JS-66.3
Global Retail and Local Mobilizations: Walmart Employees Facing Organizational Restructuring
This presentation is based on the analysis of “discrete” mutations of work, employment and trade unionism in and around the US Wal-Mart stores. While the corporation is experiencing significant technical and organizational transformations, the rise of criticism invites us to question both the nature of mutations of work in stores and the protest records in a global service firm whose workforce is mainly made up of low paid immigrant women, holding jobs that do not require a particular degree. This communication is based on a series of interviews with employees and union activists as well as on in situ observations of meetings and walkouts organized by unions and associations. Through a diachronic approach, it emphasizes the organizational and institutional dimensions of the difficult but ongoing emergence of protests in a firm that, in half a century, has come to thwart all attempts at unionization of its workforce.