‪Grande distribution globale et contestations locales :‪. Les salariés de Walmart entre restructurations discrètes et nouvelles stratégies syndicales

?This article is based on the analysis of ongoing mutations of work, employment and trade unionism in and around the US Walmart stores. While the global corporation has been experiencing significant technical and organizational transformations since the middle of the 2000s, rising criticism invites us to question both the nature of mutations of work in the stores and the different types of protest in a global service firm whose workforce is mainly made up of low paid women. This article is based on a series of interviews with employees, organizers, activists and union members as well as on in situ observations of meetings and walkouts organized by unions and associations. Through a diachronic approach, it emphasizes the organizational and institutional dimensions of the difficult emergence of protests in a firm that in half a century has come to thwart all the attempts at unionization of its workforce. Paradoxically, the 2008 economic downturn appears to be a favorable factor to the mobilization of the employees through the introduction of new profiles of workers and a series of new offensive organizing campaigns fuelled by social discontent against finance and corporations.?