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- [00:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Eileen Otis
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Eileen Otis
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Eileen Otis
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Eileen Otis
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Eileen Otis about her book titled Walmart Made in China, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Now, this book's title is nice and short and tells us exactly what we're going to be talking about. A massive business called Walmart in a massive country, China. And what happens when those two things start to go together? Why did Walmart get to China? What is Walmart like in China and what is it like in China? From a lot of different lenses, we're going to be talking about consumers but also about workers, about different kinds of workers. So there's a whole immersive element in a lot of ways to this book to understand, you know, obviously something that's a massive global economic deal as well as something that impacts everyday lives of a lot of people too. So clearly a lot for us to discuss. Eileen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Eileen Otis
Hi Miranda, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
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Dr. Eileen Otis
Yeah, I'm an associate professor of sociology and anthropology as well as international affairs at Northeastern University in Boston. In general, my research focuses on labor, globalization, gender and inequality in China. And I teach classes on all of these things. So how did the project begin? Well, when I was finishing up research, actually doing follow up research for my first book, Markets and Bodies, I was in Kunming, Yunnan and Yunnan is kind of a remote province, it's in the southeast and borders on Myanmar and Vietnam. And I was surprised to stumble upon a Walmart in, in the capital in Kunming. You know, interestingly, I'd never been inside a Walmart before, either in the United States or in China. And I was sort of surprised it didn't look like what I thought it would look like. In fact, the Walmarts in China do look in some ways quite a bit different from those in the United States. But it did have the familiar smiley faces all over the place and the slogans like everyday low prices of course translated into Chinese everywhere. But in the aisles I saw like a monk in saffron robes and People's Liberation army soldier. There were also of course students and families all shopping together. And it just kind of struck me as remarkable. How did Walmart end up in this corner of China? What were workers experiencing at this new workplace? My first book was about service work in China and the emergence of a service economy that really been stalled under socialism in China and was not like a, of course not a for profit form of organization. So I was sort of continuing my, my interest in the organization of service work in China. So I was really interested in how workers were experiencing this new sort of consumer institution in China. And ultimately I wondered, was Walmart transforming China or was Trans or was China transforming Walmart? What was happening here? So the deeper I look, the more Walmart became a window onto a much larger story, a story about globalization, about China's rise, about the this momentous shift in the organization of capitalism and with that, the transformation of work within this shift in capitalism. So what began as a curiosity about a single store in remote Kunming, Yunnan, became a many years effort to understand how one company connected Chinese workers, Chinese consumers and global capitalism and was a force in transforming social relations in China.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so you know, not small questions, right? There's a whole things there just from the one store, very much expanding out from that. So how did you approach such a big topic, like how did you break those big Questions down into kind of pieces that are more manageable to investigate with a level of sort of intricacy that you've done in the book.
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Dr. Eileen Otis
Oh, thank you. Well, yes, yes. So I spent a lot of time reading. So as I. And, and I spent a lot of time of course hanging out in Walmart stores, shopping and what have you. But I became increasingly aware in my investigation of the literature that scholars were talking past one another. On the one hand we had political economists like Gary Giraffe and historians like Nelson Lichtenstein who had shown how retailers like Walmart transformed global capitalism by creating, by you know, creating this kind of market force through logistics, through the U.S. the United States fairly permissive legal system that allowed Walmart to leverage this massive power over the global economy and really dominate manufacturers as manufacturing move from the United States to China and other nations in the global South. So they told this really big important story about the shifts in global capitalism and Walmart's leadership. Walmart's like pioneering of this shift along with China. But they didn't enter the stores themselves. They didn't have a lot to say about labor within the stores themselves. Political economists tended to stop at the threshold of the retail stores. Meanwhile you had service scholars and I was really interested in service scholarship, that is scholarship looking at the, the uniqueness, the unique qualities and characteristics of work in the service sector. And this was a kind of important form of scholarship because before this kind of scholarship came along, most of the literature focused on manufacturing labor. And so with the rise of service scholarship, especially Arlie Hochschild's work on emotional labor, you see sociologists and other labor scholars, feminists really explore the unique characteristics of service labor. And those characteristics were like emotional labor, the ability to control one's customer's emotions through controlling one's own emotions. Aesthetic labor, where workers do work on their bodies in order to events, a certain kind of Persona. And the focus focuses on customer interactions and three way workplace control where like in manufacturing you just have the worker manager, but in the service sector of course you have customers who figure into what gets called a triangle of control in Robin Leidner's work and as well as market mediated identities, market embodied identities, which is something I explored in my prior work. But all of that work, all of that scholarship really neglected the thing that I saw as so crucial in these Walmart stores, which was the commodity that this work tended to focus on relationships with customers and kind of individual identities, but really neglected kind of the larger flow of commodities that I saw moving through stores which Is something that political economists really focused on the ways in which commodities were kind of being efficiently moved through this now global system, this global commodity chain, through new logistics and communications technologies. And this was something that Walmart contributed to enormously. And so, so I really saw this pretty enormous gap. So I was interested in kind of the labor that sits between these two literatures. The labor that moves commodities from the stock room to the shopping cart, Displays them, explains them, markets them, and connections between these forms of labor within the stores that ultimately helps to transform the commodities into sales. So sometimes I found that, like the. The literatures, especially the service work literature, kind of neglected the. The whole point of the service work relationship, which was to kind of convert a commodity into money. And in the Marxist scholarship, this is called realization. And it's distinct from like production labor. For Marx, like production labor generates the value, generates a kind of surplus value that is then converted into money when the commodity is sold. But many labor scholars had neglected this second half of the process that Marx calls realization. So the value of. If the value of a commodity isn't realized as money, Then that commodity ultimately has no value. Marx himself actually neglected the labor involved in realizing the value in commodities. And so to kind of help to identify this labor that sits between the commodity and its realization, or the commodity and its sale, I developed the idea of realization labor. Because it's labor that helps realize the value embedded in the commodities through exchange. So the book argues that realization isn't simply inevitable market event, but rather it's a labor process. Commodities don't sell themselves. Workers perform the labor that makes realization possible. So this seems very common sense, but often it's neglected by the literature because kind of production manufacturing still is seen because it generates value. It's seen as kind of the privileged site of labor in our economy. But realization is just as important. So what I found in the stores, once I start looking through these lenses, through this lens, sorry, the store appeared really differently. And as I followed the commodities through the stores, I saw an internal supply chain. So I saw produce workers moving produce, like fruits and vegetables from storage to shelves and managing the shelves. I saw vendor dispatch sales, workers in China's Walmarts animating commodities, ginning up sales, encouraging their purchase, really doing kind of marketing labor and cashiers, ultimately converting the monies into. Into, sorry, converting the commodities into money. And each of these moments in the internal supply chain Were defined by unique labor processes, the unique ways of organizing and disciplining labor. So each occupied a different position in the realization process. And experienced different forms of control, surveillance, evaluation, and resistance. So while to sum it up, while political economists followed commodities in the global supply chain but stopped at the threshold of the retail store service, scholars entered the store but lost sight of the commodity. So realization labor. What I'm contributing is a labor that connects these two. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka Ms. CollegePC. Send help is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
- [14:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
We're somewhere in the Gulf of Highland.
- [14:46]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Getting us out of here should be your focus. I'm your boss.
- [14:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You work for me.
- [14:50]
Dr. Eileen Otis
I'm not in the office anymore. It's bold, relentless, and endlessly rewatchable. Discover why critics give it 93% on rotten tomatoes. You're so fired.
- [15:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Oh, am I? No.
- [15:04]
Dr. Eileen Otis
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a really helpful answer because it gives us a ton of things to talk about in more detail, obviously. For example, talking more about those different groups of workers that you just mentioned. But before we dive into the stores itself, I wonder if we can stay on the big picture for a moment and talk a little bit about what makes Walmart in China even possible. I mean, we It's a relatively established story, I think, in terms of like, why is Walmart so successful in the US Right? There's a list of factors it's taught in business schools. It's a case study. Are any of those factors the reasons that enabled Walmart to be big in China? Or are we looking at an entirely different list. Can you give us a sense of this aspect please?
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Dr. Eileen Otis
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. Walmart had a lot of resources. Obviously it was the first retailer to top the full Forbes Fortune 500, the largest company in the world. But it was facing saturation of U.S. markets and stockholders were pressuring the company for expansion. It was big and powerful and could use some of its China supply chains to supply its stores. And China was such a, of course, booming economy, it made sense for the store to focus its sights on China, as did other stores, other big box retailers or big hypermarkets like Metro in Germany and Carrefour in France. But let's step back and look at Walmart's origins in the American South. So Southerners. So of course, as we know, Sam Walton founded the first store in Arkansas and he began to grow the company in Arkansas in the south, which was really interesting because other big retailers had actually gotten their start in the North. But Southerners traditionally had a deeply felt suspicion of northern businesses. And at the same time many areas in the south were underserved by retailers. So Sam Walton and addressed both of these because he was a Southern boy and he established his first stores in what are called greenfield sites. That's areas that are often, you know, underserved by retailers. So they have lots of pent up customer demand that's not getting served and also plenty of workers available for work in the retail aisles. So only it's in its like kind of expansionary phase into the larger suburbs of the Midwest, New England and the south did the firm begin to encounter competition from smaller businesses. But it made easy work of destroying smaller like mom and pop stores that couldn't match the firm's scales, the firm's scale and discounts. So and this became really a point of criticism of Walmart in the United States that was really destroying mom and pop stores. So fast forward to China and Walmart's its start as a retailer in China in 1996. And there were few other global retailers there. But we see some similarities. Under a few decades of Maoist socialism, retail stores were operated by the state and functioned in China as distributors in a scarcity economy. So these retailers employed workers who were not working to generate profit for a, you know, in a market economy for a capitalist company. But they were, you know, part of a distribution network really. They were giving and it was a scarcity economy. There was not an abundance of goods for consumers. So they tended to be gatekeepers and quite literally gatekeepers since shoppers had to go through a clerk at a counter to purchase items. So stores also encouraged recycling and even offered some repair services. They encouraged customers to be, to be frugal. At the same time, workers were also gaining access to some of the necessities of life through their workplace, which was another kind of distribution network for the necessities of life in China. So the upshot for Walmart here is that when it landed in China, its first retail store again in Shenzhen 1996, there were no viable local competitors. The major competition came from other global retailers like as I mentioned, Carrefour, Metro and Trustmart, which Walmart eventually it was a Taiwanese company that Walmart eventually purchases. So where Walmart put many small retailers out of business in the U.S. stirring up substantial resentment, it found itself in kind of a greenfield terrain in China with customers who were underserved, many of whom for the first time experienced self service stores, that is stores where you can just grab stuff yourself. The customer could grab stuff themselves off the shelf and choose from what for them at that time was an eye popping wide array of goods. So there was this sort of greenfield similarity. But more important I think are the differences. So while Walmart had to measure success in China, it struggled at first. It didn't really easily convert its power over US markets into kind of domination of the Chinese market. And I think that's a pretty interesting outcome that needs explanation. So why didn't it replicate this success? So first Walmart's lowest price model couldn't be replicated. So lowest price model in the United States. Walmart sort of promises that it provides the lowest prices for consumers, offers consumers the lowest prices, which another conversation is does it? And many say it doesn't. But this model couldn't be replicated in China because local retailers most notably, eventually, that eventually emerged later in the game, Woomart had an edge on them. So this was kind of a, you know, it was actually more of a local retailer, but it was started by somebody from China who had a Stanford degree. Anyway, WMART was actually able to undercut Walmart's prices and it wasn't subject to the same price regulatory systems. Walmart had higher standards for its products. It had this like return policy that was amazing in China, like you could just return anything. And that for Chinese folks signaled that, wow, okay, this company is really providing a high quality product because you can return it. Other companies weren't offering those, those terms. But also Wumart eventually was able to, you know, mobilize its local networks and the regional economies in China are Very distinctive. And so Walmart was able to kind of mobilize a lot of regional local networks to supply its shelves. So Walmart ended up serving a mostly middle class market of consumers in China. Second, Walmart had difficulty establishing its system of distribution centers with its very sophisticated cross docking that attempts to keep like commodities, products in movement constantly so as to accelerate the movement of commodities so as to accelerate their sales and create a very efficient system of, of movement and delivery. So these distribution centers, you know, they were once called warehouses and you know, Walmart changes the name to distribution centers to convey this, the reality that now the commodities aren't being stored there, they're being moved through these centers. So they replace these warehouses with systems of conveyor belts that move goods directly into trucks instead of storing them. And the idea is to keep the, again the commodity movement. But China's infrastructure at the time, limited easy delivery of goods. Now it has a pretty well developed infrastructure, transportation infrastructure. But at the time the firm really struggled with the China's, you know, kind of developing infrastructure. And it was also not able to build stores fast enough to support its distribution centers there. So they had, you know, just a very small number, like you count them on one hand of stores per district supported by each distribution center. Whereas in the United States each distribution center is, is supported by like 100 supports. East Distribution center supports like 100 stores. And so they weren't really able to achieve the same kind of economies of scale in China. At the same time, Walmart was challenged to address the sheer diversity in the regional consumer habits and preferences in China. So I think Westerners underestimate the vast linguistic and cultural diversity of China that also gets expressed in consumer habits. So Walmart built its domination of the US market on centralization of control that allowed it to develop its logistics systems and distribution centers. So that would be led by its headquarters that makes virtually all the decisions about product purchasing, everything centralized in China. This simply wasn't viable. And in 2006 the firm decided to decentralize much of its purchasing, allowing store managers greater discretion, which actually created huge problems because it opened the door to corruption and declining quality of goods. That really opened up Walmart to a lot of criticism in China. So these are the challenges that the firm navigated.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see the comparison with what worked in the US and it's starting to give us a sense of kind of Walmart in the minds really of the Chinese market. I wonder if we can focus then on the perception in terms of Walmart as an Employer, like once Walmart is there kind of some of these issues, these teething problems in a way are sort of worked out. To what extent and for what reasons was Walmart seen as a place people wanted to work?
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Dr. Eileen Otis
Teething problems, I like that. Yeah. So it was really interesting when I spoke with, I interviewed a number of what I call veteran workers, workers who had been at Walmart for close to a decade. And you know, a number of them described to me like the, really the buzz and excitement over the opening of the first store. And one, one woman described to me like an enormous line that wrapped all the way around the store composed of people who wanted, you know, to get jobs at Walmart because it was, you know, word had gotten out that it was this great employer, that there were these great opportunities there. And so people were standing in line for hours, as did she. And it was very, this was in Shenzhen, it was very humid. And she said she was soaked by the time she got to the front of the line and got an interview. But she was so happy that she got the job. She just couldn't believe it. So Walmart had generated a lot of excitement. And it was initially seen as a good employer because it combined material benefits with a surprisingly resonant symbolic culture, like a symbolic culture that in surprising ways resonated with kind of historical legacies in China that I think no one expected. So, you know, it's interesting here too to compare to the United States because at the Same time in 1996, there was a lot of attention to the low wages that workers earned at Walmart and the, the ways in which workers were being forced to work off the clock and all of the other problems for workers at Walmarts in the United States. But in China, in, you know, in the context of China, the wages Walmart paid were relatively high. They were paying above medium wages. And that was not regulated by the state. That was something they elected to do. But what was media regulated by the state were benefits. They were comprehensive. They received pensions, medical benefits, some unemployment insurance. So these were all regulated by the state. And the Chinese state tends to regulate foreign companies more closely than it does local companies. And I think this helped Walmart initially in the consumer market, schedules were stable. Workers worked full time, 8 hour, 8 hour days, and they were informed about their schedules in good time. And you know, something that workers told me repeatedly was that promotion opportunities were widely available because Walmart was trying to build like entrain managers and supervisors to really run the stores, run their operations and expect it to expand quite Quickly so that they would need like kind of managerial talent to, to run their stores. So there were lots of opportunities available. And Walmart was paying workers to get trained to become managers. So workers saw Walmart is really a pathway to a better future. So at the same time, Walmart imported this interesting culture that comes from its own history of trying to kind of counter union, unionization drives in the United States. It's an earlier history, a quite earlier history. And this culture gets called We Care initially, but it's sort of like, I think of it as a kind of democratic esque culture, an appeal to kind of some of the kind of egalitarian aspirations of workers. And so Walmart imported elements and some of this just comes from kind of features of American culture. So kind of first and foremost is that Walmart imported a kind of first name culture. So unemployee badges, everyone just has their first names. There are no honorifics, there are no titles, just one's first name that includes managers, supervisors, even pictures of Sam Walton that are, you know, plastered throughout stores in China. It has Sam Walton, these big posters. Sam Walton also has a name badge that simply just says Sam. And for workers in a culture that had become increasingly, with market reforms, the transition from Maoism to marketization, a culture that had become increasingly stratified and had increasingly kind of returned to using honorifics, using kind of these indicators of hierarchy in language and cultural forms, this first name culture was extraordinary to workers. When I spoke with them, they just couldn't believe that they could call their managers by their first name. And for them, that introduced this kind of larger employee manager culture where employees could talk to managers in a more candid fashion. The idea of servant leadership that Walmart brought kind of embodied in the inverted pyramid in which in every store in China you see a pyramid that is inverted. And at the bottom, which is like the narrowest part, the point of the pyramid is the store manager. And as you get to the top of the inverted pyramid, the widest point, you see all of the employees. And this was supposed to represent that the employees were the most valued, they were at the top, and that the managers kind of shoulder the burdens of employees. And that really resonated with workers, sort of with kind of a more of a Maoist socialist sentiment among workers that workers. So of course we know that under socialism, under Maui socialism, workers were heralded as heroes of production, heroes of society. And they had lost that status with the transition to Mao markets in China. And there was a way in which Walmart culture seemed to kind of be recuperating parts of this culture. And that really resonated with these workers who had been really immersed in ma's culture. Finally, there was a lot of rhetoric that Walmart imported about respecting the individual, striving for respect and dignity and excellence that really resonate with workers. And workers often repeated me verbatim Walmart's, you know, slogans around this rhetoric and around this rhetoric of respecting the individual. So this was all really, you know, in fact, managers. And my colleague in anthropology wrote a article about how managers he interviewed in China actually really believed that Sam Walton had read Mao Zedong, thought that Sam Walton had read Mao's work. So the attraction, and not only this, so there were these kind of resonances with Maoism. And at the same time the company was kind of making available this sort of unprecedented sort of heterogeneity of commodities, this abundance of commodities that were accessible in ways that Maoism never really kind of promised abundance, but never really, never really made good on the promise of kind of abundance for its people. So it brought stability, it brought a certain level of consumer of, you know, of, you know, satisfaction. But it, it didn't bring the abundance that, you know, Walmart represented. So, so it brought socialist notions of equality and dignity along with the capitalist promise of abundance and consumption. So it kind of brought the best of both worlds.
- [36:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that all sounds great. That's like so many different factors coming together, right? Which makes it sound like it would be robust because even if one sort of erod roads, there's all these other reasons. But you said initially for a reason and I said sort of. Why did people think it would be a good employer at first? For a reason. Right. So like that this lovely picture you've just painted doesn't stay that way. Why? And when does Walmart maybe start to lose some of this reputation?
- [36:49]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Yeah, this is one of the most important questions of the book because when I actually start, when I start examining Walmart close up, I began in a phase where it become, what we call, becomes more of a, what we call a more despotic employer, employer that was really losing its reputation as a good employer. And so this is a really key question of the book. So Walmart's reputation declined when the material foundations that made workers believe in its rhetoric became, began to disappear. So I talk about in the book a high road phase, which is what I just described, but then that this begins to transition in around 2006 to a low road phase. And this happens along with Walmart's expansion, rapid expansion of stores in 2006, Walmart grew from 68 stores to more than 200 beginning in 2006 to more than 250 stores within just a few years. And Walmart was struggling to make a profit. So to manage the growth, the company also decentralized purchasing and supervision. So this is something I talked about earlier, that it's method of really the kind of the pivotal point of its success in the US was centralizing purchasing. But because of the regional nature of China's economy, it really was forced to decentralizing purchasing and the supervision of purchasing. And as I mentioned, this led to food quality scandals and corruption and inconsistent standards. And so that kind of soured consumers a bit on Walmart. And it also made nobody likes to work with disgruntled customers. And so it made workers work harder. Workers work much more difficult because they had to deal with customers who were becoming much more skeptical of Walmart. And so this also led to a shift to a low road strategy in labor. So staffing levels were reduced. So workers, these veteran workers I talked to described this transition where staffing was kind of cut really dramatically. So in some places staffing was cut in half in some places, more in some, in other stores it was cut by more than half. And workloads intensified enormously. So workers could barely keep up. And they talked about just being like incredibly exhausted and managers being a little more harsh and severe because the workers were just struggling to keep up with the intensified workload. At the same time, wage growth stopped. So at this time, China's inflation rate was pretty high and the country was really struggling to, to, you know, keep it to a minimum. But Walmart stopped wage growth and it stopped, Walmart's wages stopped keeping pace with inflation. And so increasingly, you know, workers struggled to use, you know, they struggle to stretch their wages to cover their, you know, costs, their consumer costs, their, their costs of living. And increasingly workers needed second jobs. So a number of workers I talked to, you know, had second jobs like selling things in a mar in the market nearby or some were taking on like babysitting or cleaning homes. Others another worker I spoke with drove a taxi and that helped kind of supplement their lower wages from Walmart. But workers were really struggling now Then really what topped this off was that in 2016, Walmart introduced something called the Comprehensive Work Hours System, a real euphemism. It allowed managers to vary schedules according to customer traffic patterns. So Walmart can keep track of customer traffic or footfall through its Computer systems at its cashiers. So it can use analytics to get a sense of when customers are likely to shop, depending on like holidays, work schedules, weather, season, et cetera, et cetera. And so this encouraged managers to really seek a system of more flexible system that would allow them to really use and use labor only when it was needed, to really target labor around the moments when customers were around. But this required a different system of regulation than the one that they had been subjected to by the Chinese government, which was that work had to be had to be assigned based on either a part time of four hours a day with, you know, notice in advance, or full time at eight hours a day. And these had to be, you know, kind of continuous hours assigned on a weekly basis. But Walmart found a loophole in the local labor law, in Chinese labor law that allowed for some service establishments, like hotels and resorts that were seasonal, that had kind of high consumer demand in the summer, but less in the winter, that allowed these kinds of establishments to adhere to a different, more flexible scheduling system. And so Walmart used, that used the appeal to that loophole to assign workers as it, you know, as they were needed. And to assign workers, they would still. The comprehensive worker work hours system refers to like, you know, that workers would be given a minimum number of hours, a minimum fixed number of hours within a month, but those hours could be assigned any time as workers were needed, depending on consumer demand. And so that through this, workers lost their predictable schedules. And with that comes, they also lost the ability to, for many of them to work second jobs because they couldn't, you know, predict when they would be available for their second job. They also lost overtime opportunities. So this meant that Walmart would require less overtime. The new system meant that Walmart would require less overtime from workers. So many felt deceived by this because managers pressured them. So as part of the process of transitioning to the system, workers had to sign some paperwork, basically a new contract. And managers in some of the stores were actually presenting the contract to workers, well, kind of misrepresenting the new contract to workers. And in some cases they were just telling workers that the contract was that what they were signing was just kind of training paperwork and not really. And not a contract at all. So they were in some cases really just deceiving workers about what they were signing. And this drew on, I think everybody's, including China's Walmart workers, this tendency to sign things, sign forms without really reading them, for all kinds of reasons, because we're presented with them all the time. Especially online now. And they're often written in legalese that people don't understand. And so I call this uninformed consent that workers were just signing stuff that they didn't really understand. And so when workers did discover what they had been signing, the contradiction between Walmart's egalitarian rhetoric and the everyday reality really became impossible to ignore. And this is where more of an organized opposition to Walmart began. And especially in the Walmart Workers association that was organized by Jiang Jun who was a worker in one Walmart store. He organized this, a website with a kind of listserv for workers to inform workers of Walmart's new policies. And when workers, and suddenly thousands of workers joined this website and began reading, you know, kind of the reality of what was happening at Walmart. And that proved that created a lot of resistance to these policies among Walmart workers, especially in the southeast coast. And most of this resistance was cited in the southeast coast. And workers tend to be more kind of militant on the southeast coast because that's where all of the factories, the global platform factories are, the export platform factories are. And so there's more of a kind of an infrastructure there of worker resistance. There were a couple of strikes that were kind of demobilized by a lawyer who, who came in and convinced workers to go through the, the arbitration system, the judicial system. And in the end also Walmart of course has a union in China. It's a state run union though, and it had become in a managerial union. And so the union did not help the workers kind of fight this battle and resist this new flexible scheduling system. And so in the end the judicial system really allowed Walmart to continue to use this flexible scheduling system and the workers really had little recourse. A few workers went through the arbitration system and gained and did get recognition and did get some remuneration for what they had been through because managers were really pressuring them hard to sign this paperwork. Especially using Walmart has a system of kind of really penalties that is called coaching. So Walmart cashes as coaching. And in the early days workers thought this was great. You know, oh, managers aren't penalizing us, they're just helping us to be better at our jobs. But then it was so funny talking to these veteran workers. They would talk about how, oh, you know, in seven years I never got coached at all. And suddenly in like the course of two weeks I was coached 12 times. And so they were using coaching to talk about penalties that managers were, were levying upon them. And so this really just Kind of corrupted the whole system of Walmart culture and really undermined the trust that workers had developed between workers had developed with. With managers.
- [48:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, so that is definitely a fall from employee paradise that you've described there. I wonder if we can get into some more specifics about kind of what all of these systems you're describing are sort of like, on the shop floor. So, for example, earlier you mentioned produce workers and kind of their really important job in, like, physically moving the commodity from the warehouse to where people can actually grab it off the shelves. How do. How does that group of workers navigate this environment that, as you're describing, it has quite a lot of sort of surveillance and control built in.
- [49:07]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Yeah. So produce workers are interesting. So, you know, like I, as I mentioned before, I follow commodities in Walmart through an internal supply chain as workers kind of. And I look at the ways in which workers kind of manage different kinds of commodities. So I start with the produce workers because they are delivering commodities from the backstage to the front stage, fruits and vegetables and the like. And so these are mostly men. They are working continuously. They're always in movement, almost always in movement, moving vegetables and fruit from cold storage onto the shelves using a hand cart. They're doing a lot of heavy lifting and physical stocking. And this work often gets associated with masculinity. I mean, because they're mostly men, but also their, you know, physical labor, which, of course, this isn't like, you know, lifting tons. Like, women could do this labor, but their physical labor gets associated with masculinity, and it gets divided off from the other kinds of labor that occurs within the store. Especially, like within the produce area. Women get assigned to, like, weighing fruits and vegetables. Because in China there's a system where, like, you have somebody in the department weigh. If you're buying a bulk item, they weigh it, and then they put the price on it, and then you purchase it. So women do that, and that's considered non, you know, physical labor. So, yeah, so it's interesting. And men actually elaborate on this sort of, you know, masculinity in these jobs. So they draw implicitly on assumptions about masculine strength, but they kind of elaborate on it. Like, they're pretty gruff towards customers. It was interesting. So to, like, really understand work at Walmart, I. I employed research assistants or used research assistants who worked in these stores. And this research assistant of mine, Zhang Zhao, who was a graduate student at the time he started on the job, you know, like, kind of feeling pretty positively disposed towards customers, and he liked them. He Liked interacting with people. But eventually he got, he kind of followed the lead of his fellow workers and became quite gruff towards customers. Especially because customers became, in their view, like, you know, really what that was the source of their labor. The more customers purchased, the more they had to work to replenish shelves. And so they would actually even put the occasional rotten piece of fruit or vegetable on a shelf in order to discourage sales so as to slow down their constant labor. And so kind of this gruffness, they developed a sense of independence among themselves. Like they constantly reminded themselves that Walmart wasn't their own work, wasn't their own business. They didn't own Walmart, they were just getting a wage. They were not like, you know, getting the profits from Walmart. And so they should not like, you know, fully invest themselves because they would forget that sometimes. But anyway, they were operating under this kind of surveillance system. In every Walmart, there are closed circuit TV cameras that are arrayed along the ceiling that are used to monitor both customers and workers. And so workers operated under the surveillance systems. And they, especially in the produce department, they became aware that, you know, pretty clearly aware that they were being monitored all the time. And they would find spaces to kind of escape the cameras. And I call this panoptic escape that. Panoptic is this term from co. And the idea is that when you're being watched all the time, you eventually kind of internalize the perspective of the person who's watching you. So they were kind of pushing back against that by saying, oh, this isn't our own business, but also pushing back against it by kind of hiding in corners where the cameras couldn't see them and gobbling down the occasional piece of fruit or vegetable because they were incredibly hungry because of the odd schedule rules. Now this contrasts with sales workers in, in China. If I could go ahead and talk about them.
- [53:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Please tell us about sales workers.
- [53:55]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Sales workers, really interesting system that doesn't really exist in Walmart or anywhere else as far as I can tell, any other big retailer, as I can tell in the United States. So you do see in, especially in Costco, you see like people giving out free samples. But these people are kind of organized by a single company that's centralized and it's really different from what's going on in China. So in China if you enter a Walmart, you see like, whereas in the United States, Walmart's aisles can feel very, you know, sort of devoid of people of activity, almost like you're there all by yourself. In China, like you walk onto a sales floor, and it's just buzzing with activity. And these are. So the floors are like, populated by sales workers who are dispatched by vendors, they're dispatched by and employed by individual companies that are selling goods on Walmart shelves. And they're there to kind of really animate marketing, to give out free samples, to really raise awareness among customers about, you know, their, their, their goods. And also they, they manage, they manage the shelving of goods. They manage a lot of the kind of movement of goods, like from delivery to putting them on shelves, to rearranging them when the goods aren't selling, kind of taping them together so as to kind of move along sales more quickly under Walmart's pressure. And these are like, mostly young women, some of them, with some exceptions, there are some college students, there are some retired women, but most of these women are from the countryside. They're migrants. And their work is explicitly built around cultural symbols of femininity. Like, many of them wear really cutesy costumes, like milkmaid uniforms or flight assistant uniforms or Minnie Mouse uniforms or costumes. And they, you know, they, they promote their products. And it's interesting because they, unlike these produce workers who are under this kind of pretty close scrutiny of surveillance by the surveillance cameras, the sales workers really, because they're employed by an employer that's off site and they're managed by Walmart department managers. But those managers, like, really just don't know what to do with these sales workers. They just, like, have other things to do. They're too busy. And so these workers have a lot of autonomy. And so while they engage in this kind of customer interaction, they promote sales and get free samples and makeup. Makeup sales workers will give makeovers and do demonstrations. There's a lot of stuff going on. I mean, they yell through loudspeakers, they pound on drums too, promote their products. There's just, you know, a lot of different, like, noise in China. Chinese, it's called now, it means hot noise. And it really, you know, connotes this sort of festival, this festive environment. And so they're generating that. And so they've really played an important role in kind of making Walmart feel like, you know, like a place where something's happening. But these workers have a lot of autonomy. They're not managed closely, and so they roam around a lot. Sometimes they'll work two jobs at the same time. Unbeknownst to the vendors, they'll sell two items at the same time. So they can make more commission, they can make more wages, which are very, very low in most cases. With some exceptions, they come and go as they please and they have this little kind of informal economy where they kind of stow away some of their free samples and they trade them with each other, which is kind of a way in which they kind of supplement their wages. So these, these young women really see their jobs as a kind of opportunity to network on the sales floor, to develop kind of new urban consumer habits. Because they're migrants from rural villages. This is an opportunity for them to kind of immerse in, in the consumer market of an urban center and immerse in all of this abundance and get familiarity with a kind of new forms of consumption, including learning how to put on makeup, learning how to dress, and talking to other sales representatives about other kind of job opportunities. So they really lean into this opportunity or they create this opportunity to kind of network and find different kinds of jobs. So we can see in the contrast between the two that the shop floor and this internal supply chain is gendered, that it reflects long standing assumptions about masculinity and femininity, with women deployed to do more connective labor and to look cutesy and sometimes sexy, to draw in customers, and men just doing this kind of non relational labor where they're just gruff and really uninterested in interacting with consumers. That this kind of gets built into or becomes part of the workplace design and part of what the gendering of the workplace really becomes part of what moves the commodities forward through this internal supply chain. As commodities kind of move from one department to another, they get, you know, put on shelves, they get marketed by the sales vendors and then they eventually end up in consumer shopping carts and, and, and where, and customers drive those to the cashier, which is of course
- [59:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
the next category of worker we must discuss. So tell us about the cashiers in a Chinese malt Walmart. This one seems to be less about gender, but maybe more about high turnover. So what's happening with this role?
- [60:12]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Yeah, really high turnover in these jobs. They're hard jobs. It's really hard. So if you go to a Walmart store in China, I think one of the first things you'll notice is like that the cashiers are in these really tiny spaces, really compact spaces. And the design of the interlocking or cashier, little conveyor belts and scanners are really inter articulated. And so they're around fellow workers, they're close to fellow workers, but they're also pretty close to the customers who are constantly moving through the lines at a pretty fast clip. And so this work is the environment Just can become quite noisy and a bit suffocating actually. And then workers are standing for long periods of time. Now this work tends to be divided between men and women, with a slight preponderance of women from my estimation, going into a variety of different stores and generally just counting the number of men and women who are working as cashiers. And they are really subject to the closest surveillance of all of the workers in Walmart stores. Surveillance by the cameras overhead, surveillance by the scanners and the computers connected to the scanners, and surveillance by customers. So what we see in this point where the commodity is finally converted into money is that the surveillance system really bears down on these cashiers and they feel that kind of the weight of this multiple forms of surveillance. So what's interesting here I found is that like the scanning rate is measured. So the scanners generate data on every worker that measures the scan rate. So workers are required to measure a minimum number of, required to scan minimum number of goods each hour. And so there was a lot of pressure on them and it actually took some time. My research assistant described in really nice detail how she at first really had a hard time figuring out where the barcodes were on each product. And eventually she kind of learned them and she learned how to best move them through the scanner. And she learned that some scanners were better than others. So she was try to get to the, like the, the best, the most glitch free scanner in the store. So scanning wasn't really as easy as it might look. And then, you know, workers, their scanning rate was measured and then it would be posted in the back room for everybody to see. So they were, they were really competing against each other for higher scanning rates. The worker with the highest scanning rate in a given month, we get a bonus and get to wear a special vest. And was interesting. My research assistant really got into this and really wanted to be that bonus worker. And alas, she never was able to. But what was interesting here was that the consumers, of course, have an interest in workers scanning as quickly as possible. The workers didn't offer a lot of interactive amenities to customers. They were kind of gruff to customers, even though smiley faces were pasted all over the cashier stand. Actually, customers didn't care that much about chatting with the cashier. They just wanted to get the hell out of there because they had been standing in line for a while. And so what I found was that the computer system that's connected to the scanner, of course, as we're probably all familiar with, there's a display that gets pointed at the customer, and the customer follows the display. So each product that is scanned, the details come up on the display. And customers tended to monitor those really closely. There was a lot of pressure for workers to do. They're scanning quickly, but also accurately. And customers would get very upset when two scans, when one pass over the scanner would get. Would trigger a second one. Or sometimes a scanner that the store was so loud a worker couldn't hear the beep elicited by the scanner. It would scan something twice, and then customers would think they were getting ripped off. And that resulted in more conflict between workers and customers than you might imagine. And so what I found was that there was a way that customers became sort of these cruel overseers of cashier labor. But it was the surveillance system that channeled the customer's supervision over the cashiers. So I kind of call this a kind of techno despotism that enabled customers to kind of lord over cashiers. And then they became very picky about the bagging and all the rest of the. But. And at the same time, cashiers underwent a substantial amount of training, more so than any other worker. So they learned over a few days of paid training, they would learn. They learned customer service appearance standards, but speed requirements and how to handle cash, but also how to kind of, you know, the training also kind of created this sort of suspicion of customers because the. What in retail gets called the shrink rate, which is a euphemism for customer theft, that cashiers were trained to monitor customers for potential theft, which included, like, sticking stuff in the bottom of the shopping cart so that they would wheel by without it getting scanned, or like, switching products, product boxes, so they would put a more expensive product in a less expensive box. And so they were supposed to. They had little acronyms to make sure that they inspected everything very closely to minimize shrinkage. This was actually what seems, on the face of it, like a really kind of an easy job was actually quite a difficult job and required, like, stamina, because, again, the suffocating environment, the loud environment, the easily irritated customers really bore down hard on the workers. And so workers would quit after a short period of time. And again, I call this whole system techno normative despotism, kind of the ways in which technology actually directs customers to control cashiers.
- [67:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this definitely sounds like a very intense system indeed, as well as one that kind of seems to go for quite a long period of time. I mean, you were mentioning sort of. We went from 2006 to 2016, like, there's long a veteran is at least 10 years working. Like there's some kind of longevity in these systems you're describing, of course, though, there's also Covid, so that could probably be its own book. But maybe you could give us a brief sense of the ways in which Covid did or didn't change these systems of labor and consumption.
- [67:55]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Yes, yes, Covid. It exposed something that we usually take for granted, that the realization of commodities is not automatic, like the. And we saw this everywhere. You know, populations saw this, that supply chains were interrupted and that workers in, you know, that workers were taking on a great risk by showing up to work. And retail workers, retail workers included, and retail workers in the United States and China, they got sick or they decided they didn't want to take the risk. And so there was this sort of, you know, decline of work, decline of workers in the retail section sector. At the same time, other sectors, like the restaurant sector just had to lay off a bunch of workers or workers just didn't have jobs because many businesses had to. Had to close their doors because of COVID China had a system that allowed, like workers to easily transition from the. From the industries that were harder hit, like restaurants, into industries like retail that were still very much needed. So Covid also underscored how important this realization labor is, how important retail labor is to bring everybody the commodities they need, the food and all the rest that they need in order to survive. So the pandemic really reveals. I mean, retailers got called essential workers. And in China, too, the pandemic revealed how much modern life depends on these workers who move and stock and process and distribute goods. So it reveals kind of this hidden work. And workers were. So Walmart in China got designated as a livelihood enterprise, and it was granted special during COVID and it was granted special permission to continue operating because they were necessary to sustain life. But the work, of course, was really different, and the goods that were necessary were different. So workers were really focused on helping to make available food, medicine, and certain household necessities, masks and the like. So at a moment of extraordinary fear and uncertainty, so I talked to one, actually a research assistant of mine spoke with a supervisor from Walmart in Wuhan. And as we know, Wuhan was the kind of the origin of the pandemic. And he said, we called ourselves the most beautiful heroes in harm's way. Working invisibly. Everyone had a sense of the kind of mission of their work to enable the survival of everybody. So workers were invested kind of with a new importance, but they had to deal with increasingly empty Shelves, delivery delays, stocking, the new importance in the reorganization of stocking work. And so like work got really reorganized, especially because now, you know, commodities, retail goods were being delivered to people's doorsteps. And so the store had to be reorganized as something more like a warehouse than a retail store where customers would come in and shop, although customers were still coming in, you know, they trickled in and their temperatures were taken at the door and you know, they had to wear masks, they had to keep distance, but they trickled in. But mostly the stores were used as a kind of place where workers would now, you know, armed with scanning guns, would now take orders from an online system which Walmart had set up but had to expand dramatically. They would take orders from an online system and use scanners to pick these orders from the aisles and collect them all into baskets and bags and then make them available for another set of workers who would deliver them to workers homes. So in this way the work was similar in both Walmart here and Walmart in China. So, so their work was really became more like factory labor right at assembly line where. And at the same time it became more like shopping labor, like they were doing customer shopping for them. And this is the beginning of course of everyone getting more accustomed to kind of online shopping. And since then like the stores have shifted and Walmart's really quite behind in this trend and overtaken like Alibaba and other retail platforms in its kind of making available kind of delivery services. Although it is doing a lot to try to catch up. And there's a way in which, you know, today in the post Covid environment, having kind of army of retail stores scattered throughout neighborhoods actually becomes an advantage, an asset for the company. As in China and the United States, customers are expecting shorter and shorter delivery time. So in some places Walmart's like guaranteeing one hour delivery. And so having a store nearby allows for food and other goods to be delivered quite quickly rather than coming from an enormous warehouse miles and miles away. So there's a way in which Covid accelerated the transformation of retail in both the United States and in China. But yeah, it also transformed the work that workers did. So now you have more pickers, what gets called pickers, who are using scanning guns to select goods from shelves and doing more consumer activity. And we see that really built in more to retail environments, especially in Walmart in China today. And I think one thing we really need to remember, especially as we're shifting to digital retail platforms, is to remember the labor that avails us of the abundance of goods we purchase from them. Because labor is becoming less visible as people visit brick and mortar stores less and less and instead, like, kind of find their goods at their doorstep delivered by an invisible worker who just, you know, who plopped it right there.
- [75:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's a whole bunch of kind of patterns on the surface that seem like they're changing. But a lot of the big picture points you're making about. Hang on a second, how does the object get from point A to point B? There is labor involved. Right. That's still very much there, whether we're talking before, during, or after Covid. So I think that might be a good place to conclude our discussion about the book. But I would love to maybe conclude our discussion overall with a brief. If you've got anything you're currently working on, you want to give us a sneak preview of.
- [75:36]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Thank you. Yeah. Well, I am interested in taking this framework, realization labor and internal supply chain, and using it to understand digital retail labor and as it's becoming. So one question that emerged from the project is whether, like, realization labor is becoming more important rather than less important in the digital age. I think we can say it's getting reorganized and even more important in the digital age. So we often imagine that platforms and automation eliminate retail, but in many cases, it simply reorganizes it. So I'm interested in how new technologies are transforming realization labor and the ways that commodities are brought to consumers, and how digital coordination of realization labor impacts work across a chain of realization from digital platforms to warehouses to final delivery workers. So, for instance, when goods are delivered, men have replaced women as the final agents, or predominantly, men have replaced women in many of the jobs as the final agents of realization. So in many stores, clerks, and cashiers, they're either divided between men and women, or women predominate. And now we see really mostly men. The vast majority of delivery workers are men. So I think that's an interesting phenomenon. Also, the sequencing of the process of realization is reorganized within digital platforms. So with customers buying goods well before they are actually delivered, so there's this, like, wait time between handing over the money and getting the good, which is, like, completely different than in the retail store. So also, customers are giving up more of their own data, more of their own information when they use digital platforms. And that's often invisible to them and involves, like, you know, a kind of a form of uninformed consent where, you know, customers will often, like, kind of click on some elaborate agreement or a contract without really reading it, which, you know, I mean, who's got the time right and can we even process that kind of the legal jargon in those, in those contracts? So it's, I think what's happening in digital retail is a much more sophisticated version of what happened at point, at, at, at the point of sale in stores, with much more data being collected on customers that then gets used to kind of market, market goods to them. So it's a bit more like the days, in some ways, it's a bit more like the days of the catalog when people paid out money well before they received an item, interestingly. But it's interesting, then a whole chain of delivery is triggered from the warehouse to packaging, which is more complicated than bagging and, and then final delivery to the doorstep. So I'd like to use this framework of realization, labor, to understand how goods moved and how the labor has been reorganized. Because what we're seeing in the literature right now, and you know, very important first step, is that the labor scholars are focusing on isolated workplaces. Like what is it like to work in one job in the warehouse versus another job in the warehouse and what's it like to work as a delivery worker? Or what are the software programmers who are creating digital platforms? What are they up to? So I'm interested in kind of bringing all of this literature together and understanding the digital retail process as a, you know, as a supply chain, an internal supply chain, a supply chain internal to the company, that draws, that brings the commodity to the awareness of the customer and goes through a variety of processes, labor processes, to get that thing to the customer in a kind of reorganized system of circulation. Understanding, kind of how all of these different forms of labor and different labor regimes, different ways of organizing the labor, different ways in which gender and different identities figure into the labor, kind of coordinate the larger internal supply chain that brings commodities to customers.
- [80:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That sounds like an interesting project.
- [80:20]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Thank you. Stay tuned. Yeah, no.
- [80:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Walmart Made in China, published by Stanford University Press in 2026. Eileen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [80:34]
Dr. Eileen Otis
Thank you so much, Miranda. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education.
- [80:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Eileen Otis
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- [80:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Eileen Otis
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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