This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Essential Workers, Poverty Wages, and The Real Cost of Cheap Groceries with Ann Larson | 417

Starting point is 00:00:09 I'm Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And listen, it's important that we acknowledge that work in general doesn't look like how it used to. It used to be that we'd show up somewhere, a clock in, do our job, get paid. And now work is everywhere. It's a laptop, a login, a platform, it's side hustles, virtual schedules, flexible schedules, which somehow just means working all of the time. It's manifesting in mindset, leadership and entrepreneurship, branding and targeting campaigns. And as work has expanded, so has the gap between who gets paid and who doesn't.

Starting point is 00:00:53 There are a lot of reasons for that, technology, education, access. But one moment that really reshaped how we think about work was COVID. It forced us to look at pretty much everything. And at the beginning, especially, it required us to define, work is essential or not. And so, yes, of course, doctors, nurses, teachers, essential. But also grocery clerks, delivery drivers, the people who stock our shelves, the people who made sure we could eat, function, and survive. And I'll be honest, I thought that moment might reset something for us, that we'd take a hard look at who we rely on versus who we reward.

Starting point is 00:01:33 because, and I'm going to say this even though it calls me out to, the people that are making the most money are far too often not the ones doing the most essential work. Because here's what really happens. We're willing to call people essential right up until it's time to pay them like they're essential. Then suddenly the narrative shifts and we start hearing terms like low skill, entry level, replaceable, which is convenient because it lets us all keep benefiting from. from the system without having to really question it. So if we're actually serious about redefining woman's work, then we have to include the work that has always been dismissed, underpaid, and often disproportionately carried by women. And we've got to ask better questions about why.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Because there is no such thing as unskilled labor. There is only labor we've decided not to respect. We've bought into this idea that wages reflect value, and they don't. They reflect power and privilege. and we've been conditioned to believe that where we shop, what we pay, and how we participate in these systems is somehow separate from the people who work within them. And it's not. If where we spend our money is a vote, and I believe that it is, then we're casting ballots every single day for the kind of system we say that we don't want. And corporations will keep getting away with the things we hate unless we stop funding them. So we're going to talk about that today. And our guest is Anne Larson, a journal. journalist and activist who's writing on education debt and low-wage work has appeared in the New Republic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, and the Nation. She's co-author of Can't Pay,

Starting point is 00:03:13 won't Pay, the case for economic disobedience and debt abolition, and a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her latest book, Clean Up on Isle 5, takes us inside the supermarket, not as shoppers, but from behind the register, challenging how we see essential work, poverty wages and our own role within the system. And thank you for being here. And I'd love to start here, basically, because we're going to use supermarkets as the lens for this conversation. And you actually worked within one.

Starting point is 00:03:48 What did that show you about the reality of what we call essential work that most of us don't see as customers or consumers? Well, hi. Well, first of all, thank you, Nicole, so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here. thank you for that very astute introduction, which just covers a lot of the themes that I think are so important to this conversation. Let me start by explaining kind of how I got a job at the supermarket. I was a white-collar worker.

Starting point is 00:04:16 I was a former academic. I have a PhD. I was teaching part-time. I was a co-founder of an organization called the Debt Collective that helped student loan debtors get debt relief from the federal government. So I was, you know, I had a South. for a lot of the time I was middle class. Then in 2020, something happened that I found myself unexpectedly unemployed, and I was in my 40s. And this was spring, fall of 2020. It was very bad timing. So the pandemic hit right around that time, as I'm sure you'll all recall. And everything shut down. I had

Starting point is 00:04:54 a hard time finding work. And I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I really needed an income. I needed health insurance. Supermarkets in my area were hiring. They were doing very brisk business. And so I figured I could work in a store, I'd earn an income, and I thought this would just be a part-time thing until the pandemic ends. I'll find my next real job. But the experience that I had behind the supermarket register was so enlightening and so troubling that I just couldn't stop thinking about it and I wrote a book about it. So Clean Up on Isle 5 tells the story of my year working in the store. And as you mentioned, What I saw was that there's this kind of hidden reality that goes on behind the scenes that customers don't see. And one of the things that comes out when you participate in this hidden reality and see it is that these myths about grocery work as low skilled as something that people do, you know, kind of in a short term basis before they move on to something, quote unquote, better.

Starting point is 00:05:52 These are all myths. These are all false. Grocery work is highly skilled labor. And women are, most grocery workers are women. and cashiers. I worked in an area of my store called the front end where all the frontline workers are employed. Cachiers, 70% of cashiers are women. And they earn, when I was on the job, they earned under, they earned under $15 an hour. So this is, there's a real, we have a contradiction here between the highly skilled work, the essential nature of that work, as you mentioned, during the pandemic,

Starting point is 00:06:24 all of us counted on grocery workers going to their job so that we could shop for groceries. and then the fact that these people are so underpaid, they often can't even afford their own groceries. So what I got on the job, in addition to seeing this hidden reality that I talk about in the book, is this lesson in universalism and interdependence. I realize as a shopper, I'm better off when the person behind the checkstand who's selling me my groceries has a living wage, has good health insurance, we should value that work, but not just like appreciate it and respect it, but also pay. people, material benefits, wages, health insurance, pensions, and those kinds of things that other

Starting point is 00:07:04 people take for granted. You said so many important things in there. And while I don't appreciate that you had a situation where unexpected and I appreciate that you got this experience because hearing from somebody who is highly skilled who is an academic, to hear you say this is highly skilled work, I think goes a long way. But for the doubters, can you share what skills are being employed at a high level in environments like this that we are undervaluing or not even acknowledging? Yes, yes. Thank you for asking. I just want listeners to imagine your cashier at a checkstand in a busy store. You see hundreds of shoppers a day that come through your checkstand. And every single person, think of the communication skills that are required to address each person as an individual, to make sure their needs are met, to answer any questions they might have. It's just the interpersonal skills. People who work, everybody who has a job working with people knows how valuable and how difficult interpersonal skills are to attain. It's not something everybody has. But a cashier in a grocery store, you see hundreds of people who all have questions, who all have needs. And not only are you having to speak to them, give them proper questions,

Starting point is 00:08:22 customer service, be kind, be attentive. You also have to pay attention. Am I scanning this correctly? Is this coming up the right price? Am I entering the right produce code? What's the payment method going to be? Do I have to get ready to accept a check? Do I have to, what's, are they going to pay with the credit card? Do I have enough bags next to me to help me bag these groceries? So it's multitasking. There are many things going on at once. Also knowledge of the store. Customers want to know, where's the applesauce? You know, where's the sun-dried tomatoes? Having, my store was huge. It was 65,000 square feet, but it wasn't any larger than your typical grocery store. And employees have this vast knowledge of what the store, where items are located in the store and how to find them.

Starting point is 00:09:01 So I would say a combination of communication skills, technical knowledge, how to operate their register. I write in my book how difficult it was for me to learn how to operate that cash register. It took weeks for me to become even a little bit comfortable. I was very intimidated by the process. And even after I'd worked at the store a year, there were things I was still learning. about how to operate those machines. At a certain point in my job, they replaced many of the cash registers with self-checkout machines. And people think, oh, that's just the customer then checks themselves out. And that's really not true. The cashier who works that station has to know how to operate those machines. This is a technical skill that people have to learn if they're going to

Starting point is 00:09:42 help shoppers who are trying to operate those machines. I was not given a raise to learn how to operate self-checkout machines. It was just considered a new technical skill that I had to master. So I could go on and on, but there are just a number of skills, and you have to have them all at the ready. At any moment, anybody could ask you something, a problem could arise, and you've got to be able to think on your feet. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is you're kind of the first line of defense for everything, right? And this organization or corporation does not profit without you being there to facilitate all of these things. And yet, as you said, a lot of these people aren't making enough to afford their own groceries or their own livelihoods,

Starting point is 00:10:25 then add to that, most people in supermarkets or in some of these essential working environments that are being undervalued are not getting any kind of benefits, right? No 401K, no PTO, no maternity leave or what have you. Oh, of course not. So how does that work for somebody

Starting point is 00:10:51 in that situation, like, how are they saving for retirement if they can't afford groceries? And then how is that a problem for all of us? Because it is. How do they handle it when they have an illness? Or how are people living through these things? Well, they are not living through it. Many of them, let me just tell you a story about one of my colleagues at the store was a 79-year-old woman who had been bagging at the store for about a decade when I met her. So at 79 years old, She had a job in her early years when she was in her 20s, and then she got married and had some children, and her husband died in an accident. There's a whole, she had a lot of bad luck. But long story short, she ended up at 79 years old.

Starting point is 00:11:32 She couldn't, her social security wasn't enough to finance her lifestyle. So she's still bagging groceries at the supermarket at the age of 79. Now, I want to be clear that this, my colleague loved her job. She claimed, I love my customers. I come into work every day. It gives me something to do. but nevertheless she was sick, she was elderly, and she had constant problem. Like, she constantly had to take days off because she was sick or ill.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Sometimes being on her feet so long, her ankles would swell up and she couldn't walk and she would have to go home. So this was somebody who was really struggling at a time in her life when she should have been able to retire. And maybe if you want to pick up a shift now and then part time because you like going to the grocery store, that's fine. But this was an economic necessity for an elderly woman that should not have been in that position. So a lot of times what people do is they just kind of try to keep working as long as I can

Starting point is 00:12:21 and hope for the best. I mean, we are in a crisis when it comes to retirement. There is almost no better example of the economic inequality in our country that affluent people can go off, retire at an age that seems appropriate, live, go traveling, enjoy themselves. And yet we have a class of people, including many grocery workers, who simply have to work until they die. Sorry to break in, but this part matters. Rate the show, share it, and support the sponsor so I can keep making episodes worth interrupting you for. I hope that we all agree that every person deserves the dignity of a living wage and a retirement. So I'm just going to use that as a baseline for our conversation.

Starting point is 00:13:08 If you're tuning in and you don't agree with that, well, then fuck off. But if that is the case, if we believe that, that we all deserve the dignity of a living wage and retirement. How do we support making it so? My first question is, what can we do as consumers, as shoppers, as people who are funding these organizations and keeping them in business? How do we, as shoppers, impact the people working within the organizations that we frequent, getting a living wage. Yeah, that's a really good question. Let me just start, before I answer that

Starting point is 00:13:48 question, just saying a little bit about how serious this crisis is. A couple of years ago, a report came out showing that about three quarters of workers at Kroger, the second largest grocery company in the nation, three quarters of workers were food insecure, meaning they skipped meals. They didn't have enough money to fill their cupboards between paychecks, and they would go to work. These are people who sell food for a living who are not able to meet their grocery bills. So this is 75% of workers at Kroger, according to one study. A bunch of those workers relied on food aid. So you've got a cashier who is earning not enough money for food. And so she herself is relying on SNAP benefits in order to feed her kids and to take care of her family. So we are in a real

Starting point is 00:14:34 crisis in terms of wages for retail workers and the people that do this essential work. This is a very good question in terms of what shoppers can do. I mean, there are a few things. One thing is to talk to your, I'm really a big advocate of just talking to people. When you go into your store, you know, there's this kind of like, there's the shoppers and the workers and they're separated by the checkstand. And we don't see ourselves as part of the same community or we're having the same needs. But in fact, our needs overlap. If your cashier is hungry, if she can't afford, if she doesn't have health insurance, if she's got a toothache that she can't afford to fix, all these things happen at my store. I had one, one cashier who left the job early. I had one,

Starting point is 00:15:12 because she started her period and she couldn't afford maxi-pats. So she had to go home. Jesus. I mean, this is what, this has literally happened while I was on the job. A couple of cashiers wore diapers because behind their checkstand because breaks were so hard to get. And so they were worried about, you know, having an accident behind the checkstand. I mean, this is really undignified for these women that work in these roles. So what can shoppers do?

Starting point is 00:15:34 Talk to the people in your store. I really came to see the supermarket as one of the few places in society where we actually cross paths with people that are. are in a different social class than we might be where middle class people and working class people kind of interact. You go to the supermarket and there are people from all walks of life there. There are not many places in society where that happens. So I would say get to know the people that work in your store. Talk to them. I mean, I'm not saying you have to grill them about their working conditions. Some of them might be uncomfortable about that. But talk to them, say hello, ask them how they're doing. Let them know that you care and that you see them. A lot of times

Starting point is 00:16:09 cashiering can feel kind of invisible. Customers coming through, they pay high, high, and they're just on their way. If you communicate to your cashier that you see them, that you see them as a human being with needs, that you care about their health, their pay, that really goes a long way towards making that job a little less, a little more dignified, which is, I think, the goal. In terms of policy, there are also some things that we can do. We should really, shoppers should really be taking the lead on demanding that retail workers have options to create unions. Unionization is the number one thing that will lead to higher pay and better working conditions. Invariably, where grocery workers are unionized, they are better off.

Starting point is 00:16:50 But we have some barriers to that in our country, including I worked at, my store was in Utah. So this is a state where there are legal barriers to organizing. It's they call it a right to work state. We need to get to, we need to get rid of right to work laws. These are just horrible anti-worker laws. And there is a bill in Congress right now. It's called the Pro Act. And we can encourage members of the Senate. It's already passed the House several years ago. We can encourage members of the Senate to pass the Pro Act. And that would eliminate these right-to-work laws that make it difficult for workers to organize, especially in really hostile places. I also think SNAP. We need to expand SNAP benefits. Snap is a program that allows people, low-income people, to

Starting point is 00:17:34 buy food. That program has been cut over recent years. Trump just made huge cuts to snap. Biden added work requirements to snap. I mean, this is all just undignified. People should have a fundamental right to food. We should expand SNAP benefits. We should remove the means testing. If you need food to feed your children, you should be able to get government support for that. And finally, I'll just mention, I could go on, but I'll mention one other thing that I think is really important. And that's universal health care. It's very, very expensive. Healthcare costs keep going up and up and up at $15 now where people cannot afford their health care premiums. We need to have a public health care system that people can buy into or Medicare for all, some way that people who are doing our society's

Starting point is 00:18:15 essential labor or anybody who needs health care can afford it. And those are some policy programs that I just think are essential to solving this problem. So really important things in there. And I just want to reiterate kind of what I heard is a reminder that we need people in these jobs. These are essential workers. And I just, again, fundamentally believe that people in this country should be able to eat and access health care, regardless of their job status. I think sometimes people are like, oh, we don't have the money for that or that's going to negatively impact me. And the reality is, is it may negatively impact the richest among us. but we're not talking about them not being able to eat or not being able to get health care.

Starting point is 00:19:03 We're talking about what size yacht or private jet or fucking vacation they are going to go on. These people having basic needs met, food and health care, only in my mind can impact us positively because we sort of end up paying for it anyway, right? What are your reactions to any of that? I came away from the supermarket really. You kind of understand inequality in the abstract. Inequality in the sense of like a certain group of people who are doing our society's most essential labor can't afford to feed themselves. But seeing it up close, you know, many of my colleagues couldn't afford their own groceries. Several of them were relied on SNAP benefits.

Starting point is 00:19:43 Almost nobody could afford health care. And yet, I'm telling you, colleague, I worked alongside colleagues. They loved their jobs. They loved coming to work. They valued customer service. They saw it customer service as not just a job description, something like, oh, I need to do this because this is how I get my money. But no, they saw it as a social value. I have a chapter in my book called Community, where I show all the different ways that store workers treated customers who came in as like members of the community.

Starting point is 00:20:11 They're neighbors. They come through your checks and you've seen them before. How's it going? Hey, how was the baseball game last night? Did your kid do well in the spelling bee? I mean, these kind of community, many of us live lives that are so isolating now, only hang out with us, maybe a small number of people, we can feel cut off from community. The supermarket's really a place where colleagues that I worked with really tried to work against that tendency.

Starting point is 00:20:35 They cared about their jobs. They took pride in doing them well. And yet, I couldn't help but see that that sometimes felt like a one-way street where we were doing all we could to maintain that sense of community, especially during the pandemic when everybody was, many people were isolated at home and stuck in home and didn't go out, that, you know, grocery workers really tried to give people that sense of community when they came out of the house. But I couldn't help but see, you know, it felt like a one-way street in that, again, we are struggling to pay our bills, we're struggling to stay housed, we're struggling to see a doctor where we need medical care. That tension really was profoundly affected me and how I saw the grocery store from then on. And it just also, like,

Starting point is 00:21:15 I think the grocery store in some ways, we're not even talking about the supermarket, right? we're talking about what kind of society do we want to have? What kind of world do we want to live in? And the argument that I make in the book is that by improving the lives of supermarket workers, by making retail workers, by acknowledging and in a material way, the essential work that they do, we make society better for all of us, that this is about all of us, not just the people who work in the store. And I just think if we can make those connections, we need to start connecting our experience in stores as shoppers, You need to start connecting our experience in stores to the labor conditions of the people that work in them.

Starting point is 00:21:54 And I think that's another step we can take. If you walk into a store and people are a little bit rude or surly or they don't seem friendly, it might be that, you know, they're underpaid and can't afford health insurance. Yeah. I want to lean in on that a little bit as shoppers. I think one of the biggest ways we can communicate is through our spending power. Yes. And sometimes I get a little bit like worried, well, I boycott a certain. store, does that negatively impact the people working in it even more? Like, are they going to lose jobs or get paid less? And then the flip side is if we put pressure on people, then maybe the conditions will change. Any thoughts on when we should use our spending power against some of these corporations? Like you were talking about Kroger earlier, I don't shop there. We don't have one close by. I wouldn't, but if I did and heard that, I would stop shopping there now. I think there are certainly

Starting point is 00:22:50 ways we can use our dollars to indicate, you know, to force change. I would never, boy cats can be very useful. Historically, they've been very useful. I would say, though, that one of the problems that we have is that these companies are gigantic, right? Kroger is a second largest grocery company. Walmart is one of the largest private employers in the country. Think about this for a second. Four companies sell about 50% of every single grocery item purchased in the United States, just four companies. So these companies are so large that, you know, we really have to think differently about how to force them to change their practices and to change their behavior and to raise wages and to treat workers well. And so one of the things I advocate in the book is enforcement

Starting point is 00:23:33 of our country's antitrust laws. This is a little bit wonky, but we have laws in this country against giant corporations taking over whole industries. And we have not been enforcing those laws in recent years. Since about the Reagan administration, we used to enforce them in the early 20th century during the progressive era. We used these laws to take down standard oil and these kind of large companies that because we knew that as companies get larger and larger and larger, wages get lower, prices get higher. It's not good for the public. But later in the 20th century, starting in about the 1980s, we stopped enforcing antitrust laws. politicians kind of had this idea that, well, a bigger company simply means better efficiency,

Starting point is 00:24:16 lower prices. They can get more things, more items on the shelf because they have more efficient supply chain. We started this, this idea kind of became dominant that bigger is better. And I just think that in recent years, that has turned out to not be the case. It doesn't serve anyone when four corporations control the grocery market. Yeah. Well, it serves probably like four or five people. Right. Exactly. Exactly. There was a study just recently that came out, I think earlier this year or last year, that showed when a Walmart superstore establishes itself in a local community, the poverty rate sky rockets. And so everybody knows Walmart's famous for low prices, right? But even if they offer basic goods at lower prices, it doesn't make up for the fact that they bring wages down. They close local businesses. Local businesses can't survive. It really makes a community poorer, even though you can go buy your Jaroselt of $0.50 less. So we need to start understanding something that might seem convenient, that might seem better in the short term is really not so good in the long term. So part of the argument I make in

Starting point is 00:25:20 the book is that we need to enforce our country's antitrust laws. There was a slight turn in the right direction during the Biden administration. The Federal Trade Commission, which was led by Lena Kahn, began prosecuting companies for violating antitrust laws. And that was a really good step. But now that we have a new administration, those cases mostly have been abandoned and we've gone back to sort of the pre, back to the sort of 1980s view of things where bigger is better. So there have been signs in recent years of a change. But another thing shoppers can do is, it sounds wonky, but urge your elected officials, vote for people who vow to enforce antitrust and make sure this is not saying all corporations are bad or that we should not have any big

Starting point is 00:26:03 companies. It's just about leveling the playing field and saying, look, you can't control. the entire market. We need small business. We need medium-sized business. And it's about making things a little bit more fair for workers as well as shoppers. It's another example of the fact that it's not that raising workers' wages is going to harm us. On the contrary, we have these shared and overlapping needs as shoppers and workers. I'm going to speak for myself. When it comes to antitrust law, I feel like I have very little impact. I can make a phone call. But outside of that and how I vote, I just feel like I have such little impact. And so I tend to lean towards shopping locally,

Starting point is 00:26:42 shopping directly, right? Like instead of going to Walmart, which I will never shop at, I will find the people who sell the products I'm looking for and just buy directly from them whenever possible. Or even like out, like way out, which is the best of the corporate options? Like I prefer to shop at Trader Joe's.

Starting point is 00:27:02 And I'm sure if I go, digging at some point, maybe they'll, I'll find something. But, you know, like, again, are these helpful? I want to be helpful. I also just want to be mindful. I consider my dollars like a vote. And so I do not vote for certain corporations. I think that you're absolutely right. That instinct is absolutely right. I think in addition to reforming the corporate structure that we have, that dominates the grocery industry, we also need to develop and support alternatives. That's absolutely true. Farmers markets, right? Go to your local farmers market, support your local farmers. I go to mine every Saturday. There are co-ops, cooperative stores. You know, co-ops is such an interesting history

Starting point is 00:27:43 all through the 20th century, even before, cooperative stores. They were founded a lot of them in the early 20th century by black shoppers. You know, black shoppers in the early 20th century, they faced racism in stores. They would go into a store. And in the 1910s, 1920s, you would go into a store and the, all the goods were kept behind a counter. So a clerk, you'd have to go up to a counter and wait and a clerk. You'd say, I want a box of this, one box a cream of wheat, and the clerk would hand it to you, or I want a pound of chicken, and the clerk would get it for you. So not only you're in line behind all your neighbors, you can hear you talking to, to the clerk, it was a very public process, but in, clerks were racist, and they would cheat black shoppers. They would

Starting point is 00:28:25 stick a piece of gum under the scale to charge them extra for meat. They would sell them rotten goods. they were treated to horrible in stores. And, you know, if you're a black shopper and you're cheated, you can't call the police because they're probably going to side with the clerk. So we really need to thank black shoppers in the early 20th century for setting up these cooperatives. Cooperative stores that were owned by the community, run by community members, that were an alternative to corporations. There are still cooperative stores out there.

Starting point is 00:28:52 That impulse is still out there. I would connect it to this public stores. Many cities have public grocery stores where you can go in, and support that their government run and that the food there is subsidized. They get a bad rap because of propaganda from the corporate sector, but public grocery stores.

Starting point is 00:29:10 In 2025, the New York City, he was a mayoral candidate at that point. Mayor Zoran Mandami proposed a public grocery store, one in each of the five boroughs is kind of an experiment to help keep grocery prices down. And this is exactly the kind of thing we need to be doing and supporting.

Starting point is 00:29:27 There's a lot of propaganda about how these stores are horrible and it's communism and awful stuff. But in fact, this is an alternative to the corporate store. People can go and support these stores. According to what I've read, all that Mondami's proposing to do is to cut out the middleman. So to keep those prices down and offer people a public option. There are many, many ways we can support alternatives to corporate stores, and we should certainly be doing that. I have so many more questions, but, Ann, I just want to thank you for writing this book and for being here today. Listener, go get your hands on it. It's cleanup on aisle five.

Starting point is 00:30:00 and available, I'm sure, on Amazon, but let's go to bookshop.org or go to your local bookstore, keep them in business. Well said. And Ann, thank you for being here today. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Pleasure was all mine. All right, friend, a living wage and benefits shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a baseline. And if it's not, we have to stop acting surprised by the consequences of a system that undervalues the very people it depends on. And we don't get to throw up our hands and pretend like we can't do anything about it.

Starting point is 00:30:33 We don't get to separate ourselves from it, not as leaders, not as consumers, and not as people who benefit from it. So the question isn't whether this is fair. We already know it's not. The question is what we're willing to tolerate, what we're willing to challenge and what we're willing to change,

Starting point is 00:30:50 starting with what we support and where we spend our money. So go vote with your dollars because it's the language corporations actually understand. Vote with your dollars, because that is woman's work.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Essential Workers, Poverty Wages, and The Real Cost of Cheap Groceries with Ann Larson | 417

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