"I worked at a Wal-Mart for a few years in Va. I cannot tell you the amount of lies I was told about the company practices, possible raise, transfers and schedule changes....
Wal-Mart feeds off of its employees['] ignorance."
[Emphasis added]
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Former Wal-Mart Employee J.J. McClure, 2002.
Despite its crude name, the employee forum at Walmart-blows.com serves the useful purpose of battling this ignorance. While it is full of childish insults and profanity, many Wal-Mart employees come here to ask questions about their work and find out how things are "really" done at other Wal-Marts around the country.
While some of you must assume that I used to work at Wal-Mart to devote so much time to dissecting them, I never have. Reading these workers' complaints was an eye-opening experience.
For example, I knew Wal-Mart was behind the ridiculous and now ubiquitous use of the term "associate" to refer to wage labor, but that's not where their Orwellian use of language stops! At Wal-Mart, an employee reprimand is called a "coaching," and if you get enough coaching you will be fired.
But this series is about Wal-Mart workers writing in the first person, so let me get to some quotes. This woman works at Sam's in New York state:
Just recently they have instated a new rule that the cashiers are not allowed to have any kind of water bottle at their registers.
I think this is absolutely ridiculous. I am a COS now, but I used to be a cashier, and I still run register from time to time. That is a very strenuous, physically demanding job. You are lifting very heavy items all day. 50 lb bags of dog food. Cases of pop and bottled water. Huge buckets of cat litter. You are expected to transfer everything. Plus, you are constantly talking. "Hello, Mr. Smith, did you find everything all right today? Your total is ___. Credit or Debit?" You get the idea.
To say that you are expected to do that for 8 hours without access to a water bottle (except on breaks, which can be 2 - 3 hours between), is cruel and inhumane. For a company that preaches respect for the individual, these cashiers are being treated like machines. This is absolutely barbaric.
Believe it or not, I've been in one of those aircraft hangars and they are hot!!! Is Wal-Mart trying to provoke a medical emergency? It seems so at least to some extent, as the answers she got to this question suggests that the policy varies by store. Some managers let them; others are just cruel.
Here's a different heinous policy:
We have a situation at your local Howell NJ store where the management team and the district manager is bullying associates to travel to other stores to help them out of a jam.....Can they actually do this??? Force associates to go to other stores????? In force, I mean the threats of you will do this or else... These people are goddam idiots. If I wanted to travel all over the goddam planet, I would have enrolled in the neo-nazi brainwashing anthem of the whole walmart world and become upper management, I am merely a dept. mgr who is very disgruntled about this crap.
This is probably a result of Wal-Mart's chronic understaffing, documented nicely in Simon Head's recent piece from the New York Review of Books. Once again, this policy seems to vary from state to state. Or on, as one respondent put it, "how big an ass your manager is."
Here's another case of the rules being "flexible":
I am a two year associate working for Sam's Club as a cake decorator. My girlfriend was recently promoted to a photo center manager position in a new club 1.5 hours away. Since we live together, it would require us to relocate. I looked up the policy regarding fraternization and saw that it was okay for us to work in the same store as long as I was not in the same division.
I told my general manager that I needed to transfer to the Sam's and he said it shouldn't be a problem. He called the general manager at the receiving facility and told him I was requesting a transfer, but he denied me. The grounds? He said that although the policy states that we can work together, it changes the situation because we live together and are considered, by management, married.
In general, it appears that Wal-Mart's set industrial relations strategy is to make it up as they go along because they are tyrants and can get away with it. I have faith that some day this will catch up to them. Successful unionization campaigns have been built on a lot less.
JR