Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work

In Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work, Joya Misra and Kyla Walters offer novel insight into the experience of retail work at a time when schedules are precarious and workers are closely monitored by surveillance technologies. Walking Mannequins is a timely book. Retail jobs remain one of the most common occupations in the United States. This is also an industry dominated by women—including many women of color—who are paid poorly and receive few benefits. The book draws on interviews with 55 current and former employees working primarily in teen-oriented clothing stores, paired with 35 store observations. The book begins with an overview of retail clothing work. Fast-fashion stores do not expect clothing to last more than a few seasons, and companies take a similar approach to their employees. Turnover in these jobs is high, and managers invest little time in training to build workers’ skills. Instead, they focus on whether workers fit the look of the store. As in many service-sector jobs, employers have found ways to successfully transfer risk onto employees. New technologies allow managers to match staffing to demand, meaning that workers often have shifts changed with little notice. In an environment where few employees are scheduled for enough hours to pay their bills, managers reward workers not through better pay but through the opportunity to work more. The next section documents workers’ relationships with managers, customers, and each other. Here, Misra and Walters differentiate between frontline managers, who work in stores, and corporate managers, who monitor employees from afar. These different actors operate within what Misra and Walters call the ‘‘service panopticon.’’ Frontline managers constantly surveil workers, monitoring their appearance and interactions with customers and checking their bags at the end of each shift. Outside of stores, corporate managers keep watch using a barrage of metrics collected from cameras, computer software, sensors, customer surveys, and secret shoppers. Although frontline workers question the utility of these metrics, this data effectively transfers organizational decision-making power to corporate managers and strips both frontline managers and workers of agency. This section also sheds light on the unexpected challenges retail workers navigate. Just as managers keep watch over workers, workers monitor customers as part of the service panopticon. Managers often task Black workers with the job of trailing Black customers whom they suspect of shoplifting, as if racial profiling is less harmful if outsourced to a Black employee. Workers are similarly bothered by expectations to push branded credit cards onto customers, which they find exploitative. Indeed, a surprisingly large percentage of store revenues come not through selling clothes but through credit cards with exorbitant interest rates. The final chapters delve into the concept of aesthetic labor. Despite their low pay, workers at teen-oriented retail stores are held to high aesthetic standards. These stores don’t necessarily have uniforms, but instead regulate appearance through extensive ‘‘look policies.’’ Workers should appear as though they naturally wear the store’s merchandise in their everyday lives. Rather than throwing on a company t-shirt at the start of their shift, workers must contort themselves to embody the brand from head to toe. The examples that Misra and Walters document are striking. Workers describe trudging through the snow in January in their Hollister-issued flip-flops and are threatened to be sent home for unsanctioned nail colors. In one particularly memorable vignette, a manager opened a store late to re-style a worker’s hair, implying, in no uncertain terms, that the worker’s appearance was more important than any sales Reviews 357