The Modern Labor Movement Comes to NBC
Superstore, the new NBC sitcom that finished its first season last month, is set in a chain big box store called Cloud 9. Through this season, the show has taken great advantage of its setting, where almost any object any character could need is just a few minutes’ walk away. In 2016, though, with so many people really fighting for more equitable treatment in workplaces like Cloud 9, it just makes no sense at all for the minimum-wage-earners of Cloud 9 to be so close with their boss, Glenn (Mark McKinney), nor for him to care so deeply about their well-being. This is a problem with far more series than just Superstore, which is why its finale, “Labor,” was so “surprisingly powerful and inspiring for such a funny little gem quietly existing on NBC on Monday night,” as Pilot Viruet wrote at The AV Club. Superstore joined the ranks of The Carmichael Show, Black-ish, and Mom as a current sitcom willing to actually take on the reality of its setting.
In “Labor,” the staff of Cloud 9, led by Amy (America Ferrara), stages a walkout to protest unfair working conditions, especially the lack of maternity leave for new mother Cheyenne (Nichole Bloom). Until this point, the series occasionally felt like it was set in a fantasy version of a big box retailer — not only did the store’s staff nearly always share 8-hour shifts, but the store manager, was friends with the staff, and they often did favors for him just to help him out.
While many store managers at Walmart, Kmart, Target, or other Cloud 9 equivalents can be as friendly and avuncular as Glenn, the scene in “Magazine Profile” where Glenn agrees with a Cloud 9-circulated trade magazine article titled “Minimum Wage is Maximum Fun” served as a sharp — and funny — reminder that while management and labor can be friendly, they can never be friends. Management deprives labor of a living wage. In that same episode, Jonah (Ben Feldman) gladly allows Glenn, his boss, to take credit for Jonah’s ideas to help Glenn look better to corporate. Another employee, Garrett (Colton Dunn) allows himself to appear on the magazine’s cover (he hates being tokenized by corporate literature) to help Glenn appear there himself. Glenn is a deeply conservative Christian, and interrupts a conversation in the breakroom to tell his employees that he’s not comfortable with them giving one another rides to abortion clinics. While sitcom characters laughing off one another’s unforgiveable violations is a tradition older than television, it seemed to stand in the way of Superstore actually grappling with a primary tension of its setting — the division between management and labor at big box retailers. It’s a blind spot as big as ignoring NYPD’s violent racism on a sitcom about Brooklyn cops.
Superstore’s creator, Justin Spitzer, wrote on The Office for seven seasons, credited as a co-EP for its last two. While The Office began as a show largely about a man who has bought into the fanciful notion that his workplace is a family (Michael Scott), by the end of Steve Carell’s run, there were tearful goodbyes, the staff forgiving Michael for his constant verbal abuse and harassment, and Jim insisting, “You turned out to be…the best boss I ever had.”
But a second season episode of The Office featured its own disruption of the work family unit by labor organizing. That episode, “Boys and Girls,” coincidentally aired ten years to the month before “Labor.” “Boys and Girls” explored exactly what the limits of this work family model can be as Michael and Jan (Melora Hardin) respond to the warehouse staff suggesting unionization. Like “Labor,” “Boys and Girls” demonstrated the ways that management uses race, class, and gender to divide workers against each other, to keep them from organizing.
In “Boys and Girls,” Dunder Mifflin holds a Women in the Workplace seminar, run by Jan. As Jan explains, “One of the goals of these women’s seminars is to feel out if there’s any standouts. Women who could be a valuable addition to our corporate life.” Madge, the warehouse’s only female worker (Karly Rothenberg), is not invited to this seminar — the only possible standouts are office staff. It won’t be until seasons later that warehouse foreman Darryl will be recognized for his management skills, and moved up to the office (this also coincided with the release of the Craig Robinson-starring Hot Tub Time Machine).
Michael, of course, cannot handle that the men in the office — especially him — are being excluded from something, and demands to hold his own Men in the Workplace seminar. Jan insists it take place in the warehouse, both she and Michael assuming this seminar would be welcome in a presumably busy warehouse. The Men’s seminar makes Madge feel unwelcome almost immediately. Free-associating, Michael encourages the staff to air grievances, and the warehouse workers quickly start talking about the unfair compensation gap between office and warehouse staff, including pay and benefits. Playing off Michael’s need to be liked and accepted, Darryl pushes Michael to support warehouse unionization, shaking his hand and telling him “Welcome to the warehouse.” Michael knows that he cannot allow a union but doesn’t want to be the bad guy, so he brings the issue to Jan’s attention. She immediately tells the warehouse staff, “If there is even a whiff of unionization in this branch, I can guarantee you the branch will be shut down.”
Reviewing the episode, the organization American Rights at Work (now a part of Jobs with Justice) noted:
“It’s unfair and illegal for Dunder-Mifflin to threaten workers in this manner. But can we chalk it up to another Hollywood dramatization? … 49% of employers openly threaten to close a worksite when workers try to form a union.* … [emphasis theirs]
“And while it’s usually Michael who’s not operating by the book, in this episode Jan, from Dunder-Mifflin’s corporate office, made the ‘mistake.’ If she had hired one of the thousands of highly-paid “anti-union consultants” out there, she could have avoided this misstep by being coached to give practically the same speech with a few subtle differences to ‘technically’ not violate the law.”
Indeed, this is exactly what Cloud 9 does when Jonah and Amy use the words “union” and “strike” on a phone call with corporate. They send a self-described “labor relations consultant” (Dan Bucatinsky) to hold a staff seminar explaining that unions are only necessary at other companies. He has them practice saying “No” to a union organizer, and offers stale donut holes to deflect questions about maternity leave.
Michael Scott also finds a way to distract from difficult questions that Jan’s announcement raises: by agreeing with the male warehouse employees that Jan is a “bitch.” By reinforcing this gendered division, Michael keeps himself from being the bad guy, even as the company he works for illegally threatens its employees for demanding their rights.
Superstore’s Glenn is not defined by Michael Scott’s cowardice. Glenn is a conservative, evangelical Christian who’s constantly trying to insert prayers into morning meetings. He thrives at Cloud 9, because it’s a big St. Louis superstore, where a right-wing Christian is unlikely to make waves. But Glenn also believes in treating people fairly and kindly, even when those values are at odds with Cloud 9’s goals. This, of course, is ultimately his undoing.
The Superstore episode “Shoplifter” sets Glenn and Amy each on their own trajectories that culminate in “Labor.” In that episode, Cloud 9’s then-assistant manager Dina (Lauren Ash) suspects a snobby customer (played by Ash’s Another Period co-star Natasha Leggero) of shoplifting. She detains Leggero’s character, and with Amy’s help, tries to get her to crack. When they check the tape and learn that they were mistaken, Natasha Leggero tells Glenn that she’ll “call your corporate offices and make them fire [Dina]” and refers to the staff as “back-country idiots.” So Glenn hides a DVD in Leggero’s bag, leveraging the threat of prosecution against her to protect Dina. This is an early instance of Glenn putting his staff ahead of corporate policy, and it becomes a trend as the season continues.
In the series pilot, Amy’s seniority has earned her a spot as floor supervisor, but her lack of college education is holding her back at Cloud 9. Her struggle is particularly racial and gendered — she had a baby at 19, and in “Shoplifter” Amy must bring her daughter to work because she can’t find a sitter. Though Amy occupies that gray zone between management and staff, she socializes mostly with the staff, and in the pilot helps Cheyenne take unscheduled breaks when her pregnancy makes working uncomfortable. In “Shoplifter,” however, Amy helps Dina try to ensnare Leggero (she doesn’t object to the shoplifting nearly as much as she does to Leggero’s snobbiness). At the episode’s end, Dina thanks her for her help, and also informs her that she’ll be writing her up for bringing her daughter to work.
But Amy’s star continues to rise at Cloud 9. Dina takes a demotion so she can romantically pursue Jonah (not Superstore’s best storyline, and a reminder of how rarely male TV bosses step down so they can pursue female subordinates), and Amy is hired as the new assistant manager. From then on, Cloud 9 begins paying for Amy to continue her college career (not unlike Dunder Mifflin’s “design training program” that Jan offers Pam (Jenna Fischer) in “Boys and Girls,” it’s corporate-subsidized education to benefit the company). To underline the way corporations value education and experience only to the extent that they can exploit them, in “Labor,” when Cheyenne goes into labor, everyone rushes to her aid, but almost no one knows how to deal with a baby being born. One employee, Sandra (Kaliko Kauahi), tries to offer, “If it helps, I’m a trained midwife,” but she’s passed over for Glenn, who “played the abortion doctor in a hell house once.”
Jonah’s influence disrupts Amy’s Frank Underwood-style ascension to power. Jonah is white, male, and overeducated. Early on, he assumes that because Amy has a child and is Latina, she’s a single mother. They eventually get close, and for a while feel like the sitcom’s Pandas — the two characters the show wants us to want to hook up. But she’s married, and his presence in her life (and in the store) seems ephemeral — their dynamic almost mimics Sally Field and Ron Leibman in Norma Rae. In the pilot, they quarrel over whether or not a workday can be made exceptional. The episode ends with his attaching glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling of Cloud 9, creating a beautiful effect when the lights are off.
In the season finale, “Labor,” Jonah again expects something extraordinary from Cloud 9. Cheyenne’s due date is drawing close, and Jonah is appalled to learn that, because Cloud 9 has no maternity leave, Cheyenne will work up through and immediately after the birth. He pushes Amy to call corporate and ask for change. When Cheyenne gives birth immediately after the resultant anti-union presentation, Glenn can no longer abide by Cloud 9’s cruelty. He gives her six paid weeks off, pretending it’s a disciplinary measure. His ruse is transparent, and he’s finally fired for doing right by his employees. Amy is offered his job, and she must make a choice — to stand in solidarity with her coworkers, or create a smooth transition to her store leadership. “Amy, you’re a leader,” Glenn tells her, “And the people here need a leader. Can you do that?” She can, and leads the entire staff in a walkout.
As Amy’s coworkers join her in the parking lot, Superstore joins us in the real world of big box retail. Labor groups are pushing superstores to change, and some progress is being made. In fact, Walmart’s refusal to accommodate pregnant employees (creating the same economic pressures Cheyenne faces on Superstore) precipitated the formation of OUR Walmart’s Respect the Bump campaign, whose pressure led to Wal-Mart overhauling their policies.
Like in real life, because Cloud 9’s workers are not unionized, they’re fired for staging wildcat strikes. Unlike in real life, they are not arrested. While Jonah keeps instigating (asking Bucatinsky’s union-buster about maternity leave, encouraging coworkers to discuss the fact that they’re kept under forty hours per week so Cloud 9 can withhold benefits, bringing an “intent to unionize” card to work), it’s Amy who actually takes action and leads the walkout. She has more at risk, and that’s who leads strikes. As the staff stand around in the Cloud 9 parking lot, Jonah asks her, “Is this gonna work?”
“I don’t know,” she replies, “But it’s worth a shot, right?”
It remains to be seen if Superstore will continue to follow the story of these brave, striking workers, and resist the urge to return them to square one with its second season, the way sitcoms often do. Exploding a series’ setting in favor of characters taking brave (and politically controversial) action doesn’t always work. But it’s worth a shot, right?
