The following submission comes from Target Workers Unite members honoring the legacy of founding member Sharon Keel who recently succumbed from her battle with cancer
Founding member of Target Workers Unite Sharon Keel has succumbed to her battle with cancer. She leaves a lasting imprint in the Virginia labor movement, which cannot be replaced. Eight years ago it was Sharon who took the initiative to help us organize at Target store 1292 in Christiansburg, Virginia. Without her we never would have launched Target Workers Unite.
A small collective of local workers operating under the name New River Workers Power went on an extensive canvassing effort in local trailer parks owned by a local slumlord. It was at the Oak Forest trailer park in Merrimac, Virginia where we first met Sharon. Initially the collective intended to start a tenants union – the New River Tenants Union – with Sharon being the first worker-tenant to organize her fellow tenants at the Oak Forest trailer park. It wasn’t long after this that Sharon faced intimidation and harassment from the park manager for attempting to organize at the trailer park. With the threat of eviction, Sharon decided to change focus toward her jobsite. Specifically over the issue of long time manager Daniel Butler, who had put his hands on her, as well as making other women workers uncomfortable with his comments and actions. Sharon had worked for Target for close to 20 years. It wasn’t just the manager that was the issue for her, but lack of pay, benefits, and working conditions that she took issue with.
Her job had a direct impact on her living conditions. The lack of pay and benefits from Target affected her health and her housing. It wasn’t uncommon for her to have to use predatory payday loan shops to make ends meet between her paychecks. She had no health insurance from Target despite her many years of dedicated service. She oftentimes was living with chronic pain before her cancer diagnosis, which made her job duties even more difficult. With no health insurance she was oftentimes forced to go without treatment. This was unacceptable to her, she knew how much profit Target was generating. Why shouldn’t all workers have access to the same level of healthcare as Target CEO Brian Cornell? She was adamant that all workers like her should have living wages and a good quality of life which pushed her to organize at Target.
Sharon was instrumental in Target Workers Unite. She spent much of her free time meeting with coworkers outside of work to go over our plans for a strike action to hold the manager Daniel Butler and Target accountable. She came to meeting after meeting with coworkers and supporters as we built up a solidarity network to ensure the success of our first strike and subsequent organizing efforts. She did all of this despite her chronic pain, despite her physical limitations and mobility issues, despite the mounting stress from living in a trailer that needed constant repairs and which the slumlord refused to do anything about.
A constant gripe of Sharon’s was the insufficient level of support and action from other coworkers. Living in the South with a tiny unionized workforce, where unions are lambasted by bosses and politicians, and with hardly any living memory of a militant union culture which isn’t corrupted by sellout union bureaucrats working in the interests of bosses over the union rank and file, made for a tremendously difficult environment where the odds were against us. In particular, as we lived in a college town, much of the Target workforce was comprised of college students who didn’t see their jobs at Target as “real jobs” since they only saw Target as a short term situation before they graduated and moved on to becoming part of the professional managerial class. This has always remained a constant contradiction within the Target workforce and is used by Target as a means of dividing the workforce in order to minimize the threat of Target workers organizing and unionizing. High turnover in the service industry is a key component of union busting.
Despite the odds Sharon was always committed to the cause, even recognizing nothing short of a workers revolution would adequately address the plight of the US working class. Sharon may not have lived to see the successful unionization of Target, nor a workers revolution, but she played her part and contributed what she could towards such ends. As she constantly said “it’s up to future generations to make a better world.”
You can find more of Sharon’s outspokenness and advocacy in the following interviews:
The Virginia Worker 
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