Aubretia “Windy” Edick wears her Walmart story. She often sports the distinctive blue vest worn by all store employees, and a large badge announces her name in capital letters.
But layered on top of her standard ensemble are buttons and pins. One reads, “Stop Corporate Greed — Jobs With Justice.” Another, which refers to hourly wages, reads, “Walmart can afford $15 and full time.” Stuck through her nametag is a green metal pin shaped like the ‘a-okay’ hand gesture, thumb to index finger — the logo used by the labor advocacy group Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart).
“These are legal. I can wear all of these,” she said. “This is how I come in to work.”
It was, at least, until she was fired from her job as a cashier at the Walmart in Chicopee on Nov. 21. Edick, 64, asserts that this happened because of her active involvement with organizations like OUR Walmart, which champion workers’ rights, fair wages, and better working conditions.
Walmart is the largest private employer in the United States, and the six members of the Walton family are worth more than 100 billion dollars, making them the richest family in the country.
The average full-time Walmart associate earns approximately $15,500 a year nationally, according to Glassdoor.com. In Massachusetts, where the cost of living is higher than in other parts of the country, it’s a little over $18,000.
Edick worked at the Chicopee location for two years. Before that she spent 12 years at the Walmart in Hudson, NY, alongside her father, himself a Walmart employee of 17 years. It is his story that galvanized her into action.
Seated in a booth at a Cumberland Farms in Granby last week, Edick sipped coffee from a styrofoam cup. As she shared her account of her father’s death, she put her cup aside and took hold of an OUR Walmart black baseball cap instead. “I’m going to try not to cry,” she said, pulling distractedly at the plastic strap.
Her father, Harold “Buddy” Richards, had been a department manager. Ten years ago he suffered a gallbladder attack and spent six weeks out of work.
“Then he went back. I didn’t want him to go back so soon, but he insisted. My dad loved Walmart. So the first day he came back, the manager had him climb a ladder and clean a ceiling fan. While he was up there, he had a minor stroke.”
Edick was working at the same location. She brought him home. A few days later she confronted the store manager about it.
“I told him that it was a really foolish thing to do. I asked him whether he would do the same thing if it was his own mother up on that ladder. He said yes, he would. All I could say was, ‘Well, I’m glad I’m not your mother.’”
She didn’t pursue it further. “But my dad, he started to move really slowly after that. They demoted him and made him a people greeter.” Edick was living with her father at the time, and she said she saw his hours and his pay rate decrease.
A few months later, on her day off, Walmart called. “They wanted me to pick up my dad. They said he wasn’t feeling well. As soon as I walked in the store, I saw right away that something was wrong.”
Edick paused to wipe her eyes with a napkin. “I reached in his pocket and got the keys. Nobody helped us out of the store. He couldn’t walk. I got him to the hospital, and by then it was too late. He’d had a major stroke. They couldn’t do anything for him.”
Her father died in 2011. He was 80.
She stopped to stare through the glass at the gas pumps and traffic outside. “That’s why I joined OUR Walmart. I start a lot of conversations online and on social media about this. I’ve heard stories all across the nation.”
Fate might not have brought Edick to western Massachusetts. But a heart attack in 2011 put her out of work for nearly a year. Income ceased. She sold her furniture. After being evicted from her apartment, she decided to move in with her partner, a retired musician, in Granby.
Edick has been busy over the past few years. She joins meetings, gives speeches, and protests locally in collaboration with the Springfield-based coalition Western Mass Jobs with Justice (WMJWJ) and with the local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UCFW). On Black Friday she trekked between protests at retail outlets in Hadley, Westfield, Springfield, and Chicopee.
Additionally, OUR Walmart has covered travel costs for Edick to travel to meetings and protests in Boston, New York, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Earlier this fall she spoke at a protest outside of Rob Walton’s mansion in Phoenix. In September, she was one of twelve OUR Walmart members to meet with Senator Elizabeth Warren in Washington to discuss the fight for fair wages at Walmart.
Jon Weissman, the coordinator for WMJWJ, remembers Edick’s arrival to the area. When OUR Walmart notified him that she was coming to town, “I remember them saying, ‘She’ll light you on fire.’ And she did.”
Walmart is not the be-all and end-all for labor reform, Weissman said. “But Walmart is symbolic. Walmart is a metaphor. It’s the largest U.S. employer, and it sets the pace. We have a saying: If you can organize Walmart, you can organize anybody. And the national Jobs with Justice website says this: Change Walmart, Change the Economy.”
The Western Mass chapter of JWJ has over 70 member organizations across a wide range of work sectors. It was formed in 1998, out of a national coalition created in 1987. “It grew out of the left wing of the AFL-CIO,” he explained. “They wanted to resurrect the idea of social movement after Reagan. Particularly around workplace issues, including the right to organize.”
That’s Edick’s passion too, he added. “Right now, I think we’re the most fortunate chapter in America. Because we have her.”
Patrick Burke is a staff member at WMJWJ. Since getting involved with the UFCW this fall he has been working closely alongside her on what he calls “direct organizing,” which consists of on-site, face-to-face introductions and conversations with Walmart workers in the stores.
“We’ve been explaining to them what their rights are, trying to get them to join OUR Walmart,” he said. “It’s a workers association, not a union. We want workers to use their own strengths and rights to encourage and talk to other workers about labor laws.”
“Windy is someone who really gets it,” he added. “She really does like working at Walmart. She’s honest, and she tells good stories. Customers like her. It’s been a real honor to be working with her on this stuff.”
Burke said he talks to workers who are in search of second jobs. He talks to workers caring for a sick parent who wonder whether they’ll be given enough hours to pay the bills. “More and more people feel precarious,” he said. “It’s harder than ever to feel secure in these jobs. But I see the lightbulb turn on, and I see people thinking about their collective power.”
Edick feels supported and appreciated by her fellow activists, but she said her Chicopee store manager, Dave Ebbling, hasn’t been thrilled about her constant campaigning.
Then came what she calls “the incident in the parking lot” on Nov. 7, which she thinks Ebbling saw as a convenient opportunity to fire her.
That morning, a woman unknown to Edick fell down beside her car as she was pulling into the lot. The woman is suing Walmart for injuries sustained from the fall.
In that police report, upon reviewing the surveillance tape, the patrol officer wrote that “though [Edick’s car] never made direct contact with pedestrian, [Edick] failing to slow is responsible for the injuries to pedestrian.” Edick says she didn’t see the pedestrian crossing, and she doesn’t see how an incident not ticketed by police, which occurred while she was off the clock, is grounds for dismissal.
In an email to the Advocate, Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg stated that Walmart has a strict anti-retaliation policy. He said this was a safety violation, plain and simple: “She already had active disciplinary coachings for prior policy violations, and this violation moved her to the last step of our progressive discipline policy, which resulted in her termination.” Ebbling did not respond to calls for comment.
Early last week, Edick met with a human resources manager at the store to appeal the decision. She doesn’t want just any job — she wants this job.
Which raises a question Edick hears constantly: why is she fighting to win back a position with low pay and minimal benefits — not to mention all of this festering distrust?
“I want to stay at Walmart because I want to see a change in Walmart,” she said. “Quitting is putting your blinders on. It’s running away. Sometimes you have to stay. You have to stand up for the right thing.”
She grabbed a napkin and wrote down a column of letters: F, E, A, R. “Do you know what this stands for? It stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. That’s Walmart’s biggest weapon.”
Store associates are afraid, she explained. “When I first started working at the Walmart in Chicopee and I said I was going on strike, an associate told me that it was really stupid to go. She said I wasn’t going to have a job when I came back. I told her that it was my legal right to strike. She didn’t believe me. So I went on strike, I came back, and there was my job.”
But the fear runs deep, she said. “We get low pay. Every worker there really needs the job. And to stand up with the person who’s making noise, that can put you in jeopardy.”
A handful of OUR Walmart members hold store management positions, but not very many, she added. “It’s because joining up requires you to see things differently.”
So who gets involved?
“Usually it’s people who have worked there for three or four years. Most get involved because crap has happened to them at Walmart, and they seek us out online.”
But Edick says she’s not anti-Walmart. “I just took off my rose-colored glasses.”
And where does the fight go from here?
“My purpose is to get my job back, go back into the store, and continue to work,” she said. “I will wear my buttons and speak out. I will say to other associates, ‘See? This is what OUR Walmart is about. They fought for me to get my job back. Walmart was wrong to fire me, and because I didn’t let it go, I got my job back, and here I am. I’m here.’”•
