From Walmart to Amazon to Walmart
A serious Walmart union campaign is long overdue.
Walmart is, and has long been, the biggest private sector employer in America. It has more than two million employees. A couple of decades ago, Walmart was, in the public mind, what Amazon is today: the big, bad symbol of a McJob, the gargantuan employer of last resort that was swallowing up the American workplace. Amazon’s internet roots and its ability to drive the entire retail sector towards online shopping has allowed it to replace Walmart as the dystopian image of The Future of Work. But Amazon still has 600,000 fewer employees. Walmart has never gone away—it just managed to clean up its reputation.
Common sense tells you that the biggest employer in the country is one of (if not the) most vital targets for organized labor. And for many years, Walmart was. The UFCW, the main grocery industry union, spent a ton of money on what was more of a PR and legislative campaign against Walmart than a straight union organizing campaign, and never managed to win any unions. The company, viciously anti-union since day one, once eliminated its meat-cutting department at 180 stores after meat cutters at a single store in Texas unionized.
Today, Amazon has become the Massive Company We Must Unionize, and for good reason—it probably does more to affect how more Americans will be working in coming years than anyone else. And the Teamsters, fresh off a wave of Christmas strikes, are having some tentative success, though organizing Amazon is a task that, even if it goes well, will be continuing for the rest of my lifetime. But somehow, Walmart feels as if it escaped; from organized labor’s crosshairs, from the harsh glare of public attention, and from its own bad reputation.
Besides allowing Amazon to conveniently take the heat off of it, one way that Walmart pulled off this neat trick was by pouring money into PR efforts to burnish its reputation. (I was working at PRWeek Magazine when the massive PR firm Edelman began its lucrative task of putting a friendly face on Walmart. If you work at Edelman you need to quit your evil job.) Part of this has been a huge effort to put itself at the forefront of corporate America’s “sustainability” campaign. Another part has been an effort to win the intellectual battle over whether Walmart itself is a net good for the communities where its stores land.
Instinctively, you know what happens when a Walmart opens outside a small town: It becomes the biggest store in town, with the lowest prices, as well as the biggest employer. All the small stores downtown, unable to compete on price, slowly go out of business, a process that only strengthens Walmart’s position as the only place to work. First, use your scale to put your local competitors out of business; then, pay low wages, because where else are your workers going to go? In time, all small town character dissolves in the face of Walmart’s economic obliteration machine.
The counter to this argument, from Walmart’s allies, has long been that the money that Walmart saves consumers is worth all that other stuff. By being huge and squeezing its suppliers for every last penny and relentlessly cutting prices, they said, Walmart becomes the consumer’s greatest ally. It’s hard to know precisely how to weigh the sides of this argument. Still, all of it has been plausible enough to make Walmart respectable again. Christ, Hillary Clinton was a Walmart board member.
I mention all this because it now is possible to say how the scales balance in terms of Walmart’s effect on public welfare. As Rogé Karma lays out in this excellent story in The Atlantic, meticulous new economic research shows that the opening of a Walmart causes incomes to decline in the community where the store opens by more than the amount that shoppers save at Walmart. One research paper says that the average net loss from a Walmart’s opening is about $2,000 per year per person, leading to a 16% increase in poverty locally.
Another paper, by Justin Wiltshire, confirms the mechanism of that damage:
I first show Supercenter entry sharply increased labor market concentration. Supercenters were able to hire large numbers of retail workers with zero increase in average earnings, indicating Walmart had wage-setting power. I then show Supercenter entry caused large declines in overall local employment and earnings, particularly among local goods-producers, indicating Walmart displaced manufacturing demand away from local producers and to its own national and international suppliers.
In other words, your common sense instincts were correct: Walmart opens a store, puts local stores out of business, which causes the suppliers of local stores to suffer as well, which reduces employment options locally, which forces people to work at Walmart, which then has the power to keep wages low. And Walmart’s low prices do not outweigh the damage from its power to screw workers and small businesses.
Fuck you, Walmart. We were right about you fucks all along.
With that in mind, I would like to gently suggest that the fact that there is not a major effort by organized labor to unionize Walmart is, you know, insane. The largest employer in America. Proven to drive down wages and keep communities poor. Owned by the richest fucking family in America, all of whom should be held by the ankles and shaken until their collective $267 billion net worth falls out of their pockets and into the pockets of the millions of workers that they extracted it from.
I do not want to minimize how difficult organizing Walmart would be. Besides the corporate union-busting built into every level of the company, it is always, always hard to successfully unionize large workplaces of low-wage workers with high turnover in areas where people are economically desperate. On the other hand, look at the Starbucks campaign: 500 stores unionized at a large, national low-wage employer. And look at the state of the Amazon organizing campaign: Years of effort with very scattered success have finally come together under the auspices of a major union which appears ready to professionalize the fight and keep banging on the company until they actually secure at least one union contract, which will serve as a launching point for more union contracts. It is still early, but those two campaigns are demonstrations that things can be done in places that have some similar characteristics to Walmart, if enough effort is applied.
In fact, Walmart is probably easier to unionize than Amazon. Where Amazon has warehouses in out-of-the-way locations, Walmart has physical stores, with huge foot traffic. Where do you think a picket line would get more bang for the buck? Walmart’s nature as a physical retail establishment makes it more susceptible to picketing and protests, more susceptible to bad PR, more susceptible to local political and community fights than Amazon. Both are hard. Both are important. But if unions can, ever so slowly, get their roots into Amazon, they can do it at Walmart too.
Walmart is the largest grocery store chain in America. The UFCW has long understood that it is hard to maintain labor power in the grocery industry if the largest player in the whole fucking industry is union-free and can undercut every other company on prices and wages. Although UFCW has a lot of money (which it does not bother to spend on organizing), the truth is that Walmart is too big for any single union to meaningfully tackle on its own. It (along with Amazon, and the big tech companies, and the big union-free national retail chains that trap hundreds of thousands of American workers in permanent poverty) is ripe for the creation of a strategic, national, multi-union organizing campaign. That is the sort of thing that the labor movement would do if it had its shit together, which it does not.
Other than spreading the word about the new economic research, nothing I’m saying here is in any way novel. The lay of the land here is pretty well understood. The new year, though, is a good opportunity for those of us in the labor movement to stop lying to ourselves. Will we have a resurgence of worker power in America if we have zero, nada, no union presence at the biggest fucking employer in the country? No. Come on now. Unionizing Walmart will be hard. Unionizing Walmart will take a long time. The first step is to start. Two million workers will thank you.
More
Related reading: Can Grocery Workers Take Back Their Union?; Lean Into the Punch; The Life and Death Stakes of Labor Power. I once wrote a story for an alt-weekly about spending 24 hours in a Walmart the day after Christmas, but sadly it is no longer online. Don’t do that though.
Elsewhere, I have a piece in The Guardian today about the urgent moral need for you to not snitch in 2025. Over the holiday break, I had another piece in The Guardian about what it is like to write a book. (Order “The Hammer” today!) I may be publishing a bit less frequently here than usual in January, because I am working on another project as well this month, and I’ll be covering the presidential inauguration for In These Times. But have no fear: any slowdown in me running my mouth is only temporary.
You are reading How Things Work. This site has no corporate funders. It has no ads. It has no paywall. This is pure, uncut independent media, 100% funded by readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. If you enjoy reading this publication, and would like to help it continue to exist, and have a few spare bucks, take a second and become a paid subscriber today. By doing so, you are doing your part to keep independent journalism going, at a time when, I think, that will be an important thing. I thank each and every one of you for reading and supporting How Things Work. Bigger and better in 2025.
Worked at Walmart as my first real job for about two years. Have avoided shopping there ever since. And it's not because they fired me for stealing food and magazines from them!
Happy New Year, Hamilton! Thank you for your work ❤️🔥