Imagine being a single parent in a rundown neighborhood. Anxiety, stress and money trouble are your constant companions. Inexplicably, a money-making monster descends with offers of jobs and a better life. It seems a friend to the poor. It hires single parents, high school dropouts, students. A disadvantaged, desperate staff burdened with high hopes.
The euphoria fades fast. Confusion creeps in. You’re working, but you’re broke…You want full time hours but it never happens. Instead, the company hires more part-time staff. You can’t make friends: fraternizing is discouraged; you don’t even know your colleagues’ last names. That would be seditious.
The staff is never the same, turnover is staggering. You feel isolated but don’t dare complain. When you tell an associate you feel broke and overwhelmed, he disappears.
Dangerous details can’t be shared. Last names, salaries, hopes, expectations and workplace beefs are all off limits. You hardly dare go for a smoke lest you are fingered as being an agitator, too friendly or too curious. The mere suggestion of talking things over is high treason, in Wal-Mart speak. It’s unionizing talk and a reason to be fired.
As you struggle with your conscience, you find it hard to believe your boss’s job is to crush associates that associate. Managers are told to toe the anti-union line. If not? They, too, face firing.
As you struggle on your meagre salary, you realize your neighborhood isn’t better off, either. You find out for every two jobs Wal-Mart creates, three are lost when competitors are forced out. Amazing statistics for a powerhouse retailer with more than 1.5 million employees, a bigger budget than many countries, and more economic clout than any other single retailer in the US. It out muscles G.E. and G.M... So where Wal-Mart goes, the marketplace follows. It’s frightening that its latest project to revamp the workplace is to try to sell US staff on the benefits of buying their own health benefits. It’s only a matter of time before it drags millions of workers back 30 years in hard-won benefits.
Suddenly you realize, as I did at a November conference in Toronto called “How Unions Matter in the New Economy,” the courage it took for staff at Canada’s Wal-Marts to beat back their fear and campaign for change. Rather than accept a unionized staff, Wal-Mart vindictively shut down the Jonquière store and threatens to close others. What? Pay a living wage? Why bother – until you have to?
“How unions matter in the new economy” was organized by the Centre for Work and Society at York University. Carmel Smyth works at CBC in Toronto and is a member of the Guild’s organizing committee. |
