This past summer, just like in June 2011, thousands of New York City Macy’s workers were ready to strike. In either case it would have been the first work stoppage at the storied department store since 1972, but instead, in the wee hours of the morning, representatives of Local 1-S of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union called off the strike and agreed to a tepid five-year deal. Also in 2011, workers at a nearby Long Island Target store cast ballots in a unionization drive. Like most such elections recently it failed, dashing hopes for a new union beachhead in big-box retail.

Alongside fast-food, retail is among the most recognizable “bad job” sectors in twenty-first-century America. It has become synonymous with low-wage, unstable, “stopgap” work. Average wages for nonsupervisory workers are 30 percent below the private-sector average, and those in general merchandise — which includes Macy’s, Target, and Walmart — are 44 percent lower. And less than 5 percent of retail workers are unionized today, down from more than ten percent in 1983.

Retail thus appears ripe for organizing and the boost in wages this has historically brought. Nelson Lichtenstein argues that big-box retail provides “the template of twenty-first-century capitalism” and is therefore central to revitalizing US labor. Yet the broad failure to unionize retail seems to symbolize the main dilemmas facing American unions: their cautious conservatism in remaining strongholds and their inability to organize new ones.