such an attempt would require another book project entirely. Nevertheless, I contend that the following comparison illustrates how, just as technologies of worker exploitation and surveillance have transformed in the digital age, so too have movements for collective liberation.
United States. According to critics, workers centers’ campaigns against wage theft may prevent more “offensive” organizing, while reliance on foundation funding rather than union dues hinders long-term institutionalization. In addition, some argue that workers’ centers’ practice of community building and small, workplace-based campaigns contrasts with union’s attempts at “large-scale industry-based” campaigns.9
On top of that, although women of color are now more likely to be union members than any other demographic group,10 fast-fashion retail organizing is enmeshed in long tensions over race, gender, and sexuality in the labor movement. Throughout U.S. civil rights struggles—including the March on Washington, the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, and the Poor People’s Campaign—many mainstream labor organizations remained absent if not adversarial.11 Revolutionary union movements of the 1970s saw mainstream unions like the United Auto Workers “as equally oppressive” in furthering managerial interests, work speedups, and racial hierarchies.12 Similar difficulties mark the trajectory of LGBTQ union movement.13
RAP’s worker center is commended for organizing “queer class and race”
issues.14 One of RAP’s key features was its Member Organizing Training program, which provides a small stipend and political education for interested retail workers. Ben, a RAP organizer and former member organizer in training, said, “The program consisted of me thinking more about my community, who I am as a person, the nation, capitalism, white supremacy, all of the things.” Rachel, who was RAP’s executive director, told me a commitment to understanding these connections underpins the organization as a whole:
Workers are part of an ecosystem and as workers it’s important to have a very well-rounded understanding of all the different factors at play, versus when we talk about just “our jobs.” Race and gender, you know, everything that we do is political from the second we wake up to the second we close our eyes. It’s been fascinating to have members come in the door and be like, “Yeah, you know, I don’t do politics.” And to be able to say, “Yeah, you know you do it every day. Every single day.
In fact, your very existence is deeply political.” Our work has to be grounded in that idea.
Rachel explained that, in this way, a RAP member’s work doesn’t stop even when they’ve won their workplace organizing campaign. There are always more opportunities to fight for justice.
The Retail Action Project differs from other worker centers in that it was created out of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. RWDSU was founded in the late 1930s in New York City but generally stagnated following “anti-Communist tension after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.”15 RAP emerged in 2005 through a partnership between the RWDSU and a tenants’ rights organization called the Good Old Lower East Side.16 RAP organized small, independent retailers in Manhattan’s SoHo shopping district, targeting a store called Yellow Rat Bastard for wage violations. It launched similar campaigns at Shoemania, Scoop NYC, and Mystique Boutique. RAP attempts to exert force on the retail industry by providing service training to help workers forge a sense of occupational identity, holding hiring events to “control labor supply”17 and allocating benefits based on organizational membership rather than location or focusing on a specific work site.
When large retailers and fast-fashion chains began to proliferate throughout the city, RAP’s organizing strategy shifted. Robyn, who had been an organizer with RAP for a year and a half when I interviewed her, said, “RAP has definitely changed in a sense, but so has the retail industry. . . . I think RAP had a hold of the retail industry when it was smaller in the city. Of course, SoHo was huge, and like Fifth Avenue, maybe Herald Square a little bit, but [the industry] wasn’t this much. So [RAP] had it on lock. But now the industry is so insidious and prominent, bringing in so much money.” That insidiousness is what we’ve seen throughout this book: stores across the city with unreliable employee schedules that are determined by algorithms, intensified daily workloads, and widespread worker monitoring and surveillance.
These shifting labor conditions make organizing exceedingly difficult.
Emma, a former RAP organizer, told me, “I organized retail workers for three and a half years and honestly turnover was the hardest thing I faced while organizing retail workers in general. Because I would meet awesome people that had so much potential, but they just couldn’t take it anymore.”
With the rise of fast fashion, high turnover was coupled with a large employee base. Emma explained: “You also need more organizers if you
have over a hundred employees you’re trying to organize. Versus when you have forty you may just need two organizers.” Emma learned this lesson the hard way. When RAP launched a campaign against Zara in 2015, four organizers covered seven different locations across the city. “We got burnt the fuck out.” These conditions took their toll on Emma and other RAP organizers, demanding as much flexibility and overwork from them as from frontline retail employees.
As I have elucidated throughout the previous chapters, digital technology and just-in-time production processes facilitated these changes in the labor force. RAP would attempt to confront some of these issues head-on at the annual meeting of the National Retail Federation.