Working for Respect by Adam Reich

Author:Adam Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026000, Social Science/Sociology/General, BUS097000, Business & Economics/Workplace Culture
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

PMS

To see the opportunities and challenges faced by OUR Walmart, we need to return to the early days of OUR Walmart and to the lessons learned at one of the organization’s most active stores: the Pico Rivera Walmart Supercenter in Los Angeles. What happened at Pico—and in a few other stores—is that workers reclaimed the dignity that they felt Walmart had taken from them by adopting a new, collective identity. At Pico, this was about what it meant to be a woman. In Dallas, it was about being in an army of the just, like David battling Goliath. In Chicago, it was about race and the legacy of civil rights. The irony here is that the workers acted collectively as Walmart workers, as people whose new identities (as empowered women, as David, as freedom fighters) were centered on Walmart. From that standpoint they could and did make moral claims on their coworkers, on the public, and ultimately on Walmart executives hunkered down in Arkansas. So what happened at Pico?

Discussing the motivations that led to their organizing, Dora Avila, the key associate leader at the Pico store said, “Walmart has been advertising that they are a family-oriented company. And if this is how family is treated, then I would rather not have a family at all.”38 Dora dates her “radicalization” to being transferred to a Walmart in nearby Hemet [#1853] where she was confronted with blatant racism from the mostly white management there. She had never been treated so badly, she says, and she started to feel that

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