Economy
Related: About this forumWhite Resentment on the Night Shift at Walmart
Seven years ago, I joined the night shift at a Walmart in rural Michigan. For $8.10 an hour, I spent four or five nights a week filling shelves with the flour and sugar and marshmallow fluff that residents of the local county, which in 2008 voted for Barack Obama, needed to get through the holidays. Four years ago, the county went with President Obama a second time, though by a thinner margin. But this past November, the county, like the state, turned red.
A few shifts into my time on Walmarts sales floor, I spent a smoke break outside in the damp November air with a co-worker, a white single mother of four. We squatted on a concrete curb in the gray cast of parking-lot lights and surveyed what lay before us. Walmarts expanse of asphalt, dotted with worn-out pickups and domestic sedans, gave way to a road lined with strip malls and dollar stores. Beyond it, a sign for Meijer, a regional competitor to Walmart, glowed red against a black sky.
I know people talk about working over there and they say its better because its got a union, I remember my co-worker telling me as she gestured at Meijer. But Id rather have those dues in my paycheck. Besides, she told me, Walmart wasnt as bad as everyone said. The night shift came with a 50-cents-per-hour premium, she got raises and after seven years, she said, she was up to $11 an hour.
If she made it to 15 years at Walmart, which was common among workers on our shift, she said shed even get to keep her employee discount card which offered 10 percent off produce and other items for life. As I talked to other co-workers, nearly all of whom were white, I got the impression that Walmart wasnt necessarily considered a good job, but it was one of the best jobs in town. At least it wasnt going to up and move to Mexico, the way factories had.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/opinion/sunday/white-resentment-on-the-night-shift-at-walmart.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&src=trending&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Trending&pgtype=article
Dustlawyer
(10,495 posts)Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)I believe that of all the sectors out there, the one in most need of Unions is Retail and it is the most difficult to organize due in large part to the transient nature of the jobs.