Working at a Walmart Deli Showed Me Why America Loves Unions Again

Daily indignities at work are not incidental — it’s a corporate strategy to prevent workers from banding together.

By Alec Monnie

I worked in a Walmart deli for three years. It made me understand why labor unions in America are more popular now than they’ve been in generations.

I’d heard horror stories about what it’d be like to work at Walmart. The customers would be rude. The treatment from higher-ups would be bad. The day-to-day would grind you down.

I tried to wave away these warnings. I’d already worked some not-so-glamorous jobs, from sweeping floors as a janitor to manning a footlong hot dog shack (the hot dogs were a footlong — not the shack). Surely Walmart wouldn’t be so awful. I was wrong. And frankly, I was unprepared for how soul-crushing it would be.

Though it was just a deli inside a Walmart and not some big-shouldered butcher shop, the job was more physically demanding than you’d expect. Slicing meat and serving customers was only part of the role. Other frequent tasks: spending hours in a subzero freezer unloading clumsily stacked pallets of 50-pound boxes of food; leaning into 400-degree ovens to cook rotisserie chickens that sprayed scalding grease onto your arms; and emptying discarded scraps of meat into an enormous garbage can that smelled of death. Those trimmings, incidentally, were eventually turned into either dog food or makeup, depending on who you asked. The list of “job duties” went on.

Sadly, the compensation was just as painful as the labor. I started in 2018, when Walmart generated $512 billion in revenue. I made $11.90 an hour, or about $25,000 a year. As for benefits, I was unaware of any. I think once during my orientation, right after I was lectured on why I should never join a union, I heard that Walmart sponsored a health insurance plan. But management had a cute way of scheduling people just short of the hours they’d need to qualify for coverage. And retirement benefits? Non-existent. Let alone any protection from being an at-will employee.

None of this was ideal, but it was tolerable. For me, at that time in my life. The worst part, though, was the total lack of control I had over this labor that made up such a big part of my life.

My schedule shifted wildly without notice. One week I’d work 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. The next it was 5 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a few random mid-day shifts thrown in. Making plans with friends or spending time with family was impossible.

At the deli counter, customers could mistreat you, but you had to swallow it unless you wanted a manager to chew you out. Some customers seemed to enjoy making absurd demands. No, I wanted the turkey to be ground into sawdust, not chipped! Working in such an environment every day really starts to destroy your dignity.

The best aspect of the job was the other people. My co-workers were very nice and hardworking. It’s not like I was scanning the streets of some distant roadside looking for IEDs. But working at Walmart still made something click in my mind.

For a long time, I was really frustrated by what I thought was the cluelessness of people in the corporate world. Did they not know that this isn’t how a business should be run? Did they not see how many people were quitting every week? Their methods made no sense. Why would they structure their company in a way that exposed workers to so many daily indignities?

Then it hit me: daily indignities aren’t a flaw in the system. They are the system. If workers are treated decently, they stick around. When they stay, they form relationships and begin to invest in their community. They realize they have things in common with the people around them — like being disrespected by management and not being paid their fair share.

When workers see themselves as “we,” they’re more likely to demand better.

That’s terrifying for executives whose priority is protecting their bottom line and bloated compensation packages. Companies like Walmart do everything they can to atomize their workforce — grinding people down, churning them out, and maintaining annual turnover rates around 70 percent. When everyone is temporary, isolated, and exhausted, there is no “we.” It’s just me. And one guy is so much easier to control.

Like many Americans, I grew up with little exposure to organized labor. But over time, I’ve come to see how unions like the Teamsters have been one of the few forces in our economy that push back against the excesses of big business that I experienced firsthand. It’s easy now to witness every day, in the news media and online across social media, if we’re willing to pay attention.

In the last year, the waste giant Republic Services spent over $50 million in a failed attempt to break strike lines of hundreds of sanitation workers represented by the Teamsters. The company’s effort was for nothing, in the end, as every single Teamster who was pushed onto the picket line emerged with a strong new contract. It was senseless greed by a corporation well known all across this country.

As employers rake in higher profits than any time in American history — while still offering workers scraps — it’s no mystery why unions are more popular now than they’ve been in decades. History shows that when greed goes unchecked, workers band together. As companies like Republic Services, Amazon, and Walmart prioritize that bottom line over the health and prosperity of working people, there’s likely no end in sight to our nation’s resurgent support of a labor force that’s fighting back, demanding respect, and getting organized.