« Making Change at Walmart » : le syndicalisme solidaire étasunien au sein d'une multinationale des services

Abstract

This article focuses on an emerging labor dispute within the retail giant Walmart, one of the foremost bastions of union-busting, at a particularly difficult time for the US labor movement.Through ethnographic research carried out during the Chicago Black Friday protests in November 2013, we will examine the structure and daily operations of the “Making Change at Walmart” campaign and the “Our Walmart” association. The study of the rhetorical and practical strategies employed by the workers and their supporters highlights a union-funded campaign conducted with multiple actors on many fronts. While this recent movement appears to contain the potential for going beyond the dominant model of bureaucratic unionism, which contributed to the decline of the US labor movement, it nevertheless harbors the risk of reproducing the same failings, i.e. turning into a mere service-provider for a limited section of the workforce.