Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (21 page)

I test this theory out on Isabelle: that our job is to constantly re-create the stage setting in which women can act out. That without us, rates of child abuse would suddenly soar. That we function, in a way, as therapists and should probably be paid accordingly, at $50 to $100 an hour. “You just go on thinking that,” she says, shaking her head. But she smiles her canny little smile in a way that makes me think it's not a bad notion.

With competence comes a new impatience: Why does anybody put up with the wages
we're paid? True, most of my fellow workers are better cushioned than I am;
they live with spouses or grown children or they have other jobs in addition
to this one. I sit with Lynne in the break room one night and find out this
is only a part-time job for her-six hours a day—with the other eight hours spent
at a factory for $9 an hour. Doesn't she get awfully tired? Nah, it's what she's
always done. The cook at the Radio Grill has two other jobs. You might expect
a bit of grumbling, some signs here and there of unrest—graffiti on the hortatory
posters in the break room, muffled guffaws during our associate meetings—but
I can detect none of that. Maybe this is what you get when you weed out all
the rebels with drug tests and personality “surveys”—a uniformly servile and
denatured workforce, content to dream of the distant day when they'll be vested
in the company's profit-sharing plan. They even join in the “Wal-Mart cheer”
when required to do so at meetings, I'm told by the evening fitting room lady,
though I am fortunate enough never to witness this final abasement.
[31]

But if it's hard to think “out of the box,” it may be almost impossible to think out of the Big Box. Wal-Mart, when you're in it, is total—a closed system, a world unto itself. I get a chill when I'm watching TV in the break room one afternoon and see. . . a commercial for Wal-Mart. When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world. Sure, you can drive for five minutes and get somewhere else—to Kmart, that is, or Home Depot, or Target, or Burger King, or Wendy's, or KFC. Wherever you look, there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices. Even the woods and the meadows have been stripped of disorderly life forms and forced into a uniform made of concrete. What you see—highways, parking lots, stores—is all there is, or all that's left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized, paved-over, corporatized everything. I like to read the labels to find out where the clothing we sell is made—Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Brazil—but the labels serve only to remind me that none of these places is “exotic” anymore, that they've all been eaten by the great blind profit-making global machine.

The only thing to do is ask: Why do you—why do we—work here? Why do you stay? So when Isabelle praises my work a second time (!), I take the opportunity to say I really appreciate her encouragement, but I can't afford to live on $7 an hour, and how does she do it? The answer is that she lives with her grown daughter, who also works, plus the fact that she's worked here two years, during which her pay has shot up to $7.75 an hour. She counsels patience: it could happen to me. Melissa, who has the advantage of a working husband, says, “Well, it's a job.” Yes, she made twice as much when she was a waitress but that place closed down and at her age she's never going to be hired at a high-tip place. I recognize the inertia, the unwillingness to start up with the apps and the interviews and the drug tests again. She thinks she should give it a year. A year? I tell her I'm wondering whether I should give it another week.

A few days later something happens to make kindly, sweet-natured Melissa mad.
She gets banished to bras, which is terra incognita for us—huge banks of shelves
bearing barely distinguishable bi-coned objects-for a three-hour stretch. I
know how she feels, because I was once sent over to work for a couple of hours
in men's wear, where I wandered uselessly through the strange thickets of racks,
numbed by the sameness of colors and styles.
[32]
It's the difference between working and pretending to work. You push your cart
a few feet, pause significantly with item in hand, frown at the ambient racks,
then push on and repeat the process. “I just don't like wasting their money,”
Melissa says when she's allowed back. “I mean they're paying me and I just wasn't
accomplishing anything over there.” To me, this anger seems badly mis-aimed.
What does she think, that the Walton family is living in some hidden room in
the back of the store, in the utmost frugality, and likely to be ruined by $21
worth of wasted labor? I'm starting in on that theme when she suddenly dives
behind the rack that separates the place where we're standing, in the Jordache/No
Boundaries section, from the Faded Glory region. Worried that I may have offended
her somehow, I follow right behind. “Howard,” she whispers. “Didn't you see
him come by? We're not allowed to talk to each other, you know.”

“The point is our time is so cheap they don't care if we waste it,” I continue, aware even as I speak that this isn't true, otherwise why would they be constantly monitoring us for “time theft”? But I sputter on: “That's what's so insulting.” Of course, in this outburst of militance I am completely not noticing the context—two women of mature years, two very hardworking women, as it happens, dodging behind a clothing rack to avoid a twenty-six-year-old management twerp. That's not even worth commenting on. Alyssa is another target for my crusade. When she returns to check yet again on that $7 polo, she finds a stain on it. What could she get off for that? I think 10 percent, and if you add in the 10 percent employee discount, we'd be down to $5.60. I'm trying to negotiate a 20 percent price reduction with the fitting room lady when—rotten luck!--Howard shows up and announces that there are no reductions and no employee discounts on clearanced items. Those are the rules. Alyssa looks crushed, and I tell her, when Howard's out of sight, that there's something wrong when you're not paid enough to buy a Wal-Mart shirt, a clearanced Wal-Mart shirt with a stain on it. “I hear you,” she says, and admits Wal-Mart isn't working for her either, if the goal is to make a living.

Then I get a little reckless. When an associate meeting is announced over the loudspeaker that afternoon, I decide to go, although most of my coworkers stay put. I don't understand the purpose of these meetings, which occur every three days or so and consist largely of attendance taking, unless it's Howard's way of showing us that there's only one of him compared to so many of us. I'm just happy to have a few minutes to sit down or, in this case, perch on some fertilizer bags since we're meeting in lawn and garden today, and chat with whoever shows up, today a gal from the optical department. She's better coifed and made up than most of us female associates—forced to take the job because of a recent divorce, she tells me, and sorry now that she's found out how crummy the health insurance is. There follows a long story about preexisting conditions and deductibles and her COBRA running out. I listen vacantly because, like most of the other people in my orientation group, I hadn't opted for the health insurance—the employee contribution seemed too high. “You know what we need here?” I finally respond. “We need a union.” There it is, the word is out. Maybe if I hadn't been feeling so footsore I wouldn't have said it, and I probably wouldn't have said it either if we were allowed to say “hell” and “damn” now and then or, better yet, “shit.” But no one has outright banned the word union and right now it's the most potent couple of syllables at hand. “We need something,” she responds.

After that, there's nothing to stop me. I'm on a mission now: Raise the questions!
Plant the seeds! Breaks finally have a purpose beyond getting off my feet. There
are hundreds of workers here—I never do find out how many—and sooner or later
I'll meet them all. I reject the break room for this purpose because the TV
inhibits conversation, and for all I know that's what it's supposed to do. Better
to go outdoors to the fenced-in smoking area in front of the store. Smokers,
in smoke-free America, are more likely to be rebels; at least that was true
at The Maids, where the nonsmokers waited silently in the office for work to
begin, while the smokers out on the sidewalk would be having a raucous old time.
Besides, you can always start the ball rolling by asking for a light, which
I have to do anyway when the wind is up. The next question is, “What department
are you in?” followed by, “How long have you worked here?” from which it's an
obvious segue to the business at hand. Almost everyone is eager to talk, and
I soon become a walking repository of complaints. No one gets paid overtime
at Wal-Mart, I'm told, though there's often pressure to work it.
[33]
Many feel the health insurance isn't worth paying for. There's a lot of frustration
over schedules, especially in the case of the evangelical lady who can never
get Sunday morning off, no matter how much she pleads. And always there are
the gripes about managers: the one who is known for sending new hires home in
tears, the one who takes a ruler and knocks everything off what he regards as
a messy shelf, so you have to pick it up off the floor and start over.

Sometimes, I discover, my favorite subject, which is the abysmal rate of pay, seems to be a painful one. Stan, for example, a twenty-something fellow with wildly misaligned teeth, is so eager to talk that he fairly pounces on the seat next to mine on a bench in the smoking area. But when the subject arrives at wages, his face falls. The idea, see, was that he would go to school (he names a two-year technical school) while he worked, but the work cut into studying too much, so he had to drop out and now. . . He stares at the butt-strewed ground, perhaps seeing an eternity in appliances unfold before him. I suggest that what we need is a union, but from the look on his face I might as well have said gumballs or Prozac. Yeah, maybe he'll go over and apply at Media One, where a friend works and the wages are higher. . . Try school again, umm. . .

At the other extreme, there are people like Marlene. I am sitting out there talking to a doll-like blonde whom I had taken for a high school student but who, it turns out, has been working full-time since November and is fretting over whether she can afford to buy a car. Marlene comes out for her break, lights a cigarette, and emphatically seconds my opinion of Wal-Mart wages. “They talk about having spirit,” she says, referring to management, “but they don't give us any reason to have any spirit.” In her view, Wal-Mart would rather just keep hiring new people than treating the ones it has decently. You can see for yourself there's a dozen new people coming in for orientation every day—which is true. Wal-Mart's appetite for human flesh is insatiable; we've even been urged to recruit any Kmart employees we may happen to know. They don't care that they've trained you or anything, Marlene goes on, they can always get someone else if you complain. Emboldened by her vehemence, I risk the red-hot word again. “I know this goes against the whole Wal-Mart philosophy, but we could use a union here.” She grins, so I push on: “It's not just about money, it's about dignity.” She nods fiercely, lighting a second cigarette from her first. Put that woman on the organizing committee at once, I direct my imaginary coconspirators as I leave.

All right, I'm not a union organizer anymore than I'm Wal-Mart “management
material,” as Isabelle has hinted. In fact, I don't share the belief, held by
many union staffers, that unionization would be a panacea. Sure, almost any
old union would boost wages and straighten out some backbones here, but I know
that even the most energetic and democratic unions bear careful watching by
their members. The truth, which I can't avoid acknowledging when I'm in those
vast, desertlike stretches between afternoon breaks, is that I'm just amusing
myself, and in what seems like a pretty harmless way. Someone has to puncture
the prevailing fiction that we're a “family” here, we “associates” and our “servant
leaders,” held together solely by our commitment to the “guests.” After all,
you'd need a lot stronger word than dysfunctional to describe a family where
a few people get to eat at the table while the rest—the “associates” and all
the dark-skinned seamstresses and factory workers worldwide who make the things
we sell lick up the drippings from the floor: psychotic would be closer to the
mark.
[34]
And someone has to flush out the
mysterious “we” lurking in the “our” in the “Our people make the difference”
statement we wear on our backs. It might as well be me because I have nothing
to lose, less than nothing, in fact. For each day that I fail to find cheaper
quarters, which is every day now, I am spending $49.95 for the privilege of
putting clothes away at Wal-Mart. At this rate, I'll have burned through the
rest of the $1,200 I've allotted for my life in Minneapolis in less than a week.

I could use some amusement. I have been discovering a great truth about low-wage work and probably a lot of medium-wage work, too—that nothing happens, or rather the same thing always happens, which amounts, day after day, to nothing. This law doesn't apply so strictly to the service jobs I've held so far. In waitressing, you always have new customers to study; even housecleaning offers the day's parade of houses to explore. But here—well, you know what I do and how it gets undone and how I just start all over and do it again. How did I think I was going to survive in a factory, where each minute is identical to the next one, and not just each day? There will be no crises here, except perhaps in the pre-Christmas rush. There will be no “Code M,” meaning “hostage situation,” and probably no Code F or T (I'm guessing on these letters, which I didn't write down during my note taking at orientation and which may be a company secret anyway), meaning fire or tornado—no opportunities for courage or extraordinary achievement or sudden evacuations of the store. Those breaking-news moments when a disgruntled former employee shoots up the place or a bunch of people get crushed in an avalanche of piled-up stock are one-in-a-million events. What my life holds is carts-full ones, then empty ones, then full ones again.