Why We’re Seeing More Worker Protests
Employees have long used collective action to advocate for better corporate behavior, but the outcry we’re seeing now is coming from white-collar workers, too.
Would it bother you?
Source: Getty Images/Hulton Archive
It was a small act of rebellion. As a minimum-wage bookstore clerk, I used to hide a certain book I hated — a pickup artist’s bestseller on how to manipulate women — in the back of the stockroom. I knew people would still buy it, of course. They just wouldn’t be buying it from me.
I’ve been thinking a lot this summer about my retail resistance. In June, Wayfair Inc. employees walked out to protest the company’s sale of bedroom furniture to migrant detention centers; employees at Salesforce.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also spoke out against their companies’ ties to immigration agencies. Earlier, Google employees protested the company’s work with the Department of Defense as well as its approach to censorship in China.