Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  Of course, every gain for retail workers has come amid howls of protest from the employers, who argued that raising retail wages will accelerate what’s come to be known as the “retail apocalypse.” Stores are closing, the Internet is now where people do their shopping, and entire brands are closing up shop. The result is that people like Ann Marie Reinhart are forced to restructure their lives. To keep up with changing demands, stores lay off workers or cut back hours, often worsening their already-existing problems, according to Richard Granger, organizing director at the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union Local 23 in Western Pennsylvania. “Our fear is that if people are spending less time and money in a brick-and-mortar location, that if they then also start to experience less customer service, less attention because a corporation makes a staffing decision, that creates a vicious cycle that drives consumers to look for other options,” Granger said. There is also the push to automate jobs: the self-scanner is now common in grocery stores and some other retail outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, but thus far it has had a relatively modest impact on job loss.37

  The apocalypse was sometimes overstated. Sociologist Stephanie Luce explained that brick-and-mortar retail and even customer service remained popular. “Shopping isn’t just buying; it is also an activity. Tourism, for example, involves lots of looking in stores.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects only a slight decline in the industry over the next decade. While e-commerce has grown relatively rapidly, it still makes up a small portion of total retail sales and only employs a small percentage of total retail workers.38

  But e-commerce has also expanded the role of the distribution center. Central to Walmart’s business model, and now to Amazon’s, the distribution hub is a place for goods to move rather than to be held, and jobs in it are infamously miserable. Yet in some ways the jobs are similar to those in the retail stores: the handheld scanner, the shelves of goods, the pressure to go faster. But instead of the emotional labor of smiling at customers, the “pickers” in the warehouse face the grinding boredom of long hours alone, without even music to keep them company. Emily Guendelsberger, a journalist who took an Amazon “fulfillment center” job and wrote about it in her book On the Clock, encountered a coworker one night dressed as Santa Claus for a pre-Christmas shift. He was, she wrote, a professional—well, a volunteer—Santa in his time outside of the warehouse, but Santa-ing didn’t pay the bills. Santa encouraged her to feel “blessed” to be “healthy enough to work here.” But the shift toward more distribution center work is unlikely to leave anyone feeling blessed—or fulfilled.39

  It might be easier to differentiate oneself from the warehouse work, though, than it is from the enforced smile of the retail shop floor. Arlie Russell Hochschild noted that the risk of overidentifying with the job was the dreaded “burnout,” now a buzzword of sorts. Burnout, associated, in particular, with the millennial generation, in the case of retail workers, could be the exhaustion that comes from convincing oneself over and over again that low-wage work is fun and fulfilling, even if not deserving of higher wages.40

  And now even emotional labor, rarely recognized as requiring skill in the first place, is undergoing its own process of deskilling. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target give workers scripts to follow when they interact with customers, foreclosing their own ability to make decisions, and secret shoppers might also check to see how closely workers follow such a script. Such deskilling itself seems once again to point toward full automation, but in the moment, it’s just another tactic of control.41

  The coronavirus pandemic accelerated many of the trends already existing in retail. With the shift to online ordering as shelter-in-place orders spread across the globe, some companies, such as J. Crew, slid into bankruptcy, while some e-retailers—particularly Amazon—profited wildly. Companies laid off workers, particularly part-timers, as they tried to save money for eventual reopening. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target remained open, putting up safety shields for workers and providing in some cases short-term bonus pay for those who continued to show up. Workers, however, demanded more. The workers deemed “essential” during the pandemic, explained Travis Boothe, a pharmacy technician at Kroger in West Virginia, were retail workers like him, and the whole country was realizing “just how essential we are to the very foundations of this country’s economy.” Kroger, he noted, was doing “extremely well”: “Profits are up, sales are up. They pretty much have a guarantee that those profits will continue throughout this crisis.” But the company moved to take away the workers’ $2-an-hour “hero pay” just two months into the crisis, and the workers (and some customers) were angry. Telling them that they were essential, that they were heroes, one minute and then taking away their hazard pay the next didn’t sit well with them, and that anger lent fuel to the protests that erupted across the nation in late May 2020.42

  WHEN ANN MARIE REINHART FIRST HEARD THAT TOYS “R” US WAS GOING bankrupt, she said, “I think it was the seven stages of grief. I think we all went through them. It was mostly denial at first.”

  The announcement came in September 2017. At first the company said it would keep operating as usual; then, Reinhart said, they were told that over one hundred stores were closing, including the superstore where she worked in North Carolina. She tried to keep up her hopes, though, telling herself, “I had seen them close stores before.” Since the leveraged buyout—one of a stack of finance terms Reinhart and her coworkers would learn in the ensuing years—“the whole mentality changed.” Before, Toys “R” Us had a family atmosphere, she said—she recalled the founder, Charles Lazarus, arriving at her store for an unexpected visit one time, in jeans and a plaid shirt. The store, she said, “was his baby.” Lazarus, she noted, died just as the company went into liquidation, in March 2018.43

  Reinhart had researched Bain Capital during the 2012 presidential race. Mitt Romney (now senator from Utah) was running, and he had been one of the firm’s founders. She always read up on the candidates before making her choice, and Bain’s business model struck her as predatory well before she had any idea how much it would affect her life. So when her manager mentioned Bain’s involvement as they changed her Babies “R” Us to a superstore, she said, “It was like, ‘Ding! Ding! Ding!’ I said to him, ‘Do you know what Bain Capital does to companies? Do you know anything about Bain Capital?’” He defended it to her at the time, but during the liquidation, she said, he messaged her to apologize for not listening to her. “He was with the company maybe ten years, but they sucked thirty years out of me,” she said.

  The Toys “R” Us workers weren’t the only ones poring over the news to find out what would happen to their jobs, their health insurance, and their retirement plans. The organization now known as United for Respect was looking to expand its organizing among retail workers. United for Respect had begun as Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, as a project of the UFCW to organize Walmart workers around the country. It used social media to build a broad-based group of workers who might never win a union election at any one store, but who could take action at many locations at once, coming together to apply pressure to the company’s leadership to improve working conditions. The organization’s founders had always thought of their work around Walmart as a way to affect the retail sector as a whole—as goes Walmart, so goes the low-wage job. But what was happening at Toys “R” Us seemed to them to be another piece of the retail story—the “retail apocalypse” wasn’t just because of the Internet, but because finance capital had gotten involved and was attempting to wring every possible dollar out of retail firms before dropping them.

  Toys “R” Us workers, like Walmart workers, had deeply identified with the company. They felt betrayed by the liquidation, and had felt the erosion of their working conditions as private equity turned up the heat. And they were organizing themselves. One of Reinhart’s coworkers told her about a Facebook group called the Dead Giraffe Society, but at first, she said, she wasn’
t interested. When she took a look at it, she saw people sharing memories and pictures, mourning and remembering good times.

  The society was also a space for a lot of anger, and the United for Respect organizers dove in, hoping to help. But how do you organize workers at a chain that is closing? Strikes don’t work—you can’t shut down business to make demands if the business itself is closing down. Still, the workers were eager to figure out a way to fight. People would say to Reinhart, “It’s just a job,” she said, but “it is a job that I gave thirty years to, so I am willing to fight. We weren’t treated well.”

  The stores weren’t all closed yet when Reinhart’s shut down, and lots of the workers on the Facebook page were nervous about making trouble. But Reinhart had had enough, and though the company had always warned workers about talking to reporters, when a request went out in the Dead Giraffe Society from United for Respect, asking if anyone would like to talk to a BuzzFeed reporter, she said she’d do it. “What are they going to do? They can’t fire me, I don’t have a job anymore.” Her first media interview took an hour, and she said she “was very tearful. It was very, very raw.”

  The same organizer from United for Respect then wrote her to ask if she’d like to come to Washington, DC, and meet with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She called her friend MJ, who had moved to Texas from New York and had also worked at Toys “R” Us. “She said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘I’ve spoken to them on the phone twice. I have to trust my gut instinct.’ She said, ‘Tell her to call me.’” On the basis of Reinhart’s gut, she and MJ went to DC with United for Respect. “My daughter-in-law was like, ‘Are you crazy?! You are going to get on a plane with strangers. You don’t know these people!’ Lo and behold, it was the best decision we ever made.”

  There were only six of them at the meeting in May 2018, out of over thirty thousand workers losing their jobs. Reinhart was nervous—she’d never done anything like this before, and suddenly she was meeting a senator and making her first picket signs. “We didn’t think anybody cared about our story,” she said. “We made all these signs and I was like, ‘Yes, but we are six people.’ We went to Bain Capital. They have an office in DC. We came around the corner and all of a sudden these two buses unloaded onto the streets of Washington, DC, with signs and balloons, and they were all Walmart workers. This one lady, Donna, she said, ‘We got you. We’ve got your back.’ I looked at her tearing up like, ‘Oh my god.’ She hugged me and I will never forget that day.”

  It was the beginning of the campaign that would be called Rise Up Retail, which brought the Walmart workers to support the Toys “R” Us workers and showed the Toys “R” Us workers that it was okay to make trouble. The video that Sanders put on his YouTube channel helped, Reinhart said, and then, as more workers came together, the campaign built momentum and power. Other stores joined in as the private equity apocalypse spread. “It is just sad that there are so many of us now,” Reinhart said.

  She went from a nervous activist to volunteering to do civil disobedience. Lily Wang of United for Respect recalled Reinhart looking at her and saying, “We’re not going to get severance, are we?” Wang said, “Probably not.” But Reinhart and the others were committed to raising hell to make sure that at least the people who came after them wouldn’t have to face what they had. Wang recalled, “They were like, ‘We are not going to hold out the hope that we are going to get it. What we really want to do is to change the law so that no one has to go through this.’”

  The stores were closing, but the workers had the offices of the private equity firms and pension meetings and the halls of Congress for targets, and they had the Internet. They held press conferences—the next one had seventy-five workers, from the original six—and marched on Wall Street. They learned to make their actions dramatic to draw press attention, and to hold them in stores as they closed, sharing videos online. They had, too, their personal conversations, as they learned more about how private equity companies operated and the ins and outs of what had happened to their company. They learned that executives were getting “stay bonuses” while the workers got nothing; that Bain and KKR and Vornado had made something like $470 million off destroying Toys “R” Us. “This has truly been an education and the more we find out, the madder we get,” Reinhart said. “It just puts more fire in our belly to fight.”44

  “I think they kept me sane because it gave me an outlet to all of this anger and resentment that I had,” Reinhart said. “Especially in that situation, you feel like you don’t have a voice. I felt like they gave us all a voice who didn’t have one.” From the low point—when she found herself, without her Toys “R” Us health insurance, literally choosing between her own asthma medication and her husband’s diabetes medication—she found her power. She’s traveled back and forth several times; she’s met Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as well as Sanders. She was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit asking for the bankruptcy court to take the workers’ claims seriously in the process. She’s spoken on a Senate panel before the Financial Reform Committee. “It was a surreal moment. Like, ‘What am I doing sitting here in Washington, DC, speaking on finance reform?’” She pointed to New Jersey’s new labor law requiring severance payments for mass layoffs as a success of the campaign.45

  And then there was the settlement. KKR and Bain announced, in November 2018, a $20 million fund for the workers—less than the $75 million that Reinhart and her colleagues had asked for, but still a victory. It was a small check each—“I just got a check for $300 a week before Christmas. That was the last of the fund money,” Reinhart told me in January 2020—but nonetheless the workers enjoyed spreading the news in the Dead Giraffe Society, which lives on. They won another $2 million in bankruptcy court, Reinhart said. “Nothing but good has come out of it for me.”46

  Not long ago, Reinhart was on the phone with a friend, who said to her, “You realize this is in the books now. You were the plaintiff.” In that moment, she realized the significance of her fight. “There was power in numbers, for sure.”

  CHAPTER 5

  SUFFER FOR THE CAUSE

  Nonprofits

  ASHLEY BRINK REMEMBERED VIVIDLY WHAT IT WAS LIKE IN HER KANSAS high school when Dr. George Tiller was killed. The Wichita doctor was beloved in progressive and reproductive rights circles, but he was a target for anti-choice violence because he was one of the few doctors in the country who would provide abortions after twenty-four weeks of pregnancy—a difficult procedure only done in extreme cases, made more difficult by the stigma attached to it. When Tiller was shot (while serving as an usher in his hometown church), it was May 2009; Brink was on the verge of graduating. “I remember people in my class celebrating in the hallways and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, finally! All these babies are going to be saved,’” she said. “I remember being like, ‘How can you all say you are pro-life, but you are celebrating the murder of a man?’”1

  At Wichita State University, Brink “found my people,” as she described the pro-choice activists and the movement she joined. In 2013, she applied to be an intern at South Wind Women’s Center, the health-care clinic that was reopening in the location of Tiller’s former practice. “I started as an intern and I fell in love with the work,” she said. “Never in a million years, had someone asked me, ‘Where do you see yourself after you graduate college?’ would I have ever said, ‘an abortion clinic.’ But everything about it, I was in love with. I was in love with the patient care. I was in love with my coworkers. I felt like I could be myself and say the things that I had always been thinking, but that people wouldn’t agree with or that people would judge me for thinking.”2

  Brink speaks confidently, with a poise born of years doing difficult, emotionally challenging work. She has dodged protesters and soothed patients through the worst moments of their lives, and celebrated with them during the best. Reproductive health care was where she wanted to be, and she planned to spend the rest of her life doing it. Like so many workers in nonprofi
t organizations, she was devoted to the cause first, giving little thought to her compensation.

  After three years at South Wind, Brink said, she and her partner were ready for a new challenge. They knew they didn’t want to live in Kansas forever, so in the spring of 2016 they headed farther west, to Colorado, where Brink got a job with Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM). Moving was expensive, and the cost of living in Denver much higher than in Wichita—even more significantly, she took a pay cut, from $15.50 to $12.65 an hour, in taking the PPRM job. But the job was certainly an adventure; she was in a traveling position, hopping from clinic to clinic in Colorado and Wyoming to fill in as needed when clinics were short of health assistants. Every month, she explained, health-center managers would send requests for her when they lost a staffer or someone took leave or was out sick.