Analysis of organizational changes at Walmart Brazil focused on possible impacts of the labor reform on labor relations in supermarkets

• Grant number: 19/06670-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2019
• End date: December 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Bárbara Geraldo de Castro
• Grantee: Vitória Camargo Baggio
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project seeks to understand the organizational changes in retail, focusing on Walmart Brazil supermarkets. It will be given centrality to the changes related to labour process and organization. The approval of the Labor Reform in Brazil, in 2017, will mediate the analysis. The Walmart company is the first in the rank of the largest international corporations. It is the most internationally active in profits and hirings in the private sector. In 2018, it sold 80% of its shares to private equity Advent International, after claiming consecutive years of downturn and closing of units in the Brazilian section. This fact led to build the research questions in this project. The transformations at Walmart Brazil's command leads to new hiring regimes and labor relations in the supermarkets. This is possible to see in the previous analysis of this research that it is intended to be developed. The analysis will be based on the observation and analysis of newspapers and union bulletins, collective conventions and employer magazines. By analysing the so-called "Walmartism" and its application in the face of the new labor legislation in Brazil, within the framework of the capitalist crisis of 2008, this project aims to delineate trends mainly regarding possible changes in working hours, outsourcing processes and anti-union practices of the company. The study of this social segment characterized by authors as "precariat" contributes to the design of the Brazilian working class, with a large participation in the service sector, and with a view to their insertion in the global value chains.