Abstract
Walmart in the Global South: Workplace Culture, Labor Politics, and Supply Chains presents eight case studies of the retail giant Walmart in various countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The chapters explore how this powerful multinational corporation successfully embeds itself in local economic and political contexts. The book is intended for scholar-activists to aid them in the fight against Walmart. It reads like a stolen playbook, explaining how the biggest retailer on the planet has managed to infiltrate, appropriate, exploit, and degrade working conditions around the world. The authors reveal how the multinational manages to enter new countries, how it adapts its labor practices and workplace culture to diverse settings, and how it subverts labor laws and grassroots resistance.
This collection emerged out of a meeting at the International Sociological Association. Editors Carolina Bank Muñoz, Bridget Kenny, and Antonio Stecher explicitly aimed to include authors from the global South—people directly affected by the global spread of the giant retailer. Both academics and activists are represented, and they provide refreshing viewpoints often missing from sociological treatments of the retail behemoth. The volume shows that the meanings of Walmart in the global South are not fully intelligible from the perspective of the global North (and vice versa).
Walmart has not been successful everywhere it has endeavored to infiltrate. The company failed in its attempt to export its business model to Germany, Japan, and India, for example. On the other hand, it has made significant headway in Argentina, South Africa, and Thailand, where it controls increasing portions of the retail trade. Why does the model work in some countries and not others? Walmart is the prototypical low-road employer; their business model does not work unless they find a way to subjugate labor. In the countries explored in this book, Walmart workers are unionized; but in most cases, their unions offer virtually no protection from overwork, wage theft, and even slavery. In Argentina, the company employed former military leaders from the dictatorship to head up their security department and keep workers in line. In South Africa, Walmart workers are supplied through brokers, and they are fragmented into permanent and contract-status employees, preventing the formation of solidarity and fomenting gender-based resentments. In Thailand, where citizens are unionized but immigrants are not, the company sourced cheap shrimp from suppliers who hire immigrants from Cambodia and Myanmar, who are kept in conditions of bondage and near-starvation.
Unions are able to stand up for workers’ rights in some contexts. Where unions have been most successful, it seems, is in protecting workers from the indignities of Walmart culture. In the United States, Walmart is notorious for its exercise of hegemonic control over workers through stylized rituals designed to build worker enthusiasm and customer loyalty. At the beginning of each day, for example, floor workers are required to do the Walmart chant (which entails shaking their hips, a move called a “squiggly”). Workers throughout Latin America found this requirement embarrassing, and, in some instances, they turned to their unions to make Walmart stop the practice.
Workers were also successful at resisting the company’s efforts to promote an ideology of familism. The company wants workers to think of themselves as part of the “Walmart family” and to refer to themselves as “associates” of the company. In Chile and Argentina, this term was translated as colaboradores (collaborators), a term with painful historical connotations that workers strongly and successfully resisted. Chilean workers went a step further, requiring the company to refer to them using the more dignified term trabajadores (i.e., “workers”) instead of asociados (associates).
However, these victories strike me as pyrrhic ones. The company may give in on symbolic matters, but rarely on economic ones. Chile seems to be an important exception, as Walmart workers have won significant wage hikes over the past ten years. Yet the company always seems to make up for any small benevolent gesture by stomping down on someone else. As Bank Muñoz documents, Walmart in Chile engages in predatory lending practices, charging customers 40 percent interest with no grace period. Poor people will often rely on credit to buy staples at Walmart, where prices are higher than in local establishments, and then get fleeced a second time when forced to pay usurious interest. Making wage concessions seems less laudable under these conditions.
Walmart advertises its stores globally as offering “everyday low prices—always.” This book reveals what Nicholas Rudikoff rightly calls “the terrible cost of Walmart’s low prices” (p. 225). Books like this one are essential to remind consumers and shareholders in the global North that everyday low prices depend on the shocking exploitation of working people around the world.