Worker Organizations
Essential Workers for Democracy (UFCW reform movement)
Stories, Lessons & Analysis
Here’s How Zara Retail Workers Won a Union
Fighting Police Brutality from the Retail Shop Floor
“I barely lived on Chicago Lake-Liquors wages,” an account of a campaign
Retail chain gangs: workers’ reports from the Sainsbury and Waitrose shop-floor (UK)
I was Henry Sy’s Slave (Phillippines)
Why Direct Action is Working for Walmart’s Workers
How the Walmart Labor Struggle is Going Global
Short Films about the Retail Sector
Unscathed: How the Press Helps Hide Target’s Harm
Books about Organizing in the Retail Sector
Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (2017)
The power of unions in workers’ lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools–like unions and labor law–with legislative gains from the civil and women’s rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers’ campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor’s decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.
Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor’s Doordramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor’s future. Windham’s story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women’s history.
A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism (2012)
Dedicated to organizing workers from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, many of whom were considered “unorganizable” by other unions, the progressive New York City–based labor union District 65 counted among its 30,000 members retail clerks, office workers, warehouse workers, and wholesale workers. In this book, Lisa Phillips presents a distinctive study of District 65 and its efforts to secure economic equality for minority workers in sales and processing jobs in small, low-end shops and warehouses throughout the city. Phillips shows how organizers fought tirelessly to achieve better hours and higher wages for “unskilled,” unrepresented workers and to destigmatize the kind of work they performed.
Closely examining the strategies employed by District 65 from the 1930s through the early Cold War years, Phillips assesses the impact of the McCarthy era on the union’s quest for economic equality across divisions of race, ethnicity, and skill. Though their stories have been overshadowed by those of auto, steel, and electrical workers who forced American manufacturing giants to unionize, the District 65 workers believed their union provided them with an opportunity to re-value their work, the result of an economy inclining toward fewer manufacturing jobs and more low-wage service and processing jobs.
Phillips recounts how District 65 first broke with the CIO over the latter’s hostility to left-oriented politics and organizing agendas, then rejoined to facilitate alliances with the NAACP. In telling the story of District 65 and detailing community organizing efforts during the first part of the Cold War and under the AFL-CIO umbrella, A Renegade Union continues to revise the history of the left-led unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
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