Walmart in Theglobal South: Workplace Culture, Labor Politics, and Supply Chains eds. by Carolina Bank Muñoz, Bridget Kenny, and Antonio Stecher (review)

This collection of essays about Walmart's operations around the world is an invaluable addition to the literature on modern global capitalism that demonstrates both the company's power to reshape work and work cultures globally and also how worker resistance can force it to make compromises with unions it would never acquiesce to in the United States.

Walmart has tremendous influence in creating modern global labor relations, as several of these essays demonstrate. Its laser-focus on reconstructing the anti-union workplace culture it fostered in its North American stores wherever it expands generates multiple levels of conflict with national laws, local customs, and the social norms of the workers it hires. It seeks to undermine unions and labor law while promoting pro-employer worker organizations to forestall actual workplace activism. It uses its notorious "mystery shopper" program to spy on its own workers, whether the U.S. or Chile, and it pushes propaganda from the Walton family on employees. It relies on young, female laborers who are seen as having less power to resist employer control. It uses large-scale temporary workers, especially in South Africa, as Bridget Kenny demonstrates. All of this is intended to subvert any worker autonomy and integrate employees into Walmart corporate values.

At the same time, Walmart has had to acquiesce to the labor traditions of the nations where it expands, even accepting unions, which it steadfastly refuses to do in the United States. The case studies demonstrate the wide variety of worker resistance strategies, from Gabriela Victoria Alvarado's exploration of Walmart's IT workers in Mexico to Katiuscia Moreno Gahlera, Scott B. Martin, and João Paulo C^ andia Veiga's essay on how Brazilian workers forced Walmart into collective bargaining. In many Latin American nations, Walmart's heavy-handed approach to dealing with workers made it a target that reinvigorated worker resistance and union cultures. Paula Abal Medina's essay on Argentina shows how Walmart's use of the term "associates" to describe its workers was translated as "collaborators," which provided a site of resistance and helped unionists organize the stores. In Chile, that same translation led to a legal case against the company, as Carolina Bank Muñoz explores. Those same workers, angry over how the company also attempted to regulate workers' fashion, including discrimination against gender non-conforming employees, also organized to create militant unionism in Walmart stores.

Walmart's greatest power is through its control over supply chains, the heart of its business model. In particular, Nicholas Rudikoff's essay on Walmart and human trafficking in the Thai shrimp industry is a powerful indictment of a global economic system that allows multinational corporations to exploit workers in shocking ways without having a legal responsibility or accountability for what happens in their supply chains. Walmart makes claims of sustainability and supply chain monitoring, but Rudikoff convincingly shows these are outright fabrications for public relations while the company is complicit with slave labor. Even when Walmart claims to use small-scale farmers, as Stephen Greenberg shows in his essay on South Africa's Supplier Development Fund, it effectively grants Walmart complete control over the supply chains, leaving farmers without negotiating power. Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, Walmart routinely bypasses negotiating with farmers at all and instead works through NGOs, leading to these organizations actively helping Walmart gain a competitive advantage over Nicaraguan-owned stores, as Jennifer Weigel demonstrates.

Taken together, these essays show the complexity of Walmart's global operations, a complexity the company does not welcome. The labor law of a given country makes an enormous difference in Walmart's autonomy to recreate its American model. In Brazil and Chile, the company had to compromise on its anti-union policies; in Thailand, with laws against immigrant workers organizing a union...