The first main theme of the collection to note is its mapping of the scale of Wal Mart’s operations. It is the largest private employer in the US, Canada and Mexico; successfully established in Europe; key driver of manufacturing in China; now eyeing the prospects for conquering the vast, untapped consumer markets of the Asian giants (China, Russia, India). This extensive web of suppliers and retail outlets is highly integrated and subject to a striking degree of centralised control, ruthlessly marshalled by Wal Mart’s own IT and logistics systems right down to individual shop floor level. As David Hoopes notes this ‘big box’ retailer has deployed advanced satellite communications networks for over two decades now - plotting sales, inventory and replenishment - and then used such information to steadily exert its influence over suppliers and distributors. Part of this has been the shift to a global sourcing of its products from East Asia, where new manufacturers were willing to dance to Wal Mart’s tune in exchange for access to the mass US market.

With size comes power. Bonacich and Hardie argue that the major result of all these developments has been the emergence of a new pattern of global production and distribution, placing the big box retailers firmly in the economic driving seat, with dramatic consequences for manufacturers, distributors and their workforces.

Producers now find themselves locked into retailers’ global supply chains, their operations tailored to the consumer preference (or ‘point of sale’) data captured by and passed on electronically from these outlets. Major aspects of production runs – length, frequency, design, labelling, price and quality – are now dictated by the retailers on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis: for Wal Mart alone has over 30,000 suppliers to choose from worldwide. Petrovic and Hamilton point out that this dominance extends to producers physically moving their sales departments closer to Wal Mart’s Arkansas HQ, and electronically linking themselves into its IT systems. Their organisation and logistics thereby become further aligned to Wal Mart priorities.

In the transportation sector, a similar stranglehold has taken place. Increasingly global supply chains and more frequent distribution (‘just in time’ replenishment) are central aspects of Wal Mart operations, leading it (and other global retailers) to lock in distributive procedures within its overarching system. (The Arkansas giant actually has its own warehousing and trucking fleet). Independent logistics firms now find themselves forced to meet retailer demands to retain contracts.

All along these supply chains, workforces across the globe are being squeezed by their immediate employers to meet the rigorous demands of the retailers. In the US logistics sector, Bonacich and Hardie find labour standards weakened as working relations become more contingent – through outsourcing, temporary employment and the transformation of once stable unionised workforces into ‘independent contractors’. Reinforcing this, the strident anti-union practices of parent companies leave little scope for organising particular employers, who can easily be dropped for more pliable alternatives. The trajectories of US West Coast port truckers and seafarers are used to illustrate these harsh dynamics at work.

Within the Wal Mart retail empire itself, working conditions come under scrutiny from a number of the contributors. Thomas Adams argues that discount retailers generally have to enforce a more authoritarian shop floor to hold down labour costs and thereby secure their profitability. A raft of strategies has been deployed here, by Wal Mart and others.

These cover organisational innovations (dividing ownership of stores and their internal departments to obstruct worker solidarity); extensive monitoring and surveillance (effected through simplification of work tasks, performance requirements, use of private investigators and lie detector tests); and a virulent anti-unionism, where pro-union employees are sacked, organisers arrested and workforces artificially fragmented to scupper any union election. This is, he notes, a pattern increasingly spreading throughout the low wage service-retail sector of the US economy.

Ellen Rosen’s research backs up this view, showing how the systematic understaffing of each Wal Mart store forces its workers to display a ‘total flexibility’, accepting any and all tasks given to them, regardless of appropriate training, or required rest breaks. Working patterns are continually subject to revision in the light of sales figures, leading to cuts in working hours and insecurity amongst employees. Low wages, limited benefits and gender discrimination against its predominantly female workforce complete the charge sheet.

One final aspect of big box retailing examined in the book is its spatial impact upon the urban environment. According to David Karjanen, Wal Mart’s global supply chain spatially dislocates production from consumption, polarising urban life in the US. Local economic development falters through this dislocation, one reinforced by its well publicised destruction of local commerce. Its low wage employment regime weakens local demand whilst placing extra burdens on state resources, to fund health benefits. Public resources are also stretched by its incessant request for fiscal support to site stores, and the demands upon transport and public infrastructures their out of town locations generate. Karjanen concludes that big box retailing imposes significant costs upon communities and urban environments for benefits that are, at best, uncertain.

So the collection provides chapter and verse on the rise of retail power. What is to be done? Here a number of political responses are put forward. At the most global level, Bonacich and Hardie argue that current production and distribution systems render traditional single plant/ employer collective bargaining ineffective. Such efforts can easily be outmanoeuvred through production relocation.

Instead new modes of labour resistance are called for, with inter union cooperation and ‘flexible organising’ of contingent workforces as likely options. These global supply chains do, they say, contain their own points of weakness – key transportation nodes, the overall reliance upon frequent (disruptable) deliveries. And this has actually increased the strategic power of the superintendents of the entire circulatory system – workers in transportation and warehousing.

Wade Rathke’s piece, by way of contrast, tackles the issue of organising Wal Mart itself in the US. With store-by-store organising a well documented failure, Rathke calls for the formation of a ‘workers association’, open to all current and ex Wal Mart workers, and pursuing a rights based agenda against the manifold legal transgressions of the employer (along labour, gender, immigration and civil rights axes). Living wage campaigns and public policy positions could be developed along the lines of community actions taken by ACORN in Florida and Chicago. Rathke argues US labour now has a number of potential allies, whose progressive initiatives (green, gender, migrant or anti-sweatshop based) all confront the power of big box retailing, opening up the genuine possibility community – labour alliances.

At both general and specific levels then, global retailing is calling forth its own oppositions, providing space for new political practices to be launched. That is the best conclusion to draw from this book.