Women Strikers Occupy Chain Stores, Win Big. Dana Frank
or a woman cleaning up—they would be exploited even more than the white workers.
As for today, the most obvious parallel is Walmart. Walmart is one of the biggest forces in the world driving down labor costs and working conditions, not just in its stores but equally importantly in the factories that supply it, all over the world. That’s why its products are so cheap. It creates poverty all around the globe, and then turns around and sells those products to other poor people whose poverty it has helped create, and rakes in the money. I mean, here’s Walmart. It has 1.4 million workers in the United States and 2.4 million around the world—and that’s not counting the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of workers who manufacture the products it sells. It creates enormous wealth for the Walton family and other stockholders. Listen to this statistic: in 2007, the combined wealth of the six Walmart heirs was bigger than that of the entire poorest thirty percent of the United States’ population. That is huge! These six people have more wealth than the entire bottom third of the United States! I think those types of numbers make people realize that something is fundamentally wrong. And WalMart is just the tip of a global iceberg of corporate-generated wealth; it’s just one example.
So, what are you going to do about it? What’s awesome about the Woolworth story—and you can see this in some parts of Occupy Wall Street—is that these young women were absolutely ordinary young people, they did not have a history of activism. They saw what their brothers and boyfriends and family members had done at General Motors and they said, “Hey, we can do that too!” They believed in themselves. They knew that the iron was hot, but they also had a sense of “We can do this, just by ourselves.” They did have major help with allies in the labor movement, but it was their idea. They also knew how to sustain themselves emotionally because it was scary to be occupying a chain store in the middle of the night. The police could have blasted in at any moment. It was their bravery and their sense that enough is enough and we can take on Woolworth’s and win. And that spread all over the city and country. This wasn’t just about one group of women in one store. It spread to another store in Detroit. It spread to fifteen stores in New York City and it spread to all kinds of other stores around the U.S. It was about people believing that organizing works. And, of course, the big point of the story is that, amazingly, organizing did work. It was a complete victory.
They were also very smart and creative about running it themselves inside the store, for the most part. The initiative came from below, and I think there’s a lesson there about successful organizing. There’s a major lesson at the end of the strike, too. It was initiated and led by women, but they were cut out of the negotiation process at the end by the male union officials who came in to strike the deal with the company. So, what did that mean in terms of what we would now call union democracy and the internal democratic process of the movement? One of the things that’s been beautiful about Occupy Wall Street is to watch people developing new forms of democratic decision-making. In the case of the Woolworth’s strike, we don’t know that much about what was going on inside the store. We know they developed their own committees to run things, and had an incredible culture of resistance, as historians would call it, but we also know that at the end, the big decisions about what they’d win were not, for the most part, under their control. So, we have to think about what we are modeling when we run occupations, in terms of what kind of a society, what types of relationships among ourselves we are building, and how gender and racial politics and class differences are going to play out.
You asked about the media. Much of the mainstream media was very supportive of the Woolworth strikers—that was a big part of what made it possible for them to stay in the store, and win. The headlines I used in the text are mostly real, although I made up the original title, “Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big.” You would see headlines like that all the time during 1937. Today, you can see peeps here and there of sympathy—like one mainstream report on Occupy San Francisco that emphasized that the demonstrators had gone out of their way to isolate and discourage anyone who sought to damage a nearby ATM. The reporters and editors themselves are usually union members. But they’re under tremendous pressure from their own bosses. So you almost never ever see a headline that affirms that Organizing Works! Striking Gets You Health Care! Warmongers Don’t Invade Country X Because of Mass Protests!
Can you talk about this question of democracy within the occupation and the demands these young women, and we should say very young women, I think the average age was eighteen or nineteen, placed on the bosses? Within Occupy Wall Street there is a strong current of concern that raising any set of demands necessarily puts you at risk of being co-opted back into the system. So, how did Woolworth workers articulate their demands, and how, given this problem you raised about union officials taking over the negotiations, how do you see what we might call partial victories?
I have a tremendous respect for the process politics of Occupy Wall Street and the way that people have been experimenting with not moving too quickly toward saying, “Here’s our one thing we want.” They want to embrace so many issues, and that’s really important. We absolutely need to think big about connecting the dots of social injustice. I myself think, though, that you have to have some concrete demands that you can win—and then you ask for lots more! That keeps you going, while you keep driving in your point about the big changes, and groping toward the middle-level road to those changes. You do need to feel a deep sense, however small, of “Gee, we did that. Look what we got,” while simultaneously keeping clear that small steps will not solve the underlying problems. You have to have a sense as a movement that organizing worked, while being open to saying, “Wait a minute, did that lead us right back to where we were when we started?” André Gorz famously wrote in 1967 that you should ask for impossible demands that the system cannot satisfy.
In the case of the Woolworth strikers, they did win wage increases, improvements in working conditions, and union recognition, but they didn’t solve the larger structural problem of Woolworth’s as a huge capitalist firm following the logic of profit unfettered. They did put brakes on that exploitation, and they did help redistribute the wealth, if you take not just the Detroit case but all the organizing of retail clerks reaching well into the 1940s, inspired by the Woolworth’s workers. But then you have to think about whether that movement then did or didn’t contribute to a process of long-term structural change. Did it take on deep economic structures? Did it challenge capitalism, which continually regenerates wealth and inequality in its very nature?
One of the differences you raise between Woolworth’s as it existed in the 1930s and Walmart today is the fact that, if Woolworth’s began to incorporate international production into its supply chain in the 1930s, then Walmart today has taken the process to the most extreme degree possible. So, we see that most of Walmart’s consumer goods come from China, from other Asian countries, all of which has to come through the ports, making Walmart a truly international corporation. And, in terms of the workforce, if Woolworth’s refused to hire people of color in the 1930s, today Walmart employs black, white, Asian, Latino workers. They are young, middle-aged, elderly, men, women, gay, straight, and on and on. In other words, Walmart’s workforce is tremendously diverse, despite the fact that Walmart’s management retains discriminatory promotional and hiring policies. What are the specific challenges facing organizers in these circumstances?
Walmart is very specific because it is so global and so big, but the formula that it uses is the same used by Best Buy or Target or Starbucks or most any huge employer. They are looking for the cheapest labor they can get, they are driving labor costs down by making the job as simple as possible—exactly like Woolworth’s did—and they’ll take whatever cheap labor force they can find. Walmart is looking for whoever is most vulnerable and is going to have to take the job because they don’t have other opportunities, in part because of racism and sexism. Of course, we know how badly Walmart has also been discriminating at higher levels of management. It also discriminates against older people, defining positions like clerks to include stocking shelves, so older people won’t be able to do it, and the company saves on health costs. I think the sheer baldness of the way in which Walmart exploits all its workers gives people a common ground, because they know they are all getting the same bad wages, the same crummy benefits, if any. They all know they can be fired the minute their supervisor, who’s watching them on a spy camera, doesn’t like the way they just burped. It’s an opportunity for unity.