg Foran came onstage in a Walmart associate vest to explain the new “investment” Walmart was making in its employees: “As a symbol of our commitment to you, we gave you a new name badge.” The slogan “Our people make the difference” would be returning to associates’ nametags. Other changes included a relaxed dress code, the return of Walmart Radio, and a one-degree raise in the temperature in stores—controlled, of course, by Home Office. The only announcement that evoked cheers from the OUR Walmart members sitting near me was the mention of an improved sick leave policy. The name badge comment drew a snort from Patricia Scott.

When it was time for shareholder resolutions to be presented, Cynthia Murray declared the recent pay raise at Walmart a victory for OUR Walmart; she then called for shareholders to be allowed to nominate board members. The Sierra Club’s Michael Brune read Mary Pat Tifft’s resolution calling for the company to cut back on greenhouse gases and demanded that associates be paid $15 an hour. Mary Watkines denounced the “double standards” in pay at Walmart, pointing out that when workers like her missed targets, their bonuses disappeared, but when Walmart itself missed targets, CEO McMillon still got a $17.5 million performance bonus. And Venanzi Luna, her voice quivering at first, told her story of being laid off suddenly when Walmart closed her store with five hours’ notice.

“Our managers say our stores closed for ‘plumbing problems,’ but the real reason is that my store has been speaking out for change at Walmart. We were the first store to go on strike, and we have been vocal in standing up for $15 an hour and full-time, consistent schedules,” she said. “Walmart executives are punishing 2,000 associates because we are trying to make our company a better place to work and shop.”

She called for an independent board chair—not someone who had been “smart enough” to marry into the Walton family. Luna’s speech apparently riled Jeff Gearhart, the executive presiding over the resolution portion, enough to get him to answer back; he proclaimed that the company had been generous enough to provide sixty days of pay to the workers who had been laid off due to the store closures. (That sixty days of pay was mandated by the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.) Ultimately, 16 percent of the shareholders voted for the independent chair resolution, or about 32 percent of the non-Walton shareholders.³⁸

When the last notes of Rod Stewart’s performance faded and the lights came up, the OUR Walmart crew reunited on the floor of the arena, where Doug McMillon was glad-handing associates. Luna stepped up to him, flanked by her colleagues, and asked whether she would be rehired when the “plumbing problems” at her store were fixed. McMillon, good at projecting emotion, looked her in the eye and told her he was sorry about what happened, but he didn’t make any promises. When the group turned to find new board chair Greg Penner, he was already moving away, flanked by besuited executives. “He’s running away,” someone commented.

“They haven’t given me a new job. And they’re not going to,” Luna told me. “If they say they don’t retaliate against associates, well, I’m a proud OUR Walmart member, start with me. You prove to me that you’re not retaliating against us.”

For many low-wage workers, jobs are temporary. Walmart’s turnover rate for hourly employees has been estimated at between 44 and 70 percent. Workers like Venanzi Luna and Colby Harris, when let go from one retail job, most of the time simply find another. That they instead continued to fight to improve the company that cut them loose was something that Walmart should value. They were dedicated. That they stuck around, as Tyfani Faulkner said, speaks to their integrity. Their commitment should also remind us of the realities of America in the early twenty-first century: retail jobs and other low-paying service gigs are the jobs that exist, and Walmart is an industry leader. If their only options are Walmart or someplace else that takes its guidance from Walmart, then changing Walmart is really the only choice they have.³⁹

For OUR Walmart members, Walmart was a bellwether for the future of stable, decent-paying jobs, and they were willing to fight hard for it. As Cynthia Murray put it, “We realized early on that if we could change Walmart, then we could help change the country back in a better direction. And we’re seeing it happen.”