A Different Class

No, Walmart, it is not the “sharing economy” when the world’s richest company tries to save money by getting customers to deliver packages for it. It’s just getting around paying minimum wage for labor.

Posted at 8:33am and tagged with: labor, walmart,.

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Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers deliver packages to online buyers, a new twist on speedier delivery services that the company hopes will enable it to better compete with Amazon.com Inc. Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world’s largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as “crowd-sourcing,” or the “sharing economy.” A plethora of start-ups now help people make money by renting out a spare room, a car, or even a cocktail dress, and Wal-Mart would in effect be inviting people to rent out space in their vehicle and their willingness to deliver packages to others.

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November 27th 2012

Dumping on low-wage workers is lousy direct action / Waging Nonviolence - People-Powered News and Analysis

16 notes

I couldn’t decide on a chunk of this piece to blockquote; it’s a longer, drawn out version of my post from last week about leaving a mess at Walmart as “direct action.”

Posted at 8:51am and tagged with: classwar, labor, walmart, action,.

November 24th 2012

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Storify of our road trip to New Jersey for Walmart Black Friday actions.

Posted at 10:34am and tagged with: walmart, classwar, labor,.

November 24th 2012

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With Biggest Strike Against Biggest Employer, Walmart Workers Make History Again | The Nation

Josh Eidelson’s report from Walmart in Maryland yesterday. Storifying my own tweets from Walmart yesterday—and I’ll have a writeup at some point.

Posted at 10:23am and tagged with: classwar, walmart, labor,.

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As he marched towards the Hanover Walmart this morning, former SEIU organizer Stephen Lerner credited the campaign with showing that workers, through strategic use of strikes, “can engage in actions that both make them feel powerful and that impact the company, and they don’t need to just spend their life waiting for some [National Labor Relations Board] process to demonstrate they want a union.” Lerner, the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign, added, “What they’re really showing is, they’re acting like a union.” By 9 pm EST Friday, the day’s last major action, a picket in San Leandro, California, with a dragon puppet and a “brass liberation band,” had come to a close. The three workers who’d been arrested in the afternoon had made it safely home. Tomorrow, the Walmart strikers are headed back to work, with at least one exception: a San Leandro worker who wanted to strike but was scheduled for days off on Thursday and Friday. She’ll be striking tomorrow.

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November 21st 2012

124 notes

-Barbara Ehrenreich, in “Made to Order”, an essay in the anthology Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-edited with Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Relevant to an argument I just had on Twitter about “disruptive” protest at Walmart in supposed solidarity with the Black Friday strikes. Picket, protest, march and rally all you want, hold a sit-in, but please, before you do things like deliberately create a mess in the store or leave a full cart in the checkout line, consider who’s going to have to clean up the mess that you make. It’s not going to be Rob Walton or any of the other multibillionaires. It won’t even be the assistant manager. It’ll be the same low-wage worker who maybe wanted to go on strike but wasn’t quite convinced, or who was threatened by their boss, who’s working an extra-long shift on the worst shopping day of the year.

Solidarity doesn’t mean you decide for yourself what is best for the workers. It means showing up in the ways they need and want you to and letting them decide how to build worker power.

Posted at 3:45pm and tagged with: classwar, walmart, labor, protest,.

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To make a mess that another person will have to deal with—the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack—is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.

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November 20th 2012

21 notes

Walmart rattled by growing unrest ahead of Black Friday’s strike | Sarah Jaffe | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

I wrote a piece for the Guardian placing the Walmart strikes into the larger context of American low wages and worker intimidation.

Posted at 10:05am and tagged with: classwar, walmart, strikes, labor, organizing,.

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Would people be so desperate for bargain shopping at already dirt-cheap places like Walmart if they themselves were making a decent living?

This year, Black Friday at Walmarts around the country will be marked by something other than just ultra-low prices. Workers, members of a labor union-backed organization called Organization United for Respect at Walmart (Our Walmart) will be striking and, along with their allies, holding rallies and actions to support the effort. Walmart has managed to go 50 years without a strike; many unions have tried and failed to organize workers. But in just a month and a half, the strikes have spread to stores across 12 cities, and Walmart is worried: the company has filed an unfair labor practices charge with the National Labor Relations Board.

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