Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1
percent of the entire American workforce--young adults, parents,
formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one
possible future of work--Walmartism--in which the arbitrary authority of
managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled
bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers' ability to control their
working conditions and their lives.
In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how
workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to
consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the
obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle
for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that
lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a
part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a
nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the
Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow
the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of
collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social
change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize
service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative
suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array
of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data,
and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a
sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes
important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the
centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.
