How Wal-Mart Treats its Workers

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Wal-mart has been accused of numerous incidents of worker abuse, neglect, and endangerment. Women in particular have filed many reports of discrimination. Here a few examples of how Wal-Mart treats its workers, from a report given by California congressman George Miller on February 16 of this year. (The full report can be found as a pdf here.)

Wal-mart has always been staunchly anti-union. It even has a hotline that managers can call if they suspect a union is organizing. The hotline instructs them on the best way to quell the activities. Wal-mart pays its clerks at average of $8.23 per hour. The national average for supermarket workers is $10.35. In December 2002, 39 class actions lawsuits charged that Wal-mart withheld overtime pay from workers. In Feb. 2004, a federal jury ordered that Wal-mart compensate 83 employees of a store in Oregon for unpaid overtime hours. An internal audit of Wal-mart discovered thousands of young employees working longer and later hours than child labor law allows.. About 45% of Wal-mart workers receive health care benefits, whle 66% of workers at similar large stores (Target, Home Depot) get health care benefits. Wal-mart encourages its employess to find charitable and public assisstance to help out with health care. Wal-mart executives knowlingly hired undocumented workers in their stores and paid them $325 for 60-hour, seven day weeks. Dozens of lawsuits have surfaced in which people with disabilities have been denies employment at Wal-mart. Some Wal-mart stores have policies of locking its workers in the store overnight until a manager with a key lets them leave in the morning. It was reported by some workers that sick and injured workers had to wait hours for treatment.

Wal-Mart and Women

Wal-Mart has recently come under fire from female workers who say that they face discrimination and sometimes harassment at Wal-Mart. Women make up 800,000 of Wal-Mart's one million employees.      Lisa Maldin worked as a customer service manager in Hiram Georgia. She enrolled in the stores health care plan, but was denied coverage for her $32 a month birth control pills. She is suing Wal-mart. Her suit claims that the store violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.      The judge for the case has allowed all women working for Wal-mart after March 2001 to join the suit.

Other cases involving women: Women sales associates, who make up three-quarters of Wal-mart's work force, make an average of $6.10 per hour, or $12,688 per year full-time. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is currently suing Wal-Mart over allegations of sexual harrassment in Alabama. Women in Wal-mart's El Salvadore plant earn15 cents an hour making pants that are sold for $16.95 in the US, and they are forced to take regular pregnancy tests.

Wal-Mart says: 90% of its workers have health insurance coverage, according to its chief spokesperson Mona Williams. Every source I found is much less.

Workers in China

China currently has 31 Wal-mart sotres with 16,000 employees. Wal-Mart employees in China, whose stores look identical to American stores and whose employees where identical outfits, face similar problems.      One sales female sales clerk at a Chinese store says that most workers make about $84-$96 a month, enough only to "guarantee the workers' basic existence," according to Jian Lichun, a corporate affairs manager at a Wal-mart in Changsha.      The worker says that "Each person does the work of three! Our productivity is much higher." When asked, she did not know what a union was.