The High Cost Of Low Wages

I did not go to college. I went to Wal-Mart. I wanted to stay in my hometown, and all my friends were still there, working or going to the local community college fulltime. Wal-Mart was one of the only places hiring at the time, and a few of my good friends from high school worked there. I grew to love the people I worked with, the camaraderie we had, the invisible bond we all felt on a rainy Sunday afternoon, putting off lunch for hours to help deal with a rush of customers. There were those of us who sunk happily into the faceless anonymity of corporate retail, but I learned in those days that the job was most enjoyable when we helped each other deal with stressful situations, angry customers, and unfair management.

I worked at Wal-Mart for a total of 4 years, off and on. When I rejoined the company after every absence, I had to sit through orientation, a couple hours of videos and a round of signing and initialing. The very first video shown to each orientation class was a 20 minute anti-union screed with a monniker along the lines of “Why We Don’t Need Unions At Wal Mart”. The video attacked existing unions’ practices, the uncertainty of arbitration, and extolling the ’benefits’ of being union-free. I probably saw the video three times, each time I thought it was a joke. The last time I specifically asked the employee resources lady if showing that video first was just to scare off people who might try to infiltrate and unionize the store.

The workers at my store needed an outlet, and an aide. They needed organizing. While I was at the company, they were constantly and persistently whittling down benefits, wage increases, schedule flexability. I was single, renting a 1-bedroom house, and could barely make rent and utilities every month with the wage I was bringing home. If I were to stay at Wal-Mart for a career, it would be impossible to survive as a full-time hourly associate. There were people (mostly women) working at entry-level jobs, in the same spot as they had been since the store’s opening, 17 years previous. An incremental (4 or 5 percent) raise every year was all they had to look forward to in terms of incentive, and even those were eventually capped for long-term associates.

In my last stint at the store in my hometown, I worked in the adjoining tire and lube center. I had developed a pack-a-day smoking habit, and I sometimes spent my hour’s lunch in the smoking lounge of the associate break room. The smoking lounge was depressing, yellowed walls which hadn’t been repainted white since the store opening, florescent lamps bombarding us with sickly light. I sat there and occasionally bullshat with some of the older coworkers about starting our own in-shop union.

“They would shut us down, immediately.” my older counterparts immediately retorted.

“What about if we didn’t affiliate with any of the established unions? What if we just got together and said ‘look, we want a little more money for our toils and we want better benefits.’

“If they do it for us, they would have to do it for every shop, company-wide, and then every store and office.”

Through continued conversation with my older coworkers, I realized it would be incredibly difficult to start an in-shop union at Wal-Mart. Even if we somehow got the whole store on board with organizing, we could be easily amputated as a labor-infected workforce and fired en masse. Wal-Mart had done it before.

I left the company in 2006, pushed out because I refused to work overnights.

Wal-Mart is fucking huge. Thousands of stores, millions of employees, but if there’s anything the recent class-action discrimination case against it proves is that they are not doing a good enough job taking care of their people. Like any giant multinational, Walmart is concerned with making money first and foremost, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but when they cannot give their long-term associates a competitive wage, when they can’t seem to pay women as much as men even though women in the company outrank men in seniority, they will be in trouble when the status quo collapses, and the workers of Walmart demand a voice.