Wal-Mart: Everything's Just Fine Here! Promise!
An internal audit of Wal-Mart employment records has revealed a total of more than 100,000 labor-law violations ranging from minors working during school hours to failure of employees to take legally mandated breaks.
An internal audit and they found that many? Jesus! Let's put Wal-Mart's auditors on the trail of Nicole Brown Simpson's real killers and we'd get that mess cleared up right quick too!
All I can say is, it's about time some attention was paid to Wal-Mart's relationship with their workforce. For all their happy-family rhetoric, Wal-Mart treats their workers with as much respect as most people treat public bathrooms. Union-busting, unfair wage practices, illegal immigrants, unpaid overtime, and tacit managerial coercion are all well-documented.
Wal-Mart responds: "[A] spokesperson told the paper the audit was meaningless, since what looked like violations could simply reflect employees' failure to punch in and out for breaks and meals they took."
So their contention is that they don't watch our workers every minute of every day, and really pretty much leave them to their own devices, like any good parent would. Riiight. Because you know how mellow and easygoing managers are about the time clock. More likely, it was made "known" that anyone punching out for breaks would be pushed to the bottom of the happy-family enthusiasm-scrum and eventually relegated to straightening the bra display and cleaning the crapper. And, jeez, Wal-Mart's protestations would be a lot easier to take if everyone and their brother hadn't already read Nickel and Dimed.
I've worked in union shops and non-union shops, and all I can say is that a good union well managed is a great thing. Right now Wal-Mart is in the same position US Steel was back in the day, what with their size and their benevolent attitude toward the meatsacks that they employ. They union-busted too, and they lost eventually. What's it going to take for a service-industry labor movement to gain traction?
[wik] In response to a question by Minister Buckethead, allow me to clarify. This 100,000 labor violations was collected from a total of 128 Wal-Mart stores only.
[alsø wik] Commenter Murdoc observes that my math is bad, and it's 77.8K violations. But Murdoc takes his arithmetic wizardry one step further and reasons that if these 128 stores are any indication, this suggests that the rate of labor violation for all Wal-Marts is on the order of almost two million per week. Mmmmmm, now that's perfidy!
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How many stores do they have,
How many stores do they have, I wonder? The average per store could be very small. Not defending Wal-Mart, exactly - but if it's really a couple violations per store, rather than continuous, unending abuse, well that puts a different perspective on the thing.
100,000 in ten stores = very bad, need heads on pikes.
100,000 in ten thousand stores = need better procedures and some managers need a pink slip.
That's 100,000 in 128 stores.
That's 100,000 in 128 stores.
Heads on Pikes.
I had a brief career in
I had a brief career in WalMart, about 3-4 months my first year undergrad. Some recollections:
*Yes, Wal Mart DOES mean jobs and opportunity in alot of places, such as the rural, perpetually poor areas of western MA. Sad, but true.
*At the store I worked in, it was the immediate supervisors who had to put in the ridiculous hours, I'm guessing with alot of unpaid overtime. Worker bees were largely un-fucked-around with, other than the usual crap associated with retail gigs.
*I did hate the relentless enforced cheeriness of the place. I even had to do a stint- one time, I assure you they didn't make that mistake again- of greeting people when they walked in the door. In my jump boots and blue smock.
I had a brief career in
I had a brief career in WalMart, about 3-4 months my first year undergrad. Some recollections:
*Yes, Wal Mart DOES mean jobs and opportunity in alot of places, such as the rural, perpetually poor areas of western MA. Sad, but true.
*At the store I worked in, it was the immediate supervisors who had to put in the ridiculous hours, I'm guessing with alot of unpaid overtime. Worker bees were largely un-fucked-around with, other than the usual crap associated with retail gigs.
*I did hate the relentless enforced cheeriness of the place. I even had to do a stint- one time, I assure you they didn't make that mistake again- of greeting people when they walked in the door. In my jump boots and blue smock.
It appears to me that you
It appears to me that you included the number of employees audited (25,000) in your total of over 100,000. The total in the article you link to is actually 77,843.
Still, taking the number of US stores into account, this still means that 1.9 million violations ocurr each week.
[url=http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/000864.html]http://www.murdoconlin…]
Pikes. Definitely.
Johno, his blog is more
Johno, his blog is more popular than ours - he must be right. I went over there, and there is a pleasing scent. Maybe we need some HTML new car scent. Let's try it out:
<new car scent>Sniff, sniff... Ah, that smells like an Yukon, yes, a Yukon Denali with the luxury package.</new car scent>
We could also try <potpouri></potpouri>, <patchouli></patchouli> (for writing about hippies) or even the dreaded <smelly Norwegians></smelly Norwegians>