Organizing the Unorganized in a Multinational of Online Services? The Digital Shift of the Organization United for Respect at Walmart
This article focuses on Organization United for Respect at Walmart, one of the major labour organizing campaigns that has been mounted in the United States over the past decade. In 7 years, OUR Walmart (OWM) achieved a series of victories over the giant retailer, which for 50 years remained inflexible in the face of all forms of employee demands (referred to as “Associates”). From its emergence as an association funded by one of the major North American trade union organizations in 2011, until its continuation independently of union funding after 2014, by means of what mechanisms and practices did OWM expand, sustain, and manage to obtain from the multinational a series of minimum wage increases for more than one million employees? The article highlights the variety of concrete practices involved in organizing employees within a multinational service company through a study of the OWM association. In particular, it underscores the evolution of the association’s increasingly successful and innovative use of digital technologies between 2013 and 2018. The effort to organize Walmart’s employees thus went from being a field campaign orchestrated by a large trade union in its early days to becoming an independent campaign with a much smaller staff and fewer financial resources. OWM thus brought about a shift in technology and in organizational networking through digital innovations and active employee participation. This shift provided an opportunity to make racial and gender inequalities visible while promoting the co-construction of large-scale professional solidarity in companies and sectors that had previously been considered out of reach and which today, though considered essential, are particularly exposed to workplace health and safety hazards.