Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  Walmart was also able to cut costs through its self-service model, where (mostly women) shoppers did much of the work themselves, finding branded products in neatly arranged aisles and only occasionally needing assistance from the sales staff. So even as Walmart advertised its quality service, it was in fact trying to cut down on the number of people it had to hire to provide that service. The company rewarded its employees for faster scanning at the checkout counter, giving out pins to cashiers who could scan five hundred items per hour. That scanning efficiency meant sore wrists, certainly, but more importantly, more data for Walmart’s distribution system and just-in-time stocking practices. It also meant deskilling the workers and devaluing the very emotional labor it had learned to pay lip service to.19

  In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy made a raise for retail clerks a campaign promise and got it enacted into law. That was despite the opposition of conservatives like Barry Goldwater, himself the scion of a department-store family, and Sam Walton, who viciously opposed the minimum-wage increase and demanded that his managers ensure the stores remained union-free. Walmart achieved that goal by maintaining a culture that emphasized the importance of service work, even if that acknowledgment came verbally (and on name tags reading “our people make the difference,” a slogan reinstated in 2015 after Walmart workers began going on strike) rather than through pay increases. Walmart, and the other companies that followed its lead, worked to infuse a sense of belonging into its workers that would make up for low pay—and would make them better at projecting the aura of care that helped the company succeed.20

  Walmart’s spread across America and the world coincided with—but barely acknowledged—the feminist revolution, even as it relied heavily on the labor of women entering the workforce in droves. While middle-class women were going to work to find meaning, though, working-class women were going to work to find a paycheck, and the work they found was all too similar to the work they did in the home. Retail and food-service jobs didn’t pay well, and managers often treated their workers abominably; in such an environment, the pains that Walmart took to at least acknowledge the efforts and care of its workers made it a better employer than many. And as it continued to grow, factories were shrinking, closing, or departing for lower-wage countries; Walmart (or its distribution centers) might soon be one of the few jobs in town. In this way, even as women moved into the workforce, more men moved into jobs that looked like women’s work, where they, too, had to learn to do the emotional labor that, in women, was taken for granted. It wasn’t the equality feminism had dreamed of: men and women both cobbling together a living from multiple low-paying jobs as the conditions of women’s work became more and more widespread.21

  The Walton family expanded its reach politically as well as economically. It invested in organizations like Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), now known as Enactus, which sponsors programs at universities to teach students about the beauties of “free enterprise,” otherwise known as capitalism. It poured money into small Christian colleges, from which it harvested management trainees loyal to the company and its professed values and willing to put in long hours. And through the Walton Family Foundation, it directed funds to “school choice,” the euphemism for privately owned charter schools. According to the foundation’s own documents, one in every four charter schools created in the United States has received Walton Family funds. Such an investment in education has ideological goals; it aims to reshape schools and what and how they teach. After all, with widely accessible education, but service industries dominating the economy, what we get is educated workers doing service jobs, and so the Waltons and others like them aimed to make sure those workers believed in the system under which they worked.22

  Walmart has changed the American workplace: more and more of the jobs of the twenty-first century are made in its feminized, low-wage image, with no health insurance, volatile schedules, and high turnover. More than 70 percent of all jobs, by one count, created in the United States between 1973 and 1980 were in services and retail trades, creating a new “service proletariat” mostly made up of women and people of color. Walmart argues that its low prices make up for the low wages, raising the standard of living of working-class people by offering them cheap goods. It also argues that its workers like their work. Regardless, the company’s impact has been such that, as Bethany Moreton argued, “the economic vision we call neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, or free-market fundamentalism could also claim the title of Wal-Martism.”23

  In the wake of Walmart, retail businesses had few options. Walmart’s entry into a community often triggered a wave of closures among shops that couldn’t compete with the chain’s massive advantages. One study found that in the ten years after Walmart’s arrival in Iowa, “the state lost 555 groceries, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 158 women’s apparel shops, 116 drugstores, and 153 shoe stores.” As a whole, the retail sector was growing, becoming a larger part of the economy in the United States and Europe, but it was also segmenting, splitting into high-end and low-end and then further in an effort to appeal to different demographics. Few companies could compete with Walmart; those that did either imitated its business model with a slightly fancier gloss (Target) or improved upon it (Amazon). Other companies—like Toys “R” Us—applied it to their specific sector, coming to ruthless dominance. Self-service and the barcode scanner deskilled the formerly skilled sales jobs in department stores, clothing retail, and grocery stores. Higher-end retailers did invest to a degree in service, even while attempting to keep labor costs (wages) low. But they went counter to the overall trend toward concentration and standardization, organizations that could replicate with a largely interchangeable workforce.24

  As this retail model spread, the recession of the 1970s hit, and then the administrations of Ronald Reagan, in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher, in the United Kingdom, slashed public services and public-sector jobs. Retailers that had been unionized or had upheld near-union wages and conditions felt the squeeze and began to slice away at labor costs. Workers got wage cuts and more part-time, no-benefits jobs. High turnover became a blessing for employers who wanted to shed their costliest workers—a shift from the decades of welfare capitalism that characterized even the earliest years of retail work. The shift to what sociologist Peter Ikeler called “contingent control” gave retail stores and other service employers a flexible workforce that can be hired and fired at need. Those workers, in other words, are unlikely to be around long enough to question managers’ power. Ann Marie Reinhart’s decades at one retailer, by the 2000s, was a rare experience.25

  By 2013, less than 5 percent of American retail workers were members of unions, down from 11 percent in 1983. Younger workers can expect more than twenty job changes in a lifetime, nearly double the number of baby boomers. In lieu of providing unionized jobs with decent conditions, the new retail stores learned from Walmart to pay lip service to workers’ wants and needs, to embrace “teamwork” while making sure workers didn’t actually team up enough to organize. Such paternalism works best with workers who don’t need to support a family on their wages—on young people, students, or women, as Reinhart noted, whose main job remains in the home. Something like one in three retail workers is a part-timer. It is easier for such workers to emphasize the positive parts of their jobs and shrug off the negatives; if it is, in the words of one young worker, “not my real job,” but just a stopgap, there is less incentive for the workers to make demands. A “cool” supervisor or one who is “like family,” snacks in the break room, those can make up for a lot if you never expected a family-sustaining wage in the first place. But it is still important to remember that two-thirds of the retail workforce is in fact over the age of twenty-five, and trending older. There are a whole lot of people working retail who are, in fact, supporting others.26

  IN 2000, THE FIRST CRACK IN WALMART’S ARMOR CAME WITH THE FILING of a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the company. Women at the time made u
p 72 percent of Walmart’s workforce but only 34 percent of its managers; they earned less than men at nearly every level of the company’s hierarchy. The company’s history of exploiting the service skills of women was still visible in the evidence in the Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., v. Dukes case: it had only added its first woman to the board in 1986, when then First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton joined up. The suit landed in the wake of welfare reform, when women were being pushed into low-wage work, and it was decided (in Walmart’s favor, on a technicality) in 2011, as the world struggled to climb out of the recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis. Women’s work was holding together the economy, but it was still valued less than that of men. The contrast could be stark. One of the Dukes plaintiffs, for example, had discovered the pay discrepancy when she was accidentally handed her colleague’s tax form—a glance at it revealed that the man, in his first year as an assistant manager, a job she’d been doing for five years, made $10,000 a year more than her. When she complained to upper management, she was told that her coworker “supports his wife and his two kids.” Pregnant at the time, the woman realized how much Walmart’s vaunted family values were worth. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff, told reporter Liza Featherstone that the company was like a bad boyfriend. “They tell you exactly what you want to hear. But then you fall out of love and feel you were basically played.”27

  Walmart has not been the only major retailer to face such criticisms. Target has been accused of race discrimination by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and a class-action suit against grocery chain Lucky Stores resulted in a ruling for the plaintiffs in 1992. Home Depot, too, faced a class-action suit. An employee of Hobby Lobby—the same retailer that sued the US government to avoid paying for its employees’ birth control with their health insurance—said she was fired for asking for time off due to pregnancy. When she attempted to sue the company, the case was dismissed because she had, unknowingly, signed away her right to do so in a binding arbitration agreement.28

  Retail remains overwhelmingly gendered and racialized. Young workers of color tend to wind up in fast-food jobs, while white teens find jobs in higher-end retail. Those are the jobs more likely to be concentrated in whiter, wealthier areas that are harder to reach by public transit. Thus young people, in particular, tend to get jobs based not on economic need but on access. If they do make it into retail, workers of color are more likely to end up in the stockroom than on the sales floor. One study found that 70 percent of Black and Latinx retail workers make less than fifteen dollars per hour, compared to 58 percent of white retail workers. And another study found that transgender people faced a 42 percent rate of discrimination just in attempting to get a retail job.29

  Increased competition even for retail work means that employees often have to jump through hoops to get the decent jobs—and small, independent retailers are no better than the chains. A New York bookshop made one college student take a quiz on authors, and then recite her favorite passage from a novel—all for a minimum-wage job. A London toy store had prospective employees make up songs and demonstrate selling skill by choosing a random product from the store and making up a play about it. Some companies weed out workers who need a job by ensuring long wait times during the screening process, leaving them with workers driven less by economic necessity than by the desire for a specific position. Presumably, they’ll be more loyal.30

  There are “aesthetic labor” requirements for higher-end stores, which expect employees to embody their brands and use their products, modeling the goods the way early saleswomen did. These norms particularly affect women, who are expected to put forward a certain image of beauty; the cost of the products women are expected to use creates something known as the “grooming gap,” as writer and organizer Mindy Isser explained. The gap creates, as Isser wrote, a “pay cut catch-22: If women don’t conform, they are paid less; if they do conform, they’re expected to use those higher wages on beauty products and grooming regimens.” These requirements cut into women’s time as well as their budgets, yet forgoing them might mean forgoing the job. Buying and wearing the products they sell is yet another way that retail employees demonstrate their dedication to their jobs. “Sometimes I feel like all the money I earn goes back to the company,” one young worker said. Their pay, after all, remains low, and then some of them find that their dedication to the brand is used against them. “You’re just in it for the discounts,” they are told, another way of telling them their work isn’t work after all.31

  High-end stores do not, in fact, necessarily provide higher-end jobs. Researchers found that high-road retailers that tout their excellent service rarely couple that with high-road labor conditions. In 2017, I spoke with Bloomingdale’s workers Betty Lloyd and Kathy Houser, members of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) Local 3 and on the verge of a strike. They were in the aristocracy of retail workers, serving wealthy customers in a flagship New York City store, yet their commissions had dried up, their incomes had shrunk, and their conditions had worsened. Internet sales had eaten into their take-home, as Lloyd explained: “You give them your product knowledge. You show them what you have that is in their needs. You fit them, size them, give them the color. You tell them how great they look. You hear the customer say, ‘Thank you very much, Betty, for your service, but I am going to go home and order this online.’” Small boutiques are no better. As writer Aaron Braun pointed out, they trade on workers’ desire for a more authentic workplace the same way they do on customers’ desire for a more personalized shopping experience. “While these jobs promise a work environment void of the monotony and corporatism usually associated with working-class jobs,” he wrote, “they often simply deliver precarious work and a more personalized form of exploitation.”32

  There is, too, the overwhelming suspicion with which retailers have always treated their workers. “Service shopping” or “secret shopping” dates back to the early 1900s, when department stores would send undercover shoppers in to report back on their saleswomen’s behavior. Being patted down when one leaves the store is a common occurrence for retail workers. “Loss Prevention” is an obsession of most retailers: at Walmart it dovetailed with the company’s anti-union obsession, and the company created a sort of internal police department that monitored workers for pilfering or for protesting too much. New technology makes such surveillance easier—the scanning devices handed to workers to track merchandise also tracks the workers, who have to plug in their information to start the device. Japanese workers have been subjected to a “smile scanner” that gauges how well they project happiness on the job—an automated test of emotional labor. The video cameras that are now common in stores not only pick up shoplifters, but can also tell whether employees are smiling.33

  The schedule, though, is the biggest complaint among retail workers, and technology plays a role there as well. Retailers attempt to match staffing levels to sales flow, but that is always a guessing game. Scheduling software allows an algorithm to calculate the likelihood of a busy day based on a host of data points, from weather reports to the previous year’s sales on that day, and to assign workers based on the results. That means workers’ schedules are always changing and may vary wildly from week to week, with preference given to those whose availability is “open,” and who do not admit to any other demands on their time, such as school responsibilities or child care. With schedules so in flux, it is easy for managers to use hours to reward favorites, or as punishment for slipups, real or imagined. The dreaded “clopening,” where workers close a store late at night only to have to turn around and open it the next morning on just a couple hours of sleep, has made its way into popular consciousness. On-call shifts have expanded, too—one 2014 study in California found that one-quarter of retail workers had to be on call to work that same day. Women remain more likely than men to work part time, whether or not they want to—something like half of part-time retail workers would prefer to be full time.34

  These conditions
are broadly true across the world in postindustrial nations. In the United Kingdom, the zero-hours contract is common—though a work contract at all might sound dreamy to US at-will employees, a zero-hours contract gives the worker no guarantee of any hours at all. As of 2017, over nine hundred thousand workers were on such contracts. In the book Where Bad Jobs Are Better, researchers Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly studied retail work in Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States and concluded that while conditions varied by country, “in general, retail jobs have gotten worse across all six countries over the past two decades,” with women and young people overrepresented, and lower-than-average wages. German workers, who had better training, got their schedules six months in advance, and had union protections, nevertheless were increasingly in “mini-jobs” with lower pay and fewer benefits. French cashiers got to sit down on the job, and stores closed earlier in the day and on Sundays, yet French retail workers too were tracked for their scanning speed. In Mexico, Walmart is unionized, but the workers complained of excessive unpaid overtime.35

  Even without the union protections that workers in other countries enjoy, retail workers in the United States have managed to push back some of their worst conditions. On the heels of voting for the highest minimum wage in the United States—$15.20 an hour—and paid sick time, Emeryville, California, a tiny town in the Bay Area clotted with retail stores, voted in a fair workweek ordinance in October 2016. The ordinance required large retailers to give their employees their schedules at least two weeks in advance, and required an extra hour of pay for every time the employer changed that schedule—meaning workers would get paid if they were sent home early or called in from an off day. It also required employers to offer hours to existing employees before hiring new workers. The ordinance came from demands made by workers who organized with the Retail Action Project in New York and in Emeryville with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). Those groups realized that simply raising wages wasn’t enough. “You needed to also tackle the means by which they get those hours so that workers have more of a say and more of a voice and more control over the schedules and hours that they get,” said Anya Svanoe, an ACCE organizer.36