Workplace Organizing and the Pandemic:
There are several difficulties which I have observed to the development of the working-class ideology that may be detrimental to the organizing of worker strikes in general, work slow-downs, and mass call-ins. These I analyze through the lens of class structure and general characteristics of the white working class. Among many of my coworkers at Walmart, I have observed a great urge to improve the conditions under which we labor, especially in lieu of the pandemic conditions that have led to increased difficulties among our workers.
The escalating economic crisis of capitalism, driving workers out of employment, has simultaneously forced many to increase their workload in order to compete for both wages and the few positions remaining. Although at the moment, it seems temporary, the wider consensus is that the long-term economic impact of the shutdowns is a slow recovery from the economic detriments. The market has contracted, and we see the expansion of the lumpenproletariat. Capitalism is showing its weaknesses.
Marx predicted this, and economic statistics have led to increasingly dangerous numbers of Americans approaching the poverty level. The lower fifty percent of Americans have seen declining savings, for the working class absorbs the losses that businesses experience. The executives of these businesses may easily move to another industry, but the worker, for all their difficulty and inconvenience, is once again ruined entirely. Livelihoods are dying, and the government’s answer is to send the workforce back to work under intolerable conditions once again, for work will set us free. The implications of the American ideology are showing themselves.
How does this impact Walmart employees? We do not receive hazard pay. We receive no paid sick leave. We receive only a $300 bonus at the end of…get this…June. Although I myself am not particularly hurt by this, as my expenses are limited, my fellow employees are not left unscathed, many of them return to work at the age of 50+ because they have not been able to sustain themselves. We earn less than people make on unemployment at the moment, earning roughly $800 per pay period (every two weeks), and so we see that Walmart values its employees not at all.
I will briefly describe the work ethics of my coworkers. Those who are white, privileged, Christian, etc. are often those who work the least. I work hard, partly because of my dedication to grocery work, and partly because I have psychiatric conditions that force my compliance and overwork. Those who are among the colonized, among the sexual minorities, who are women, are, in my experience, those who work more and more quickly. The white male workers who are minors or college students or privileged insofar as they do not have bills to pay (except their cars, oftentimes split with their parents), work the least.
We may see, then, that although these workers have repeatedly called in, or not called in and not arrived, they have not been fired. This is a form of privilege, and they expect some sort of this privilege. They oftentimes abuse either cannabis or other substances. The white working class has several distinctions within it, that is to say, those who enter into employment with the entitlement of whiteness and those who do not, those who are born into the petty bourgeoisie and use their income to work the stock market, etc. The white working class is not so immiserated as many leftists may believe. Several of our coworkers are of the type of the white proletariat imagined by colonizer leftists, but many of our white “proletarians” are only placed in that position by their petty bourgeois families. I know many of both types.
I accept that in several cases, I work far harder than my coworkers, who do not realize their privileged status. They have, on occasion, received “coaching” — official reprimands — for lack of productivity, and one for repeated absences and not being in on time. But I have not heard of any of them being fired. Perhaps business needs help to determine this, or perhaps it is simply a manifestation of white male privilege — it is difficult, in this case, to determine. I favor the approach of J. Sakai, whose critique of the mythos of the white proletariat indicates that they form a labor aristocracy of privileged workers. Colonial and patriarchic material structures act to divide the privileged, that is the labor aristocratic group, from the marginalized, that is the group who work harder and receive the same pay as those less productive.
I move on from the difficulties of bringing about a unified working-class identity to the workers at Walmart to the preliminary strategizing in which I am currently engaged. The first part of this in the words of Mao is to “identify real friends and attack real enemies,” including those among the managerial staff. To this end, I have compiled a list of people discontent with our work conditions, none of whom are part of the aristocratic, pretentious male group previously mentioned. Some are immigrants, some are poor whites, and some are colonized proletarians. A primary unifier among our workers is both better staffing and uniformity in the character of work. One department does not like being shifted to another department. Some areas are almost criminally understaffed, and were so before the pandemic condition increased staff needs. Now that there is a glut in the labor market, one of these problems is being resolved.
Another primary unifier has been the absence of consistent hazard pay, which other companies have been enacting. Even members of store management have expressed concern about the lack of hazard pay, meaning that there is quite a significant potential to organize along these lines, and that this is probably the most promising strategy of organizing. There are, however, structural difficulties to organizing even along these lines, particularly in some departments. First, staff shortages have led to declines in time on hand to discuss the matters which we must address, and second that workers are constantly under surveillance to improve their performance and productivity.
The first point is particularly well felt in departments with a fast-paced work speed, such as the online grocery pickup department (of which I myself am a part). There are significant safety concerns in this department, but none of them have been addressed in sustainable or uniform ways, despite reports to store management. There are days when the first time I’ve had to rest is at lunch, five hours into my shift, where the rest is me hurrying constantly to prep and dispense grocery orders. I average, on busy days, thirty thousand steps and nearly nine miles of walking distance. We also bear the brunt of customer anger from delays, and it is often our job to fix customer orders when something has gone astray. As such, time to discuss workplace safety is short.
The second point is also particularly felt in the department, where there are two cameras that monitor the dispensing room and three monitoring our parking lot. There is almost always a manager in the department’s rooms, making clandestine union organizing difficult. Most of it would be carried out online, if at all. Meanwhile, the hiring of new employees makes it difficult to tell who would be in favor or not in favor of organizing for collective action. The actions collectively undertaken would also be limited primarily to mass call-offs and deliberate slowdowns, most of the results of which we would be borne primarily by the employees as well, and not our management.
Who are real friends, and who are real enemies? We know that oftentimes we have delivery trucks meandering through the place where we are taking groceries to people’s cars, and that we have asked repeatedly for signs and speedbumps to prevent people from speeding through this area. All these pleas have fallen on deaf ears. The company, furthermore, only required facemasks in apparent response to the illness and deaths of four employees in localized hotspots in March. The pandemic is revealing the true conditions under which those employed serve customers. Meat packing industries have record high infection and death rates. Workers have died on the sales floors of essential businesses. One of our employees collapsed yesterday attempting to help a customer at the checkout lines, and required emergency medical attention. Work was stopped temporarily. Management was there almost instantaneously. Work continued after the employee was removed to a medical facility. One man was almost shot the week before I started. The man who nearly shot him returned several days after I began my term of employment, but was immediately seized by police officers who now continuously monitor our store.
My department manager once had a nervous breakdown during the last hour and a half of my shift, and I had to continue dispensing orders while one of my coworkers went to lunch (part of that particularly aristocratic group previously mentioned). I had to direct two members of management on how to dispense groceries to customers, issuing orders and taking leadership because I had been there for a week and a half and knew how to do all of what I was doing. At that point, I considered quitting. I had thousand-dollar debts to various collection agencies and at that point needed the job and money after I had spent a month applying to other stores.
Our market managers (district at other stores) reduced the number of orders we took through the grocery pickup system to 125. Our shelves were bare. Our store assistant manager drew as many people as she could from other departments to fill the short staffing in our department, and stocking and other duties went unfulfilled. Thirteen to fourteen cars would line up outside and wait in some cases for more than an hour for their groceries, with some drivers yelling at our dispensers and our manager for wait times. I’ve been yelled at multiple times on the phone for incorrect orders, order cancellations, etc. which were primarily caused by overloaded orders and short-staffing.
Few employee concerns appear important to management and the corporate partners. Walmart’s stocks and profits have only increased during the pandemic, but none of these, unsurprisingly, have been distributed to their workers. Most of us work overtime to ensure customers are receiving their groceries to be met with insults and impatience by ungrateful people. People who pride themselves, oftentimes, on their morality and their upholding of Christian values. We have had a strange situation of where my manager had to deal with a woman who yelled at one of our employees and then promptly delivered a card proclaiming “Happy Easter!”
The affluent white community we serve is of the type who are done with the inconvenience of lockdown and quarantine. Many of our customers flagrantly disregard our social distancing signs and guidelines. Some of them do so purposefully to make fellow customers and Walmart workers uncomfortable. Maybe fifty percent bring masks. Our workplace has not attempted to make masks mandatory, despite repeated complaints from employees, and even though other stores in our market have begun requiring people to do so. Walmart, in this case, cannot be trusted, cannot be monitored, cannot be held accountable to require safe working conditions.
Organizing is required, but how may we transcend different material situations to unify the workers enough and send a unified voice to management and corporate? It is difficult. How do we avoid the surveillance under which we constantly labor? How do we attempt to form an organizing committee for future collective action with social distancing guidelines in place, and with the lack of private areas for covert communications? These questions and more we must address to begin the struggle against our corporations and those who profit from the exploitation of the workers. It is a struggle not at this point for worker control of the industry, but for tolerable conditions of labor, a minor bar which none in the United States have yet achieved.
The difficulty arises as always from opportunity. When we seize the opportunity to act, we must seize the opportunity responsibly. How should we organize workers and claim to be on their side when we do not work or struggle beside them? How should we tell them “Strike! Strike! Strike!” when we ourselves will not join them at the picket lines? No, we need theory and practice. Theory and practice or nothing will unify the workers in opposition to capital. Theory and practice or nothing will lead to the triumph of the proletarian and colonized classes.
Many of economic struggles of the pandemic were predicted, as usual, by Marx, and many of his arguments on value, money, etc. are still prescient. But aside from the traditional Marxists, we must read and analyze more modern theorists. We must, if we are to be successful in any way, read the theorists of colonialism and anticolonialism; Mao, Fanon, Said, and others are crucial to understanding the mechanisms of American Society as well as Lenin, Marx, and Engels.
We whites overwhelmingly comprise the class of wealthy owners of land and capital. And among these white men are the most privileged of the whites. We are the people who must betray our classes as colonists and as bourgeoisie and embrace both the proletarian and lumpenproletarian arms of the colonized and marginalized. We must at all times understand the hegemonic forces that create our society and lead to our privileged status as bourgeoisie and settlers.
Pandemic strains have revealed the meaninglessness of the mythos of the white working class. They have revealed the absurdity of the purely anticapitalist model in the United States. Because of the material divisions between the members of the same class, we must remember that there are some classes which are incapable of collective structural organizing. There is no unity within the working class, as there are privileged people within it, and so we must bulldoze these class divisions to unite society. We must first seek the anticolonial line to make viable the proletarian line.
