Case Scenario: Working Conditions at Wal-Mart if Wal-Mart, now the world\'s larg
ID: 397850 • Letter: C
Question
Case Scenario: Working Conditions at Wal-Mart if Wal-Mart, now the world's largest retailer, one of his core daluès the Walton foun was thet if you treated employees with respect, tied compensation to the performance enterprise, trusted the employees with important information and decisions, and provided ample o s for advancement, employees would repay the company with dedication and hard work. For years, the formula seemed to work. Employees were called associates to reflect their status within the company. Even the lowest hourly employee was eligible to participate in profit sharing schemes and could use profit sharing bonuses to purchase company stock at a discount compared to its market value. And the company made a virtue of promoting from within (two-third of managers at Wal-Mart started as ay At the same time, Walton and his successors always demanded loyalty and hard work from employees. Managers, for example, were expected to move to a new store on very short notice, and basic pay for hourly workers was very low. Stilil, as long as the upside was there, little grumbling was heard from employees E In the last ten years, however, the relationship between the company and its employees has been strained by a succession of law suits claiming that Wal-Mart pressures hourly employees to work without compensation, requires overtime without compensating them, systematically discriminates against women, and knowingly uses contractors who hire undocumented immigrant workers to clean its stores and pay them below minimum wage. For example, a class-action law suit in Washington State claims that Wal-Mart routinely (a) pressured hourly employees not to report all their time worked; (b) failed to keep true time records, sometimes shaving hours from employee logs; (c) failed to give employees full est o meal breaks; (d) threatened to fire or demote employees who would not work off the clock and (e) required workers to attend unpaid meetings and computer training. Moreover, the it claimg that Wal-Mart has a strict no overtime policy, punishing employees who more than forty hours a weeß but that the company also gives employees more work than can be completed in a forty-hour week. The Washington suit is one of more than thirty lawsuits that have been filed around the nation in recent years. arung thm to daim no Gurhi With regard to discrimination against women, complaints date back to 1996 when an assistant manager in a California store, Stephanie Odle, came across the W2 of a mal assistant manager who worked in the same store. The W2 showed that he was paid $10,000 more than Odle. When she asked her boss to explain the disparity, she was told that her coworker had "a wife and kids to support." When Odle, who is a single mother, protested, she was asked to submit a personal household budget. She was then granted a $2,080 rais Subsequently, Odle was fired, she claims for speaking up. In 1998, she filed a disc suit against the company. Others began to file suits around the same time, and by 2004, the legal action had evolved into a class-action suit that covered 1.6 million current and former female employees at Wal-Mart. The suit claims that Wal-Mart did not pay female employees the same as their male counterparts, and did not provide them with equal opportunities promotion they wan to toke nduan agoExplanation / Answer
The case is about gradually changing employee policies of Retail giant Wal Mart that started from engaging low paid employee to work hard at the stores, who showed dedication, earned goodwill and trust of employer by showing commitment and beng loyal, and in turn got promotions and profit sharing. Later on, in quest of being lean and sustaining its low cost strategy through cost cutting, the company started to use all tactics that minimised the costs, even if it came at the cost of being unethical, partial and victimising towards the employees.
As a result of malpactices that included engaging the tainted partners who violated the rights of employees, discriminating on the basis of gender in pay and promotions, assigning unpracticable workloads, engaging the employees in unpaid trainings, not providing them sufficient breaks during the work, providing them hostile work environment, threatening the employees, manipulating attendance records to pay the workers less by cutting in their overtime hours, the company found itself facing host of lawsuits ( over thirty in number) across the US. By 2004 the legal action evolved into a class action suit covering 1.6 million former and current female employees claiming discrimination in pay and promotions on gender grounds.