Hunger Games and Crying Games: Barriers to Change

Abstract

The cases of retail organizing highlighted in the previous chapter exemplify how some workers have united and organized, choosing unionization as a route to improve their workplaces. Their experiences and, in particular, the insights they shared after reflecting on the process broaden and deepen our understanding of union organizing in retail, as well as in comparable feminized and/or private sector service workplaces. Workers’ accomplishments need to be recognized, understood, and written into the historical record as evidence of how people who are socially and economically devalued contest the dominant, entrenched hierarchies that belittle them.