Along with fast-food workers, retail workers are capturing the attention of the public and the media with the Fight for $15. Like fast-food workers, retail workers are underpaid, and fewer than five percent of them belong to unions. In Hard Sell, Peter Ikeler traces the low-wage, largely nonunion character of U.S. retail through the history and ultimate failure of twentieth-century retail unionism. He asks pivotal questions about twenty-first-century capitalism: Does the nature of retail work make collective action unlikely? Can working conditions improve in the absence of a union? Is worker consciousness changing in ways that might encourage or further inhibit organizing? Ikeler conducted interviews at New York City locations of two iconic department stores-Macy's and Target. Much of the book's narrative unfolds from the perspectives of these workers in America's most unequal city.

When he speaks to workers, Ikeler finds that the Macy's organization displays an adversarial relationship between workers and managers and that Target is infused with a "teamwork" message that enfolds both parties. Macy's workers identify more with their jobs and are more opposed to management, yet Target workers show greater solidarity. Both groups, however, are largely unhappy with the pay and precariousness of their jobs. Combined with workplace-generated feelings of unity and resistance, these grievances provide promising inroads to organizing that could help take the struggle against inequality beyond symbolic action to real economic power.

About the Author

Peter Ikeler is Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY College at Old Westbury.

Reviews

Though hardly Marx's "Satanic mills," their cheery veneer hides more than a few dirty secrets. It is behind this veil that Peter Ikeler's new book, Hard Sell, takes us, focusing specifically on the subjective positions and experiences of workers themselves. In so doing, he joins a handful of notable scholars who have sought to, once again, bring the study of work back into labor sociology.

-- Jamie McCallum, Middlebury College * American Journal of Sociology *

Ikeler's ethnography invites antrhopologists to critically engage anew with areas of work and labor not simply as places in which workers struggle to make a living, but places in which other political battles are underway and where the very identity of workers is being shaped.

* Polar: Political & Legal Anthropology Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501702426
Author Peter Ikeler
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 18mm