Walmart’s low prices rest on surveilled, union-busted precarious workers

Evidence

Of course, Walmart’s low prices are borne on the backs of its rankand-file workers, the majority of whom are part-time, temporary and precarious and whose poor working conditions, minimal income and boredom are the stuff of legend and popular humour (Discounting rights 2007; Gogoi 2007a; Lichtenstein 2010; Zimmerman and Hudson 2006). As in the broader American and global economy, the distribution and intensity of new forms of precarity are more heavily borne by women, migrants, racialized and otherwise marginalized workers (Discounting rights 2007; Featherstone 2004; Rosen 2006). These conditions persist in no small part because of Walmart’s extreme forms of labour surveillance and discipline, including an unprecedented several decades-long war against the risk of trade unions organizing their “associates” (Adams 2006). Techniques include constant CCTV observation of workers, several specialized teams of union-busting managers deployed from corporate headquarters in Bentonville at a moment’s notice (Clark 2007), and the perennial insistence (reinforced through compulsory daily pep-talks and chants) that Walmart is an egalitarian team doing good in the world by lowering the prices on consumer “necessities” (Rosenbloom 2009). Walmart is not averse to shutting whole stores that are at risk of unionization (Lichtenstein 2010, 165–196). Indeed, unions, like other social justice groups, rank as key targets of what Walmart calls its “threat research” division, made up in large part of former military and police personnel, who keep files on union organizers and activists, set up front groups to defend the corporation, infiltrate and spy on threatening organizations, and comb through Walmart’s massive databanks for labour or consumer misbehaviour (Zimmerman and McWilliams 2007). Here Walmart imports, refines and exports the militarized logic of risk management in order to control its population of over 140 million shoppers per week (Annual Report 2014, 6). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 294

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing everyday life — Walmart as the retail face of financialized corporate structure disciplining labor through militarized surveillance.
• SEED: The corporate ‘threat research’ division borrowing military/police personnel is a strong angle for an essay on how private surveillance replaces the desiccated public sphere.