How Workers are Using Globalization Against Walmart
Truthout
Matthew CunninghamCook
The recent Walmart strikes — beginning first among warehouse workers in California, then spreading to others in Elwood, Illinois, and finally to Walmart retail stores across the United States — raise the possibility that workers may be able to crack the anti-union wall at the country’s largest employer. The new momentum seems likely to spread among many more workplaces to come. But these wildcat strikes are a reminder that, if American workers are to have a better-organized future, they will have to better understand where their corporate opponents are vulnerable.
The Walmart strikes are part of a significant reevaluation of organizing strategy by labor unions and activists in the context of the continuing decline of unionism in the United States — where fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector belong to a union. As Nadine Bloch pointed out two weeks ago, such wildcat strikes on multiple levels of the supply chain at Walmart are unprecedented, and groups like OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers for Justice are planning to escalate the campaign in the coming weeks.
Over the past three decades, there has been a tremendous shift in the work lives of almost everyone in the United States wrought by processes of globalization. With the deregulation of trade in favor of multinational corporations (exemplified in trade deals such as NAFTA), and the emergence of hyper-specialization, most major commodities are now produced with components manufactured all over the world, selected through a competitive bidding process that aims to extract the maximum profit.