The consumer-citizen from Fordism to neoliberalism

A long stream of radical scholarship focuses on mass consumption, from Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (Reference Veblen1899) to Sharon Zukin’s Point of Purchase (Reference Zukin2004). While much of it has decried the costs of consumerism, a certain strand has explored the social benefits and even the liberating potential of some kinds of consumption. Key among this work is Lizabeth Cohen’s account of the rise of the idea of the consumer-citizen in the USA in the mid-twentieth century. In A Consumer’s Republic, Cohen charts the emergence of two versions of consumer-citizenship that competed for ascendancy during this period. The first was the vigilant consumer-citizen, who prodded government to protect the rights, safety and fair treatment of purchasers (and also, at times, of the workers who produced goods). The second was the “purchaser-consumer,” whose retail prowess was the motor of the economy: “individuals who contributed to society more by exercising purchasing power than by asserting themselves politically” (Cohen Reference Cohen2003: 19).

Drawing on forms of public participation with roots in the Progressive Era (a period of social activism and reform from 1890 to 1920), consumer-citizenship in the first sense found expression in struggles for pure food and drugs, antitrust laws, fair prices, minimum wages and just labor standards. It had roots in the National Consumers’ League of the early twentieth century, which sought to pressure employers and the government to improve wages and working conditions, as well as to ensure wholesome and sanitary products. Unions also promoted this sort of ethical consumption through “union label” campaigns and boycotts and exposés of unscrupulous employers. As these campaigns and associated values found expression in the programs and policies of the New Deal, Cohen (Reference Cohen2003: 23) argues, consumers arose as a “self-conscious, identifiable interest group on a par with labor and business whose well being required attention for American capitalism and democracy to prosper.”

Alternatively, the second sort of consumer-citizenship, the purchaser-consumer, reflected the role consumers played in creating demand within the economy as a whole. Cohen illustrates this with a film produced by General Motors in 1937, which portrayed workers picking up their pay and then, accompanied by wives and children (and triumphal soundtrack), spending it in downtown stores on bicycles, furniture and household appliances. “Because America has a ready purse and gives eager acceptance to what the men of motors have built,” the film proclaims, the United States will enjoy “a prosperity greater than history has ever known” (From Dawn to Sunset, in Cohen Reference Cohen2003: 20). Drawing on Antonio Gramsci (Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Smith1987), many call this virtuous relationship between production and consumption “Fordism,” referring to the Ford Motor Company’s famous introduction of the five-dollar-a-day wage: whatever the purpose for which it was introduced, it had the effect of encouraging consumption.

Insiders in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration debated the degree to which efforts to recover from the Great Depression should put the worker or the consumer at the center. Keynesian economists argued for deficit spending to fuel consumer demand, and said that fostering a wide distribution of purchasing power also enhanced economic equality (Cohen Reference Cohen2003: 55). Roosevelt summed up the case: “If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the marketplace” (in Cohen Reference Cohen2003: 56). John Kenneth Galbraith (Reference Galbraith1993 [Reference Galbraith1952]) argued later that these ideas established the concept of the consumer as a “countervailing power” to balance more powerful interests such as big business. The New Deal’s critics have correctly emphasized that it did not extend benefits equally to women or people of color, and that its policies sometimes marginalized more progressive projects. Nevertheless, its vision of government’s role in guiding and regulating the economy encouraged new forms of social mobilization, including around the identity of the consumer.

During World War II, the vigilant consumer-citizen participated in rationing programs, deferred spending, monitored stores for adherence to price controls and planted Victory Gardens. After the War, Cohen says, the consumer-citizen combined with the purchaser-consumer to become the “purchaser as citizen,” whose house in the suburbs and modern appliances fueled the nation’s economic growth, while becoming an important site for reproducing relations of family, race and class (for such reproduction in India, see Donner this volume). Corporations and government joined in their praise of the good consumer as a patriotic citizen, one who fostered the recovery of the nation’s economy. The Nixon–Khrushchev “kitchen debate” of 1959, in the heat of the Cold War, featured the American housewife as the appliance-rich author and beneficiary of the prosperity that capitalist free markets could bring. Sheila Webb (Reference Webb2006: 3) summarizes the moment: “In the postwar years, as mass production expanded, corporations grew and living standards rose. Advertising and communications networks worked to sustain the rate of consumption, and public opinion polling began to assess not only political views but consumption patterns,” and she describes how important publications such as Life magazine “strove to create a community of citizens who, with the proper training and knowledge, could thrive in this new society.” Cohen (Reference Cohen2003: 8) calls this convergence of the two earlier modes of consumer-citizenship an “alluring compromise,” which promised that the pursuit of individual satisfaction could serve society as a whole.

By the middle of the 1970s Keynesianism had died, but the concept of the purchaser as citizen had not. In the 1970s and 1980s more women moved into the US workforce, and the media portrayed them as learning to balance their traditional role as consumer with a new one as wage earner. Paraphrasing the song “I’m a Woman,” perfume advertisements proclaimed women’s new ability “to bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan.” The purchaser-citizen rode the credit boom of the 1990s, and in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, was called out by the President to demonstrate patriotism by spending. Cohen notes that the pervasive neoliberalism of the late twentieth century reworked consumer-citizenship once again, as it recast activities of government and political participation in market terms. She calls this newest configuration the “consumer-citizen-taxpayer-voter,” pointing out how neoliberal discourse encourages citizens to view taxes, voting and other political activities as market transactions and to judge them by the equivalent of consumer satisfaction: “how well-served they feel personally” (Cohen Reference Cohen2003: 9).

Cohen’s account might be criticized for flattening a number of dimensions of American working-class and middle-class life at mid-century, but this is to be expected. After all, the object of her study is the emergence of a model of civic participation that itself relies on such a flattening because it creates a citizenship consistent with market relationships. Nevertheless, in tracing the emergence of this new model, she consistently slights the modes of civic and political engagement that it displaces.

However, this new version of consumer-citizenship did not simply displace the older experiences of work and class, it discredited them. As James Carrier (Reference Carrier and Carrier1997: 52) points out, the version of the consumer that gained dominance in the 1980s not only erased the identity of the worker, but claimed that the interests of people-as-consumers were “more uniform, universal, and just than the interests of people-as-workers, which were often presented as unjust, sectional self-interest.” He offers as an example that “everyone, which is to say people-as-consumers, is in favour of lower prices of electricity.” According to this logic, the only people who might oppose lower prices are those with a narrow self-interest, who depend on the industry for an income, such as those who work in it. Carrier points to the way, under Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the US, corporate interests used this framing to justify overriding the interests of workers in industry after industry in the name of the “common good” of the consuming public. Workers came to be seen as a “special interest group,” while “consumer” was construed as a universal status.

Walmart reconfigures the consumer-citizen

For anyone studying low-wage work, Walmart is a metonym, a part of the consumer economy that can stand for the US economy as a whole. However, because of its size and the role it plays in setting the standards for competition in the retail sector, and in the low-wage labor market more generally, it merits study in its own right. Gary Gereffi and Michelle Christian (Reference Gereffi and Christian2009: 574) call the firm “a driver and organizer of global processes,” and Gereffi (Reference Gereffi2004) claims that “whatever Walmart does in terms of the labor market, all other businesses have to follow.…Walmart is really determining the direction in which the US labor market is moving.” As Nelson Lichtenstein (Reference Lichtenstein2004) put it, “Walmart is setting a new standard that other firms have to follow if they hope to compete…It is setting standards for the nation as a whole. It’s almost legislating social policy, not in terms of votes and lobbying, but when it does something, it’s so large, it’s so influential, others follow it.”

As the story of Walmart’s rise is told, it is clear that it not only represented, but drove, a whole new type of consumerism in the USA, focused on the car, one-stop shopping and price as the main dimension of competition (Strasser Reference Strasser1989; Zukin Reference Zukin2004; Fishman Reference Fishman2006; Lichtenstein Reference Stein2006, Reference Lichtenstein2009; Moreton Reference Moreton2009). Bolstering that was Walmart’s folksy, Southern “hometown” advertising image, which was laden with messages about how individuals should labor, act in relation to state and market and organize intimate relationships. And behind the scenes of the firm’s success lay the latest in supply-chain management technologies, the world’s biggest global sourcing network and astonishingly low manufacturing wages.

Walmart has habitually justified its stingy wages in the USA and abroad by reference to an attenuated notion of the purchaser as citizen. Like the postwar version that Cohen describes, it encourages people to think of their interests primarily in relation to consumption through the market, and to see that approach as responsible and patriotic. However, Walmart’s attenuated version explicitly silences other assertions of rights or interests, such as those based on being a worker, community member or citizen. The firm’s argument about the appropriate way to pursue one’s interests revolves around the concept of low prices and how they serve society.

Walmart’s website (Walmart Corporate 2011) illustrates this logic when it declares “we know that price matters to our consumers, whether they live in the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina or Japan.” It explains that saving money is connected to living better because it can help the consumer “afford something a little extra.” It offers the examples of a grandmother who can buy her grandchildren a special gift because she saved money on her prescriptions, and of a young couple who can use the savings they accrue over time to pay for a new home. Daniel Miller (Reference Miller2001) has argued that a deep trend in Western culture predisposes us to think of shopping as a moral enterprise, one in which making thrifty purchases represents a labor of care on behalf of the household. In its advertising, Walmart draws on this way of thinking, first to conflate spending with thrift and then to reinforce notions of shopping as social-reproductive labor: an act of care and love.

To support its advertising claims, in 2005 and 2007 Walmart hired economists at a consulting firm to estimate how much money it had saved US consumers. The firm, Global Insight, suggested a cumulative figure of $US 287 billion by 2006. Walmart published this information on its website, in news releases, in corporate interviews and in circulars with titles such as “Walmart’s effect on grocery prices fact sheet” and “Walmart saves Americans money fact sheet.” Based on Global Insight’s studies, Walmart officials argued that the firm saved working families an average of over $US 2,300 per household per year, and lowered the grocery bills of families who shop there by 20 percent compared to competitors’ prices. They claimed that their low prices meant that consumer prices were 3.1 percent less than they would have been otherwise. The former CEO, Lee Scott, called this decline “a wage increase” for the working poor in America. While economists have challenged these estimates in terms of the data used, the assumptions made, the soundness of the econometric analysis and the logic of the argument (Bernstein and Bivens Reference Bernstein and Bivens2006), the company continues to circulate the reports’ conclusions. Its insistent rhetoric about low prices as a social benefit that trumps all others led one anti-corporate activist to comment, “Every time we try to talk about quality of life, they bring up the price of underpants” (Greenwald Reference Greenwald2005).

Critics of Walmart have argued that it hurts US workers in two ways: by pushing other US retailers and the firm’s own US suppliers out of business, thus destroying jobs, and by eroding conditions in the remaining jobs in the low-wage labor market. The claim that Walmart drives out local businesses by undercutting them on price wherever it sets up a store has been well vetted (Fishman Reference Fishman2006; Irwin and Clark Reference Irwin and Clark2006; Karjanen Reference Karjanen and Lichtenstein2006; Neumark et al. Reference Neumark, Zhang and Ciccarella2007). Walmart places pressure on its US suppliers’ factories, demanding supply-chain innovations, quality improvements and price reductions. When these companies cannot afford to do what Walmart wants, it turns to offshore suppliers, leading firms that have relied heavily on its business to close (Gereffi Reference Gereffi2004).

Walmart also unleashes a race to the bottom in local labor markets by setting in motion competitive forces that are vicious rather than virtuous, in the sense that they are structured around cost-cutting rather than technological or labor-process improvements. When it moves into an area as a retailer, economists have shown, it depresses the prevailing wage rate, unleashing a cycle in which profits, lower consumer prices and poverty-level wages are intertwined (Dube and Jacobs Reference Dube and Jacobs2004). Goetz and Swaminathan (Reference Goetz and Swaminathan2006) studied the relationship between Walmart and county poverty rates. Controlling for other pertinent factors, they found that counties with more Walmart stores had higher rates of poverty than those with fewer Walmart stores. They calculated that the opening of a new Walmart store increases the average poverty rate in a county, and that an additional 20,000 US families were in poverty in 1999 as a result of Walmart’s presence in their areas. The mechanisms by which poverty is transmitted are primarily competitive: by offering jobs at a low wage, the company drives down competitors’ wages, or at least keeps them from rising. But anti-union tactics and driving firms with unionized or higher-paid workers out of business also play a role.

At mid-century, the conventional wisdom would have criticized such an approach as killing the goose that lays the golden egg, eroding the buying power of the customer base. But a very different logic informs Walmart’s strategy. The company knows that the poor are its most important customers, so it locates its stores near them, studies their habits and preferences and targets them in advertising. Liza Featherstone (Reference Featherstone2005) quotes one of the women she interviewed for her research as saying, “They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville.” In this, Walmart inverts the relationship between production and consumption that policymakers of the Keynesian era tried to protect and that the era’s concept of citizenship embodied (Collins Reference Collins, Gusterson and Besteman2010). A number of scholars have argued that Walmart’s low prices and its low wages are perversely related (Featherstone Reference Featherstone2004; Gereffi Reference Gereffi2004; Collins Reference Collins, Gusterson and Besteman2010). As Liza Featherstone says, “In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford’s strategy…to pay workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Walmart’s stingy compensation policies contribute to an economy where workers can only afford to shop at Walmart” (Featherstone Reference Featherstone2004: 219). In the words of Gary Gereffi (Reference Gereffi2004), “Walmart is pushing wages down to a level where the people that work in Walmart stores are going to be forced to buy in Walmart stores, because they can’t make enough money to buy goods elsewhere.”

While Walmart plays a material role in undermining wages and working conditions in the low-wage labor market, it is also important to notice what is forced out of the public conversation by the company’s rhetoric of consumer economizing. New Deal formulations of consumer-citizenship saw purchasing as only one of the roles a citizen could play in the economy, and emphasized a virtuous connection between high wages and the ability to consume. In contrast, in Walmart’s rhetoric the consumer role trumps all other aspects of citizenship, including the economic citizenship of the worker and the voice of the rights-bearing participant in the public sphere. In claiming that society gains more from lower prices than from fair wages, Walmart implies that workers’ hard-won rights and protections are rendered unnecessary by its pricing policies. Of course, unlike money in a paycheck that can be used for any purpose, the benefits of low prices can only be realized by shopping at Walmart. This formulation does not consider the worker to be an autonomous being, who might choose to save rather than consume immediately, or to invest in a home, education or healthcare rather than Walmart’s wares.

Walmart’s energetic and preemptive anti-union strategies speak to another aspect of citizenship that it would rather not confront, labor activism (Featherstone Reference Featherstone2005; Lichtenstein Reference Lichtenstein2009). Far from the labor–management accords of the mid-twentieth century, in which gradually rising prices were linked to gradually rising wages, Walmart’s business model relies on maintaining its leadership in a global race to the bottom in production costs. This has led to its hard line against unionization and its unwillingness to give any significant ground on wages and benefits. Such a strategy depends, in part, on erasing the identity of its workers as workers. Walmart attempted this, famously, by referring to its employees (and requiring them to identify themselves) as “associates” and through cultivating a sense of “family” through rousing, pep-rally style meetings complete with corporate cheers. But when push comes to shove, the company is willing to wield a big stick. When worker protests over shift work emerged just before the start of Christmas holiday shopping in 2012, the busiest period of the year, Walmart responded by threatening to curb workers’ bonuses and vacation days (Berfield Reference Berfield2012).

By shifting the conversation from rights at work or rights in the public sphere to rights in the shopping aisle, Walmart’s discourse of low prices reworks the idea of the consumer-citizen. Just as the purchaser as citizen left behind the idea of the citizen as a watchdog for unfair or unsafe practices, Walmart’s version leaves behind the idea of consuming to support the national economy. Despite its brief “Buy American” campaign in the 1980s, the firm has always been an aggressive importer, and its competitive strategy is based on perfecting ways to import cheaply and efficiently (Gereffi and Christian Reference Gereffi and Christian2009: 577). Walmart’s consumer-citizens exercise their citizenship through consuming, not in order to keep factories humming and employment rates low, but simply because that is the best way to pursue their own interests and those of their families. Walmart’s iconic shoppers do not ask whether a toy contains lead or cadmium, or if the girls sewing the blue jeans (or the clerks selling them) are paid a living wage. They do not think about the effect that buying from Walmart will have on the small grocery store down the street, or whether their purchases will contribute to the health and strength of the local or national economy. They simply compare prices.

Following a path that Cohen describes in her book, Walmart’s version of the consumer-citizen coincides with a neoliberal political rationality that portrays citizens as entrepreneurs of the self, all of whose relations, attachments and endeavors are construed in market terms. Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2006) has argued that this attenuated version of consumer-citizenship is a key component of what she calls “neoliberal de-democratization,” and that it works through devaluing political autonomy and by transforming political problems into individual dilemmas with market solutions. The collective power of consumer movements and the state-supported rights of workers are both rendered superfluous by this vision of the consumer-citizen. These moves stifle nascent class consciousness by suggesting that it is not only out of date and inconsistent with our current economic climate, but against the best interests of the well-informed, savvy, self-interested consumer.

Walmart’s consumer-citizen in the economic crisis

How did Walmart’s revamped version of the consumer-citizen fare during the recession that began in the USA in 2008? Specifically, how did a consumer-citizen whose well-being had been conflated with – and reduced to – access to low prices fare in a context of increased unemployment and economic hardship across broad swathes of the working classes?

It should come as no surprise that Walmart thrived in the early days of the recession. For all of the reasons just outlined, Walmart is what has been called a “counter-cyclical firm”, one whose fate moves in the opposite direction of the overall economic cycle and whose profits rise when the economy is weakening (see Abel and Bernanke Reference Abel and Bernanke2001: sect. 8.3). Other examples include fast-food firms such as McDonald’s and Burger King, some kinds of gardening and home-repair lines, craft stores, frozen yogurt and, most sadly, hand guns. As The Huffington Post (Bartels Reference Bartels2010) put it, “Walmart was in the sweet spot of the Great Recession. As shoppers traded down to cheaper stores, Walmart gained market share.” The New York Times (Rosenbloom Reference Rosenbloom2010) declared the company “a winner amid the downturn.” Walmart’s former CEO, Lee Scott, put it bluntly: “I feel we are well positioned for an economic downturn. Our low prices and low-cost business model should give us an advantage over other retailers if things get more difficult for consumers” (Kavilanz Reference Kavilanz2007). The company’s global sales in 2009, according to its own estimates, were up 7.2 percent over 2008, reaching $US 401 billion.

By the beginning of 2010, however, continuing unemployment and underemployment were taking their toll, and even Walmart’s low-priced merchandise was no longer a bargain that its poorest customers could afford. In 2009, 43.6 million people in the US (one in six) were living in poverty. The figure was one in five for children. Nearly 15 percent of families were living below the federal poverty line (Economic Policy Institute 2010). By 2010, Walmart was struggling to hold on to its customers, as they turned to dollar stores and thrift shops for their needs, or simply stopped buying all but the most essential items. Walmart took a look at its data. “Spending patterns…suggest that [our] customers have been hit particularly hard by the recession,” its Chief Financial Officer said (Clifford Reference Clifford2010; Clifford and Rosenbloom Reference Rosenbloom2010). “The low income consumer appears to be the last coming out.” He noted that customers’ use of food stamps was up significantly, and that they were spending according to a “paycheck cycle,” making their largest purchases when their salaries first come in and cutting back as the money runs out. In an article entitled “Watching us save, one cart at a time,” Newsweek (McGinn Reference McGinn2009) noted that Walmart managers had observed the following recession-related behaviors among their customers: more discarded items near cash registers, greater use of grocery lists, increased purchase of generics, fewer discretionary purchases, increased consumption of take-and-bake pizzas (presumably substituting for more expensive pizza delivery), asking questions of pharmacists that might normally be part of a doctor’s visit, more requests to hit the subtotal key when checking out, fewer purchases per trip, and more shopping on payday.

A Wall Street Journal article hinted at the desperation that underlay this pattern:

The article concluded with a quote from Bill Simon, Walmart’s President and CEO: “If you really think about it, the only reason someone gets out there in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they have been waiting for it” (Bustillo Reference Bustillo2010).

Walmart’s first response to its declining sales revenues was to cut prices, a strategy it pursued until June 2010. After its shareholder meeting that month, when some stock analysts declared the company a “little bit lost in navigating the economic downturn,” it began to reconsider its options (Clifford Reference Clifford2010). Without much fanfare, the “Always Low Prices” firm, unable to maintain profits by undercutting its competitors, began to raise prices. In August 2010, J.P. Morgan noted an increase of almost 6 percent in the average price of a market basket of groceries at Walmart. In October, the firm found that the price of the same basket had risen a further 2.7 percent in September, seven of its items were up 10 percent or more since August and overall prices were at their highest level in 21 months (Gregory Reference Gregory2010; Reuters 2010). At the same time, Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores announced 11,000 layoffs in 2010. To make matters worse, many Walmart workers who received health insurance and other benefits through state programs saw them disappear as a result of state budget cuts.

These actions illustrate the inherent weakness of Walmart’s version of the consumer-citizen: it is not about citizenship at all. There is no right to low prices that can be invoked at the checkout counter, no democratically agreed-upon criteria for what a fair price might be. It was in one sense a fabrication, a screen behind which real rights were being dismantled. Maintaining low prices became the justification for starting wages of just over $US 7.00 per hour, which amounts to $US 12,000–14,000 a year for a full-time worker. That is far below the federal poverty line and makes the worker eligible for food stamps. It became the rationale for the fact that 46 percent of Walmart workers’ children are uninsured or on Medicaid. It was the reasoning that lay behind the lack of compliance with workers’ compensation policies, labor laws and anti-discrimination laws that led to litigation in courts around the nation (Featherstone Reference Featherstone2004; Bernstein and Bivens Reference Bernstein and Bivens2006).

But in another sense, Walmart’s claims about its benefits to consumers were more than a smokescreen, because they did significant cultural and political work. As it wove together long-standing cultural themes of consumer-citizenship with new ones from neoliberalism, Walmart convinced a sizeable section of the US public to engage in a national conversation about the “trade-off” between low prices and low wages. It convened seminars and commissioned studies on the topic. Its framing of the debate was adopted by scholars who tried to assess its impact (see, e.g., Irwin and Clark Reference Irwin and Clark2006). Just as the firm’s business model inverted Fordism, this conversation replaced Keynesian insights about the virtuous connection between production and consumption with a seemingly stark either–or choice: if you want low prices, wages must also be low. Calling this a “false choice,” Jared Bernstein has argued that Walmart could raise wages 13 percent, to the level of its key competitor, Costco, without raising its prices, and still have higher profit margins than Costco (Bernstein and Bivens Reference Bernstein and Bivens2006). A more recent study suggests that if all the big low-wage retailers raised wages to $US 12.25 per hour, it would lift three-quarters of a million Americans out of poverty and cost customers only 15 cents per shopping trip (Ruetschlin Reference Ruetschlin2012). Clearly, Walmart does not encourage this kind of discussion about what constitutes a fair wage in its conferences or the media, and it need not negotiate such issues with its non-union employees. It asks its workers to forego better wages in order to serve the broader societal goal of lower prices for everyone, including their own families, and in so doing legitimizes their identity as consumers while undermining and delegitimizing their attempts to pursue their interests as workers.

Those who want to make the concept of consumer-citizenship a useful one in the US will, then, have to undo a series of ideological tricks that are entailed in Walmart’s hijacking of the concept. That undoing requires recovering the figure of the worker and linked notions of economic citizenship, fair wages and just conditions of work. It requires dusting off the idea of the citizen, the rights-bearing participant in civil society whose labor is protected by the National Labor Relations Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and who enjoys the right to engage in collective action. Walmart’s flattened version of the consumer-citizen is not going to be able to shop his or her way out of economic crises such as the one that began in 2008. But restoring a more robust notion of consumer-citizenship may help lay the groundwork for community-based labor movements, by tracing new arenas for citizen engagement with the economy, and also for new forms of democratic government in pursuit of a just and sustainable relationship between production and consumption.

Events in the late fall of 2012 suggested that Walmart workers have begun to do just that. Recognizing that decades of efforts to achieve union recognition and collective bargaining have failed, they engaged in a series of wildcat strikes and public relations maneuvers that took their grievances to the public arena. Supported by labor unions, and in coalition with a wide range of other community groups, they defied Walmart’s representation of them as benefiting from its low-cost–low-wage strategy and asserted that it is not working for them, not just as individuals and families, but also as members of low-income communities. As Dorian Warren noted, in the past Walmart was able to attack critics as liberal elitists who were hurting poor people who relied on its low prices (Eidelson Reference Eidelson2012). Similarly, the firm attacked workers who tried to organize unions as harming the interests of their neighbors.But the new coalitions that workers have formed with other groups have allowed them to defy these criticisms and to call for a broader reconfiguration of Walmart’s relationship with the places where it does business. Speaking not as isolated workers seeking better wages, but as members of communities impoverished by Walmart’s policies, they have pointed to the ways that low wages, stingy benefits and just-in-time scheduling harm everyone. They have rejected the idea that they can weather ongoing economic crisis by buying cheaper products, and have begun to recuperate the discourse of laboring consumer-citizens whose well-being is linked to the health of the economy as a whole.

Like many of the Spanish workers whose struggles Narotzky recounts, as well as those in Brazil described by Mollona, Walmart workers have learned that gaining influence in the neoliberal public sphere requires demonstrating that the harm done to workers reverberates beyond the workplace. Walmart’s new activists remind us that the world is not divided into those who shop and those who work, for those who shop depend upon those who work, if indeed they are not the same people. Rather, they have organized around the principle that those who shop at Walmart and those who work there have lives far different from those of the captains of industry, lives much poorer and more difficult than they need to be.

Acknowledgment

Some of the arguments in this chapter draw on my “Wal-Mart, American consumer citizenship and the 2008 recession,” Focaal 61 (2011): 107–16.