This September a Walmart shop assistant, exhausted by daily abuse, broadcast her resignation via two far-reaching public channels: first, her workplace’s loudspeaker system; later, as a video, via social media. ‘Attention Walmart shoppers and associates,’ she began. ‘My name is Beth from electronics, I’ve been working at Walmart for almost five years, and I can say that everyone here is overworked and underpaid.’

Beth’s speech was almost identical in wording and structure to an earlier Walmart employee’s resignation, announced via the same media in November 2020. Both Beth from electronics and Shana from CAP 2 (night stockers) publicly shamed their managers for worker mistreatment before calling out sexual harassment, ‘shouting out’ colleagues from the lower ranks, and concluding with a string of denouncements, including ‘fuck this job’.

There were variations in the details of these speeches, but common to each was an emphasis on worker replaceability. ‘We are treated by management and customers poorly every day,’ said Beth. ‘Whenever we have a problem with it, we’re told that we’re replaceable.’ Shana, meanwhile, called attention to the relentless hiring and firing of Black employees—a testament to management’s choice to render some more replaceable than others.

The replaceability of workers, often framed as an unfortunate, inevitable feature of technologisation and widespread unemployment, has long in fact been an intentional tool of worker exploitation. In the early twentieth century Fred W. Taylor’s management breakthrough was to recognise the power that factory workers held through their knowledge of the production process, which allowed them not only to save on working hours, but also to bargain for better conditions; by further de-skilling labour—usually by accelerating the break-up of the production process into self-contained chunks—Taylorism established a system of management centred on disempowerment.

In today’s de-industrialised labour market, this process extends well beyond the factory setting, and successive profit crises have led to the abandonment of those welfare systems, worker protections, and employment benefits that were once offered as a consolation for what is often tedious toil. The work of CAP 2 ‘associates’ like Shana centre on unloading arriving trucks full of products and transferring them to shelves: despite the resilience actually required, this work is infused with a sense of replaceability reinforced by the threat (as opposed to the reality) of replacement via automation.

Both are strategies for pushing down wages and further immiserating workers; what’s more, since capitalist ideology transitioned to individualistic neoliberalism, responsibility for workers’ welfare and livelihood has been shifted onto workers themselves to suggest that competitive performance is the only viable shield against the imminent onslaught of replacement. In other words, if you get replaced, it’s your fault.

Replaceability is a quality now inscribed in the legal status (or lack thereof) of insecure jobs across countless industries. According to the UK’s Employment Rights Act of 1996, ‘no employment relationships exists if a worker can substitute another person to do the work’. This law has been leveraged by businesses, especially those self-described as ‘platforms’, as grounds for denying employee rights to outsourced and casual staff. It is thus that in comparison with TaskRabbits and Deliveroo riders, the chance even to be employed becomes a prize to be won through individual effort. ‘Shout out to Ariel,’ said Shana from CAP 2, ‘for getting me this job a year ago when I needed it most.’

More casual workers than Shana, bouncing between agencies, platforms, and zero-hour contracts, are sold the idea that jobs are conveniently replaceable to them, rather than the other way round. While a law may be intended to make the norms of employment protect against excessive replaceability, it is instead replaceability that has come to govern norms of employment.

Within this landscape of labour, the statements of workers like Beth and Shana are powerful; in order to resist their own exploitation, workers must understand their replaceability not as an inevitability to be managed, but rather as something produced by management in the interests of exploitation.

Consciousness-raising, however, even larger mobilisation, is not in itself sufficient to transform the conditions of labour completely. Even if a number of workers were to follow Beth and Shana’s example, walking out of their jobs and making their reasons known, it is precisely the replaceability these workers bemoan that drains resignation alone of power. In single-employer campaigns at retailers like Walmart and Asda, walkouts and strikes have historically risked being less effective when staged in divisions where workers can be easily and cheaply replaced the following day.

Membership of trade unions in the UK private sector is currently less than half of what it was at the end of the 1970s. Both here and in the US, where unionisation rates are more stable, the lowest rates of membership straddle both professional and blue-collar workplaces. For union membership to be normalised across sectors, and for unions to win back the strength to carry out the strategic, co-ordinated building of supermajorities whose withdrawal of labour can hit employers the hardest and engender widespread change, greater solidarity is needed between all those whom businesses exploit.

If we are to transform a society that makes a virtue of competition and self-interest, we need more than a specific population of workers that recognises its own replaceability. We need a social movement that both asserts its members as radically equal, and looks towards a horizon of non-hierarchical labour. This means replaceability, not as a weapon wielded against, but by, the working class.

As theorist Jodi Dean writes of the political actor engaged in building this movement, the comrade, such a figure becomes, in an important sense, ‘multiple, replaceable, fungible’: interchangeable not in terms of identity or access to resources, but as a common agent in a project that strives for greater commonality.