Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil

This book explores how and why the labor practices of the world's largest employer, supermarket giant Walmart, were contested by unions and government regulators as it expanded to Latin America starting in the 1990s. With an in-depth case study of Brazil, and a comparative chapter examining Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, this book analyzes the problematic encounter between diffusion of home-office anti-labor practices and evolving national institutional contexts that are quite varied and in some cases enable considerable resistance by unions and/or regulators. Walmart's "repressive familial" and "anti-union" model is found to generate costs and conflicts that contributed to its unprofitability and ultimate exit from Brazil in 2018. This experience, contrasted with country situations where Walmart's overall competitive and labor and human resource practices "fit" better with national markets and institutions, underlines the brittle, problematic nature of diffusionist corporate models lacking adaptive capacity to significant cross-national variations across host countries.

Scott B. Martin is a Regular Lecturer in International Affairs at Columbia University, USA, and The New School, New York, and has also taught at Yale, Princeton, and Sarah Lawrence College. Among his publications on employment relations and social and industrial development in the Americas, he co-authored El Estado de Bienestar ante la Globalización: El Caso de Norteamérica ( 2012) and was co-editor and contributor to Competitividade e Desenvolvimento: Atores e Instituições Locais (2001) and The New Politics of Inequality: Rethinking Participation and Representation (1997). João Paulo Cândia Veiga is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, which he chairs, and a Researcher at the University's Center for International Negotiations (CAENI). He has (co)authored or (co)edited four books on labor rights, corporate social responsibility, and regional economic integration in Brazil and the Mercosur region, among them The Question of Child Labor (1998), and published articles in such international journals as Labor Studies Journal. Katiuscia Moreno Galhera is Visiting Faculty at Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados, Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Universidade de Campinas, Brazil, was a Visiting Scholar at Penn State University, USA, and a postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil. Among her works on gender, labor, and global value chains is "Transnational Corporations," Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas (2020, with S.B. Martin and J.P. Veiga).