Why most Walmart workers didn't strike

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Nona Willis Aronowitz, Nation - One in ten employed Americans now work in food service; the 200 who walked off the job in New York City are a tiny fraction. When you remember that Walmart’s 4,000 United States locations employ 1.4 million people, a few thousand people striking sounds almost like a fluke. Americans are increasingly realizing that the wage gap is weakening the economy for us all, but a push to unionize the service sector may be a longer, harder fight than organizers suggest.

.... I recently visited the Walmart in Secaucus, NJ—one of the stores where workers staged a Black Friday demonstration with a group called OUR Walmart—and out of the fifteen employees I spoke with, not one had ever been part of a union. Several weren’t sure what a union is. Many of them waved me off with a worried “no, no no,” even though their managers were nowhere to be found. One worker named Jon told me “all [unions] do is take dues from you.” None of them had participated in the strike a few days before.

“I got bills,” said Ida Allen, who stocks the produce department. “And some people go out there and fight for their jobs and they lose their jobs. I mean, look at Hostess. I ain’t got time for that. My bills keep coming.”

Many employees assume they’re going to be dismissed or have their hours cut if they try to organize. (They’re right to be anxious—after striking at Burger King, Pamela Flood’s hours were mysteriously cut in half.) When I asked Monica, an 18-year-old Walmart worker, what she was afraid of, she said “mainly [getting] fired” because “technically you’re going against the store.” Of course, retaliation for attempting to unionize is illegal. But many employees don’t know that, and fighting retaliation often sends employees into a maze of unpleasant legal action. Either way, Monica said, she’d only been working there two weeks—it was too much of a risk to protest.