oh, for heaven's sake
Jan. 6th, 2018 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI am fighting the urge to reply to Katie Hinde's article about how she struck a blow for feminism by moving some shirts from the boys' section to the girls' section. Apparently people on Twitter have already said everything I would say.
So . . . I'll say it here, I guess, if only to vent.
Moving stuff around in a store is not activism. It doesn't change anyone's mind about anything, and it has no effect whatsoever on corporate policies. What it does is make life harder for retail workers, whose work lives are already hard enough due to low wages, corporate policies that ensure there are few full-time retail jobs, overwork due to low staffing, and customer behavior ranging from the careless (drop something on the floor and leave it there) to the outright abusive.
During 2016 I worked in a store that sold books (among other things) and I can't tell you how often I had to find books by or about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump that some fucking retail activist had hidden and return them to their correct places. How often I had to turn books face out that had been deliberately turned face in. How often I had to write off books that had been deliberately damaged, costing the company money and resulting ultimately in fewer hours and lower wages, because the first thing retail corporations do when profits go down is to cut labor.
Eventually I put up a sign asking people to knock it off. It might have helped a little; I don't know. But I do know that if any of the folks moving or destroying books For Great Justice had contacted corporate about some perceived bias (and there probably was a bias--we stocked many, many more conservative books than liberal ones*), it would have had more impact than what they actually did, which was make my job harder and more frustrating, full stop. Their actions affected no one but me and other workers. Certainly the CEO never knew it was happening.
(*And I tried to subvert that bias, in a small way, by facing out a lot more left-liberal books than conservative ones, making them more noticeable. But I didn't move anything to the wrong fucking place.)
I mean, seriously, the behavior of Hinde and others like her is not even armchair activism. It's just being a self-congratulatory bourgeois ass while directly contributing to the shitty situation--the oppression--of working class people.
/I work retail, hear me rage
So . . . I'll say it here, I guess, if only to vent.
Moving stuff around in a store is not activism. It doesn't change anyone's mind about anything, and it has no effect whatsoever on corporate policies. What it does is make life harder for retail workers, whose work lives are already hard enough due to low wages, corporate policies that ensure there are few full-time retail jobs, overwork due to low staffing, and customer behavior ranging from the careless (drop something on the floor and leave it there) to the outright abusive.
During 2016 I worked in a store that sold books (among other things) and I can't tell you how often I had to find books by or about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump that some fucking retail activist had hidden and return them to their correct places. How often I had to turn books face out that had been deliberately turned face in. How often I had to write off books that had been deliberately damaged, costing the company money and resulting ultimately in fewer hours and lower wages, because the first thing retail corporations do when profits go down is to cut labor.
Eventually I put up a sign asking people to knock it off. It might have helped a little; I don't know. But I do know that if any of the folks moving or destroying books For Great Justice had contacted corporate about some perceived bias (and there probably was a bias--we stocked many, many more conservative books than liberal ones*), it would have had more impact than what they actually did, which was make my job harder and more frustrating, full stop. Their actions affected no one but me and other workers. Certainly the CEO never knew it was happening.
(*And I tried to subvert that bias, in a small way, by facing out a lot more left-liberal books than conservative ones, making them more noticeable. But I didn't move anything to the wrong fucking place.)
I mean, seriously, the behavior of Hinde and others like her is not even armchair activism. It's just being a self-congratulatory bourgeois ass while directly contributing to the shitty situation--the oppression--of working class people.
/I work retail, hear me rage
