In September 2017, Toys ‘R’ Us, Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By March 2018, the company began liquidating their stores, impacting the lives of all 33,000 employees. While the news was devastating and shocking, bankruptcy due to debt and mismanagement by private equity firms is not new. Kmart and Party City both closed under similar circumstances.
Aliya Sabharwal helped organize the Toys ‘R’ Us workers, securing them 20 million in severance. The stories she gathered to organize the campaign inspired her to write a nonfiction book on the impact of economic inequality on everyday life. Her work offers a deep dive into understanding concepts like “financialization” while presenting a unique history of labor organizing and life in financialized economies. Now, she is building a national coalition of Wall Street accountability activists with Americans for Financial Reform to fight back against the private equity industry's takeover of other key economic sectors. Aaliya is a member of the 2023-24 Changemaker Authors Cohort.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Narrative Initiative:
How did you get into organizing and what propelled you to where you are today?
Aliya Sabharwal:
My first job in the movement world was working with new immigrant women, primarily workers in low wage industries like nail salons and domestic work. We were starting to build an organizing program with nail salon workers to help reform the industry.
In that job, I worked with unions for the first time, understanding how community organizations and unions fit together in the labor movement. In my next job, I began organizing laid off retail workers which became the inspiration for my book.
In April 2018, I started organizing Toys ‘R’ Us workers who were losing their jobs after the company announced that it was bankrupt. A lot of workers were shocked that their company would soon shut down – they loved working with kids and families. Several workers worked in profitable stores, so they had many questions. “How is this possible?” – that was one of the most frequent questions I got when talking to workers.
A leveraged buyout is what led to the Toys ‘R’ US bankruptcy. In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust purchased the company for $6.6 billion, $5 billion of which was debt they raised from investors. The $5 billion was dumped into Toys ‘R’ Us, adding to its overall debt burden. The private equity firms aim to streamline companies but they strip assets and value, and these practices often lead the company into bankruptcy.
Workers witnessed total chaos: their jobs gone, stores shut down, a company for kids destroyed. They wanted to know why leveraging companies with tons of debt worked because from their perspective, understandably, it didn’t.
This was how I started to understand concepts like "financialization." I helped build important, even transformative, campaigns, and also found a transformation in me – I developed a desire to understand big questions like: how did we get here? How is the predatory work of private equity firms a normal part of how our economy functions? To echo the workers who asked the question first, how is this possible?
Narrative Initiative:
How do you translate concepts like "financialization" between different audiences?
Aliya Sabharwal:
I’ve found that speaking to the effects of financialization is the most important way to talk about these complex processes. This is something I learned from organizing. When I was talking to workers about their layoffs, I didn’t start by using the term “financialization.” Organizers are trained not to talk “at” people and I would never start an organizing conversation like a lecture, giving a history of Wall Street. It turns a potential member leader off of your message. I would listen to people’s experience, ask questions, and then offer context when members seemed open to it.
The first layer was naming the Wall Street firms that bought Toys ‘R’ Us and explaining how the deal took place, how a leveraged buyout works. As the campaign evolved, we went deeper as workers became more engaged and asked for more explanations of how Wall Street operated. I led political education training on these topics, and this was where we talked about financialization.
Now I work at a policy advocacy organization where I look at the impacts of Wall Street across numerous sectors. I work with state and federal policy experts, grassroots groups, and labor unions. I use the term financialization more often these days – it’s the starting point for many conversations. But it's just as important to name the impacts of how Wall Street worsens existing systemic inequalities. Whether it is how private equity-owned property management companies worsen the housing crisis by raising rent and increasing evictions, or that when private equity firms purchase hospitals and emergency rooms, cost of care increases while quality of care plummets due to understaffing and its cost cutting strategies. Remaining grounded in real-world impacts is what stays the same when translating these concepts for different audiences.
Narrative Initiative:
Could you give us examples of how you draw these connections?
Aliya Sabharwal:
Private equity is everywhere. Some workers I organized lived in manufactured housing parks or apartment buildings owned by private equity firms. Learning that PE firms were taking over housing markets deepened their engagement and they started seeing themselves as Wall Street accountability activists, not workers fighting for a retail-specific issue.
For others, when they lost their jobs, they were most worried about how they’d pay off a medical or ambulance bill. When they learned private equity firms bought hospitals (leading to increased rates of surprise medical billing) or purchased ambulance companies (creating monopolies in some states), it drew a connection outside of their retail experience into other parts of their lives that could also be mired in a financialized economy.
And then, some workers went from Toys ‘R’ Us and found jobs at other private equity owned retailers, some of which also closed down. Some workers actually lived through two private equity-driven retail bankruptcies, horrifying to imagine, but it was true. The connections were already there, people were living it. Being part of the campaign allowed us to look at these connections together, and understand how the pieces fit together.
Narrative Initiative:
How did centering the lived experiences of workers influence your book project?
Aliya Sabharwal:
I want to write a book that centers on people affected by financialization that could be useful to a general audience and those who influence policy. I am also learning to apply the same rigor I had in capturing worker stories to apply to myself, and to recognize that my lived experience of organizing workers forms a large part of this narrative.
I hope to help readers understand that centering directly-impacted communities isn’t just ideological but is strategic. We made severance for Toys 'R’ Us workers our central demand because it was what workers wanted. Despite there not being a precedent for it, we built an effective public pressure campaign and we won $20 million. We have to win what’s feasible within the parameters of existing structures and laws, but we need social movements and power building to build a new world, to win the audacious, previously unimaginable gains.
Narrative Initiative:
What did you learn through the book writing process that you want to share with other progressive organizers?
Aliya Sabharwal:
I learned that developing myself as a main character wasn’t navel-gazing and selfish but afforded the project coherence and a unique point of view. My Cohort members and coaches asked me “where are you in your story? What were you experiencing in your scenes?” At first I was resistant to make it about me. After all, I pitched this book project as about the members with me as a background, neutral narrator. But I realized that staying in the background had become my comfort zone. Organizers are trained to make room for others, listen more than they talk. Shifting the narrative to explore my experiences, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities was really uncomfortable for me. But I think it was good for me, too. The most consistent feedback I got was that people wanted more of my voice and more of “me” in the story. It was gratifying, humbling, it was one of the most meaningful takeaways from this program. I hope that other organizers out there who have stories to tell but struggle with figuring out how they fit into them apply to the Changemaker Authors Cohort.