| Weekend
Edition
September 9/10 , 2006
In the Belly of the Bentonville
Beast
Working for Wal-Mart
By JOSH
GRYNIEWICZ
I
worked for Wal-Mart just under a year. I was fired two days before
Christmas, which in retrospect was probably the best holiday bonus
I could have received.
When I started, I knew very little about unions, even less about
workers’ power and nothing about working-class history. I’d
like to credit Sam Walton with radicalizing me, but mostly, that’s
because I know he would be rolling in his grave at the thought.
As
a member of the 4-to-1 crew (4 p.m. to 1 a.m.), my responsibilities
were to unload up to three trucks a night, with freight ranging
from 1,000 pieces to 2,300 and up; stack the freight according to
department; and pull it to the floor for overnights to restock the
shelves.
According
to the program description, this job required 14 unloaders, but
we rarely had more than eight.“We were intentionally understaffed,”
John Murphy, a former support manager with seven years on the job
(during one of which, he was my direct supervisor), told me in an
interview for this article.
“A
truck has six-and-a-half panels; managers are told that each panel
should take no more than 10 minutes to unload, regardless of size
and amount of freight,” Murphy said. “A truck should
be unloaded and ready to be pulled to the floor in an hour and ten
minutes. Realistically, a smaller truck should take 45 minutes to
an hour-fifteen; larger-scale trucks up to about an hour-forty-five.”
And that’s without considering that we consistently operated
with half a crew.
To
make matters worse, our equipment was archaic. The line that we
used to move freight through the dock along rollers was falling
apart--we actually had to use paint buckets to prop it up.
None
of this kept management from hopping into the trailer to shout insults,
snap their fingers, bark at us or do just about anything to speed
things up (except, of course, throw a box themselves).
Not
only was the combination of unrealistic expectations, high pressure
and decrepit equipment inefficient--it was just plain dangerous.
Accidents were a routine part of the job, but John’s complaints
fell on deaf ears.
In
fact, it was only after a wall of freight literally buried me alive--something
that the crew had been warning about for years prior--that we actually
received a replacement line.
I
was struck so hard at the base of the skull that it knocked the
natural curve of my spine ramrod straight.
According
to the doctor who examined my X-rays, I was lucky that I hadn’t
been paralyzed. I was in physical therapy for weeks--but back on
the job at Wal-Mart in a matter of days, holding down the fort in
Ladies’ Garments, a point that management seemed to revel
in making over the radio.
It
was a bureaucratic nightmare to get worker’s comp costs covered.
There was a succession of lost faxes, misplaced paperwork and endless
games of phone tag.
While
I was navigating this labyrinth, the word “union” began
to form in my vocabulary.
Apparently,
women’s lingerie was Wal-Mart’s dumping ground for the
lame, and it didn’t take long before I found someone with
a saga far worse than mine--a co-worker whose wrist was crushed
between a shelf and a clothing cart. The injury required surgery,
but thanks to Wal-Mart, the procedure was delayed for five years,
while the bills piled up. At the time, Wal-Mart was self-insured,
meaning that it had a legally sanctioned opportunity to manage or
mismanage its own claims.
“Don’t
let management take care of it,” she advised me.
“They’ll
try to guilt you into dropping it, or bully you into letting it
go--make it seem like you are hurting the company. But you have
to look out for yourself.”
*
* *
By
the time I was back on the line, I started floating the idea of
a union regularly--not as much to see if anyone was interested,
but to find out if anyone knew what to do.
The
majority of the crew said they’d be in favor of a union, but
most raised the same concerns that came up when the Chicago City
Council recently considered an ordinance to require a living wage
at “big box” retailers. “If we were actually successful
in getting a union,” went the argument, “they would
just shut down the store and set one up somewhere else.”
The
store we worked at provided the perfect counter-argument to this
common objection to both union drives and living-wage laws. Nestled
in a cluster of affluent suburbs south of Chicago, the store operated
in a community with heavy retail competition, and where annual household
income was considerably higher than the state average.
But
its primary customer base was drawn from poorer suburbs to the south--directly
accessible by a main road that literally fed into the Wal-Mart parking
lot--and an island of Section 8 public housing that had been built
in its backyard. In short, if the store was forced to relocate even
a couple blocks from this site, it would feel the pinch having contend
with other stores and being cut off from its primary source of poor
and working class consumers.
A
co-worker who had been through an organizing drive previously set
up a meeting with a contact from UCFW. Almost immediately after
the meeting was set, it was postponed. Since we worked receiving,
the contact told us, we would probably have to meet with somebody
else.
A
different bureaucratic nightmare of rescheduled appointments and
unreturned phone calls followed.
While labor debated, Wal-Mart organized. Over the course of these
few weeks, a transfer from a store in Tennessee was brought onto
the crew.
His
story didn’t seem to add up from the start. Wal-Mart had footed
the bill for his transfer, and he was put into a quasi-supervisor
position right off the bat.
Unfortunately,
this wasn’t enough to keep the guys from inviting him out
to the bar with us, but his unconventional conversation topics eventually
exposed him as a union-buster. He seemed all too eager to know personal
details about the crew, including whether anyone ever stole from
the trucks, who on the crew did drugs, etc.
A
couple of us finally came up with a plan to freeze him out. We developed
a habit of quoting movie lines about undercover narcs anytime he
was working the line. His meltdown resulted in an hour-and-45-minute
closed-door session with management, and a promotion to manager
in another department two days later.
His
last day on the line, he approached me, tried to shake my hand and
said: “I think that if we had met at another time, under different
circumstances, we would probably have been friends.” I told
him I doubted it.
As
Murphy explains, such tactics are routine. “Managers are expected
to take it personally if their employees want to organize,”
he said. “At one point, there was a store in Indiana that
actually had a campaign underway. Almost immediately, the district
transferred managers and assistant managers from throughout the
Midwest to work there.
“They
initiated these four-hour ‘labor relations’ meetings,
where they hand-picked supervisors from every department, through
six levels of management, to go over Wal-Mart propaganda--‘Why
we are so successful,’ ‘Why employees are better off
without a union’-type bullshit.
“They
trained us to look for employees that were ‘going against
the grain’--employees who not only were frustrated, but who
were most likely to do something about it--and we would fire them
for bullshit excuses.
“So
at least a hundred managers, probably more, from throughout the
Midwest actually turn up at this store in Indiana. There were at
least one or two from every store in the district. Seriously, what
the hell do you need that many managers for? That’s the way
they operate though--a hundred managers can be pretty intimidating.”
*
* *
At
my job, with the union-buster out of the picture, Wal-Mart picked
up the pressure. Harassment from managers to speed up unloading
grew more intense. They locked the front doors and set the alarms
so we wouldn’t be able to leave without a member of management
present, and visits from store security became a routine part of
our breaks.
At
one point, a box of broken merchandise set aside for “claims”
mysteriously found its way onto a pallet to be pulled out to the
floor, providing the store with enough circumstantial evidence to
shake things up on the docks and formally interrogate members of
the crew.
I
was terminated a few months later. Four of us refused to unload
a truck until the manager left the dock. We sat on the boxes and
waited patiently while she turned red-faced and stormed off.
One
by one, each of us was called into the office and grilled. Expressing
a truly unique form of motivational speaking, the overnight manager
used an interesting analogy when stressing to me the importance
of accepting consequences. “Say I was to lose my temper and
punch you in the face,” he asked casually, “there would
be repercussions for such behavior, wouldn’t there?”
He then handed me a pink slip for “insubordination.”
The
lessons I learned from this experience were invaluable. Only through
a focused effort to organize unions at Wal-Mart--one that extends
beyond public relations efforts and incorporates the whole of the
labor movement--will wages and conditions at the retail giant change.
The
alarm has been ringing for years, and U.S. workers are awake to
Wal-Mart’s exploitation. It’s time for labor to take
the cue.
Josh
Gryniewicz writes for the Socialist
Worker. |