Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil: Limits of Global Diffusion in Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Katiuscia Moreno Galhera is a significant contribution to the literature on the global retail sector, providing an in-depth analysis of Walmart's labour practices and the different paths the company has taken in Latin American countries.The book is a result of extensive fieldwork and interviews with workers, unions, and activists, presenting a nuanced and context-specific analysis of the challenges and opportunities of labour movements in the context of global supply chains, based on a combination of qualitative research methods, including ethnographic interviews with Walmart workers and analysis of labour-management relations in Brazil, alongside a comparative study with other Latin American countries.The authors also draw on existing literature on Walmart's global strategy and labour practices to contextualise their findings.The authors begin by highlighting Walmart's global expansion through market seeking methods, which has allowed the company to become one of the world's largest employers.However, this expansion has not been without controversy.Walmart has faced allegations of labour rights violations, including low wages, poor working conditions, and anti-union practices.The authors argue that Walmart's global strategy of "Everyday Low Prices" has created a race to the bottom in terms of labour standards, as the company pressures suppliers to cut costs and increase efficiency.They draw on existing research to argue that Walmart's labour practices in Brazil are part of a broader trend of global corporations imposing repressive, anti-union policies on workers in the region.The authors also highlight the limitations of global diffusion in Latin America, arguing that local political and economic factors can shape the strategies and outcomes of labour contestation.Overall, the book contributes to a growing body of literature on the challenges and opportunities of labour organising in the context of global capitalism.For the authors, Walmart seeks to create a work environment that attempts to establish itself by distancing labour conflicts from state regulators, unions and any other members external to the company's internal labour relations.This practice, for the authors, is a great demonstration of the anti-union stance that the company presents in dealing with workplace relations and day-to-day policies in the production routine on the "shop floor".This posture is treated in the book as a workplace regime based on family norms and an
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".