No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  Branded Work: Hobbies, Not Jobs

  Though an entire class of consumer-goods companies has transcended the need to produce what it sells, so far not even the most weightless multinational has been able to free itself entirely from the burden of employees. Production may be relegated to contractors, but clerks are still needed to sell the brand-name goods at the point of purchase, especially given the growth of branded retail. In the service industry, however, big-brand employers have become artful at dodging most commitments to their employees, expertly fostering the notion that their clerks are somehow not quite legitimate workers, and thus do not really need or deserve job security, livable wages and benefits.

  Most of the large employers in the service sector manage their workforce as if their clerks didn’t depend on their paychecks for anything essential, such as rent or child support. Instead, retail and service employers tend to view their employees as children: students looking for summer jobs, spending money or a quick stopover on the road to a more fulfilling and better-paying career. These are great jobs, in other words, for people who don’t really need them. And so the mall and the superstore have given birth to a ballooning subcategory of joke jobs —the frozen-yogurt jerk, the Orange Julius juicer, the Gap greeter, the Prozac-happy Wal-Mart “sales associate” —that are notoriously unstable, low-paying and overwhelmingly part-time. (See Table 10.1, Appendix.)

  What is distressing about this trend is that over the past two decades, the relative importance of the service sector as a source of jobs has soared. The decline in manufacturing, as well as the waves of downsizing and cutbacks in the public sector, have been met by dramatic growth in the numbers of service-sector jobs to the extent that services and retail now account for 75 percent of total U.S. employment.2 (See Table 10.2.) Today, there are four and a half times as many Americans selling clothes in specialty and department stores as there are workers stitching and weaving them, and Wal-Mart isn’t just the biggest retailer in the world, it is also the largest private employer in the United States.

  And yet despite these shifts in employment patterns, most brand-name retail, service and restaurant chains have opted to put on economic blinders, insisting that they are still offering hobby jobs for kids. Never mind that the service sector is now filled with workers who have multiple university degrees, immigrants unable to find manufacturing jobs, laid-off nurses and teachers, and downsized middle managers. Never mind, too, that the students who do work in retail and fast food —as many of them do —are facing higher tuition costs, less financial assistance from parents and government and more years in school. Never mind that the food service workforce has been steadily aging over the last decade so that more than half are now over twenty-five years old. (See Table 10.3, Appendix.) Or that a 1997 study found that 25 percent of non-management Canadian retail workers had been with the same company for eleven years or more and that 39 percent had been there for between four and ten years.3 That’s a lot longer than “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap lasted as CEO of Sunbeam Corp. But never mind all that. Everyone knows that a job in the service sector is a hobby, and retail is a place where people go for “experience,” not a livelihood.

  Nowhere has this message been more successfully absorbed than at the cash register and the takeout counter, where many workers say they feel as if they are just passing through even after logging a decade in the McWork sector. Brenda Hilbrich, who works at Borders Books and Music in Manhattan, explains how difficult it is to reconcile the quality of her employment with a sense of personal success: “You’re stuck with this dichotomy of ‘I’m supposed to do better but yet I can’t because I can’t find another job.’ So you tell yourself, ‘I’m only here temporarily because I’m going to find something better.’”4 This internalized state of perpetual transience has been convenient for service-sector employers who have been free to let wages stagnate and to provide little room for upward mobility, since there is no urgent need to improve the conditions of jobs that everyone agrees are only temporary. Borders clerk Jason Chappell says that the retail chains work hard to reinforce feelings of transience in their workers in order to protect this highly profitable formula. “So much of the company propaganda is convincing you that you’re not workers, that it’s something else, that you’re not working class…. Everyone thinks they are middle class even when they’re making $13,000 a year.”5

  Table 10.2

  Employment by Selected Industry, 1997

  I met with Chappell and Hilbrich late one night in October 1997, at a deli in Manhattan’s financial district. We chose this place because it was close to the Borders outlet at the base of the World Trade Center where they both work. I had heard about the pair because of their successful efforts to bring a union to Borders, part of a flurry of labor organizing inside the large chains since the mid-nineties: at Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s. It seems as if more and more of the twenty-something-going-on-thirty-something clerks working for the super-brands are looking around — at the counters in front of them where they serve Sumatran coffee, and at the best-selling books, and made-in-China sweaters —and are acknowledging that, for better or worse, some of them aren’t going anywhere fast. Laurie Bonang, who works at Starbucks in Vancouver, British Columbia, told me that “people our age are finally realizing that we get out of university, we’re a zillion dollars in debt, and we’re working in Starbucks. This isn’t how we want to spend the rest of our lives, but for right now the dream job isn’t waiting for us anymore…. I was hoping that Starbucks would be a stepping stone to bigger and better things, but unfortunately it’s a stepping stone to a big sinkhole.”6

  As Bonang told her story, she was painfully aware that she is living out one of the most hackneyed pop-culture clichés of our branded age: this is the stuff of Saturday Night Live’s “Gap Girls” skit, circa 1993, in which bored, underemployed mall chicks ask each other: “Didja cinch it?” Or of the Starbucks “baristas” who rattle off long trains of coffee adjectives —grande-decaf-low-fat-moccacino —in movies like You’ve Got Mail. But there is a reason why the most vocally unhappy service-sector workers are the ones working for the highest-profile global retailers and restaurants. Large chains such as Wal-Mart, Starbucks and the Gap, as they have proliferated since the mid-eighties, have been lowering workplace standards in the service sector, fueling their marketing budgets, imperialistic expansion and high-concept “retail experiences” by lowballing their clerks on wages and hours. Most of the big-name brands in the service sector pay the legal minimum wage or slightly more, even though the average wage for retail workers is several dollars higher.7 Wal-Mart clerks in the U.S., for instance, earn an average of $7.50 an hour and since Wal-Mart classifies “full time” as twenty-eight hours a week, the average annual income is $10,920 —significantly less than the industry average. (See Table 10.4, Appendix.)8 Kmart wages are also low and the benefits are considered so substandard that when a 172,000-square-foot Super Kmart opened in San Jose, California, in October 1997, the local city council voted to endorse a boycott of the retailer. Council member Margie Fernandes said that the low wages, minimal health benefits and part-time hours are far below those provided by other area retailers, and that these are not the kind of jobs the community needs. “San Jose is a very, very expensive place to live and we need to make sure the people who work here can afford to live here,” Fernandes explained.9

  McDonald’s and Starbucks staff, meanwhile, frequently earn less than the employees of single-outlet restaurants and cafés, which explains why McDonald’s is widely credited for pioneering the throwaway “McJob” that the entire fast-food industry has since moved to emulate. At Britain’s McLibel Trial, in which the company contested claims made by two Green peace activists about its employment practices, international trade unionist Dan Gallin defined a McJob as “a low skill, low pay, high stress, exhausting and unstable job.”10 Though the activists on trial for libel were found guilty on several counts, in his verdict Chief Ju
stice Rodger Bell ruled that in the matter of McJobs the defendants had a point. The chain has had a negative impact on food-service wages as a whole, he wrote, and the allegation that McDonald’s “pays its workers low wages, helping to depress wages for workers in the catering trade in Britain has been proved to be true. It is justified.”11

  As we have seen in Cavite, the brand-name multinationals have freed themselves of the burden of providing employees with a living wage. In the malls of North America and England, on the high street, in the food court and at the superstore, they have managed a similar trick. In some cases, particularly in the garment sector, these retailers are the very same companies that are doing business in the export processing zones, meaning that their responsibilities as employers have been sharply reduced at both the production and service ends of the economic cycle. Wal-Mart and the Gap, for instance, contract out their production to EPZs dotting the Southern Hemisphere, where goods are produced mostly by women in their teens and twenties who earn minimum wage or less and live in cramped dorm rooms. Those goods — sweatshirts, baby clothes, toys and Walkmans — are then sold by another workforce, concentrated in the North, which is also largely filled with young people earning approximately minimum wage, most in their teens and early twenties.

  Though in many ways it is indecent to compare the relative privilege of retail workers at the mall with the abuse and exploitation suffered by zone workers, there is an undeniable pattern at work. In general, the corporations in question have ensured that they do not have to confront the possibility that adults with families are depending on the wages that they pay, whether at the mall or in the zone. Just as factory jobs that once supported families have been reconfigured in the Third World as jobs for teenagers, so have the brand-name clothing companies and restaurant chains given legitimacy to the idea that fast-food and retail-sector jobs are disposable, and unfit for adults.

  As in the zones, the youthfulness of the sector is far from accidental. It reflects a distinct preference on the part of service-sector employers, achieved through a series of overt and covert management actions. Young workers are consistently hired over older ones, and workers who have been on staff for a few years —building up higher wages and seniority —often report losing precious shifts to new batches of younger and cheaper clerks. Other anti-adult tactics have included the targeting of older workers for harassment —the issue that served as the catalyst for the first strike at a McDonald’s outlet. In April 1998, after witnessing a verbally abusive supervisor reduce an elderly co-worker to tears, the teenage workers at the Golden Arches in Macedonia, Ohio, walked off the job in protest. They didn’t return until management agreed to undergo “people skills” training. “We get verbally harassed, and physically too. Not me, but basically just the elderly woman,” teen striker Bryan Drapp said on Good Morning America. Drapp was fired two months later.12

  Brenda Hilbrich of Borders contends that justifying low wages on the grounds that young workers are just passing through is a handy self-fulfilling prophecy — particularly in her field, bookselling. “It doesn’t have to have a high turnover,” she says. “If the conditions are good and you’re making a nice salary, people actually like working in the service industry. They like working with books. A lot of people who have left have said, ‘This was my favorite job, but I had to go because I can’t make enough money to live.’”13

  The fact is that the economy needs steady jobs that adults can live on. And it’s clear that many people would stay in retail if it paid adult rates, the proof being that when the sector does pay decently, it attracts older workers, and the rate of staff turnover falls in line with the rest of the economy. But at the large chains, which seem at least for now to have bottomless resources to build superstores and to sink millions into expanding and synergizing their brands, the idea of paying a living wage is rarely considered. At Borders, where most clerks earn wages in line with other bookstore chains but below the retail average, company president Richard L. Flanagan wrote a letter to all his clerks, addressing the question of whether Borders could pay a “living wage” as opposed to what it reportedly pays now —between US$6.63 and $9.27 an hour. “While the concept is romantically appealing,” he wrote, “it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment.”14

  Much of what makes paying a living wage seem so “romantic” has to do with the rapid expansion described in Part II, “No Choice.” For companies whose business plans depend upon becoming dominant in their market before their nearest competitor beats them to it, new outlets come before workers —even when those workers are a key part of the chain’s image. “They expect us to look like a Gap ad, professional, clean and neat all the time, and I can’t even pay to do laundry,” says Laurie Bonang of Starbucks. “You can buy two grande mocha cappuccinos with my hourly salary.” Like millions of her demographic coevals on the payrolls of all-star brands like the Gap, Nike and Barnes & Noble, Bonang is living inside a stunning corporate success story —though you’d never know it from the resignation and anger in her voice. All the brand-name retail workers I spoke with expressed their frustration at helping their stores rake in, to them, unimaginable profits, and then having to watch that profit get funneled into compulsive expansion. Employee wages, meanwhile, stagnate or even decline. At Starbucks in British Columbia new workers faced an actual wage decrease —from Can$7.50 to $7 an hour — during a period when the chain was doubling its profits and opening 350 new stores a year. “I do the banking. I know how much the store pulls in a week,” Laurie Bonang says. “They just take all that revenue and open up new stores.”15

  Borders clerks also maintain that wages have suffered as a result of rapid growth. They say that their chain used to be a more equitable place to work before the neck-and-neck race with Barnes & Noble took over corporate priorities; there was a profit-sharing program and a biannual 5 percent raise for all workers. “Then came expansion and corresponding cuts,” reads a statement from disgruntled employees at a downtown Philadelphia outlet of Borders. “Profit sharing was dropped, raises were cut …”16

  In sharp contrast to the days when corporate employees took pride in their company’s growth, seeing it as the result of a successful group effort, many clerks have come to see themselves as being in direct competition with their employers’ expansion dreams. “If Borders opened thirty-eight new stores a year instead of forty,” reasoned Jason Chappell, sitting next to Brenda Hilbrich on the vinyl seats of our deli booth, “they could afford to give us a nice wage increase. On average it costs $7 million to open a superstore. That’s Borders’ own figures….”

  “But,” Brenda interrupted, “if you say that directly to them, they say, ‘Well, that’s two markets we don’t get into.’”

  “We have to saturate markets,” Chappell said, nodding.

  “Yeah,” Brenda added. “We have to compete with Barnes & Noble.”

  The retail clerks employed by the superchains are only too familiar with the manic logic of expansion.

  Busting the McUnion

  The need to prevent workers from weighing too heavily on the bottom line is the main reason that the branded chains have fought off the recent wave of unionization with such ferocity. McDonald’s, for instance, has been embroiled in bribery scandals during German union drives, and over the course of a 1994 union drive in France, ten McDonald’s managers were arrested for violating labor laws and trade-union rights.17 In June 1998, the company fired the two young workers who organized the strike in Macedonia, Ohio.18 In 1997, when the employees at a Windsor, Ontario, Wal-Mart were about to hold an election on joining a union, a series of not-so-subtle management hints led many workers to believe that if they voted yes their store would be shut down. The Ontario Labour Relations Board reviewed the process and found that the behavior of Wal-Mart managers and supervisors before the vote amounted to “a subtle but extremely effective threat,” which caused “the average reasonable employee to conclude that the store would close if the union go
t in.”19

  Other chains have not hesitated to make good on the threat to close. In 1997, Starbucks decided to shut down its Vancouver distribution plant after workers unionized. In February 1998, just as a union certification for a Montreal-area outlet of McDonald’s was being reviewed by the Quebec Labour Commission, the franchise owner closed down the outlet. Shortly after the closure, the labor commission accredited the union —cold comfort, since no one works there anymore. Six months later, another McDonald’s restaurant was successfully unionized, this one a busy outlet in Squamish, British Columbia, near the Whistler ski resort. The organizers were two teenage girls, one sixteen, the other seventeen. It wasn’t about wages, they said —they were just tired of being scolded like children in front of the customers. The outlet remains open, making it the only unionized McDonald’s in North America, but at the time of writing, the company was on the verge of having the union decertified. Fighting the battle on the public-relations front, in mid-1999 the fast-food chain launched an international television campaign featuring McDonald’s workers serving up shakes and fries under the captions “future lawyer,” “future engineer” and so on. Here was the true McDonald’s workforce, the company seemed to be saying: happy, contented and just passing through.