This is my first-ever diary, and it’ll probably ramble all over the place, so let me just apologize here in the front.
Here’s the sitch:
I work at that "corporate Death Star" Wal-Mart (thanks, Dirk McQuigley), and have for many years. I’ve worked many positions over the years, but I’m currently a "photo specialist", developing film, printing pictures, selling cameras, etc. It’s fairly skilled work, and we are fairly well-payed, compared to many other positions in the store.
This year, Wal-Mart has been "restructuring," which is corpro-speak for "raising productivity on the backs of the hourly employees." Basically, they have eliminated half the hourly department manager positions in most stores and made the folks who are left manage two or three departments instead of just one.
What this has meant for me is that my department manager, also a "photo specialist", now runs the Toy department as well as our lab, and we are expected to work in Toys whenever we have "too many people" scheduled in the Photo Lab. We got used to this. Our manager was never available to actually manage our department, ‘cause face it, Toys is a total disaster- chronically understaffed, a huge time-sucking black hole of evil. We got used to doing her job for her. We felt sorry for her. Things were slipping; our normally tight-run ship foundered a little, but we got by.
Now, as an aside, I should add that the folks hired to work in Toys make a few cents over minimum wage, fairly or unfairly, as it is an unskilled (but terrible!) job. So we, when we go over there to help, are being paid quite a bit more than the poor schmucks that have to do it all the time (at least for now). We don’t understand how this helps Wal-Mart save money, which is supposedly the point of the exercise, but hey! What the hell do we know? We just work there.
So, fast-forward to yesterday. A new change has come down the pike: "Too many people in the photo-lab" has now been re-defined to mean "Anything greater than one person." At any given time, if more than one person has been scheduled to work in the lab, all but one must go work in Toys, or maybe Cosmetics, perhaps Sporting Goods, maybe check people out... you get the picture. Never mind that it is completely impossible to actually do our jobs correctly at that level of staffing. Forget adequately serve the customers.
Well, I went home and got drunk.
For the first time ever.
I am thirty-two.
Ack.
I feel better now.
Let me say that I am aware that I am incredibly lucky to have a paying job at all, and that even raising this subject (bitching, you might say) may imply some tone-deafness considering the sufferings of the unemployed. And having to cover three or four departments instead of the one that you are actually trained to do may seem like a strange thing to get all het up about anyway- what’s the Big Fucking Deal? Well, taken by itself, it really isn’t.
This is just a taste of the things that have gone on over the years that I have worked for Wal-Mart. They have pushed productivity like this in little incremental steps many times, letting turnover take care of "extra" jobs so that they won’t have to risk the bad publicity of layoffs. They indulge in sexism, favoritism, racism, nepotism, practically every "ism" you can name, and there is little the government can do about it. They have zillion-dollar an hour lawyers and lobbyists and they get what they want. I was part of a class action lawsuit against them and was offered a whole $50 compensation for not getting state-mandated breaks and lunches. Whoo frakking hoo. They do what they want, heck- they even kill folks on the job and refuse to pay the OSHA fines, as Dirk McQuigley’s fine diary shows. And the American public lets them, and practically every other giant corporation get away with it.
I think that my lab is a microcosm of the American workplace, especially the minimum-wage set. We are utterly powerless. Wal-Mart decides to cut our hours- what can we do? Wal-Mart decides to cut benefits? Wal-Mart decides to redefine our job and have us do the work of three? What can we do? Absolutely nothing, in this economy. ‘Cause let’s face it, where would we go, McDonald’s? And if you were thinking that this makes you glad you shop at Target, don’t kid yourself. It is like this everywhere.
We, the minimum-wagers, are disposable, essentially worthless cogs in the corporate machine, made to be ground up and spat out when we’re no more use to them, or when we get uppity and start agitating for any rights at all. They have all the power and we have none. Our only defense used to be that we could come together and refuse to work until things changed, but even that is denied us: we are too scared. Every Day Low Prices have accustomed us to a certain way of life, a level of consumption that we are loathe to lose. Have you ever tried hanging your $199 32" LCD TV on the wall of a cardboard box?
I know nothing of unions or labor movements. I am planning (now) to educate myself, but Wal-Mart has spent gazillions of dollars over the years making sure that I knew that labor unions were nasty things that take your money and leave you worse off than you were before, and besides, we have the Three Basic Beliefs and the Open Door Policy, why would you need a union? I was dumb enough to buy this for a long time. No more. EFCA may be the answer, but who will pass it? The UFCW has been trying to unionize us as long as I have worked there, and so far have little to show for all their laudable efforts. From Mother Jones: "We'll never bring Wal-Mart to the table store by store," says Bernie Hesse, an organizer for UFCW Local 789 in Minneapolis. "I can get all the cards signed I want, and they'll still crush us. They'll close the frigging store, I'm convinced. We've got to do it in conjunction with the community."
There are so many of us, and so few of them, and it does not matter. They have the power. We have to do something- it’s just that I am at a loss to suggest what that something might be. Simply writing this post is risky behavior. People have lost jobs for less, and while I don’t have an LCD TV, I do have a house payment and a mass of other debt to pay off, like most of the population, and I would like to be able to do so. So I guess I am part of the problem.
I may go and get drunk for the second time in my life now.
Edited to say: Thanks to all of you. I just can't say how much it means to me. We can fight. We will fight. You have not heard the last from me!