I mentioned yesterday that Wal-Mart Watch has a new web site: Wal-Mart Employees Speak Out. Its purpose, as the site explains it:

As our nation’s largest employer and most financially successful company, Wal-Mart is a singular American institution. It occupies a unique position in our world by virtue of its size, reach and responsibility for the livelihoods of millions of workers and the needs of billions of consumers. And with such overwhelming influence comes certain moral responsibilities.

This website is a place where Wal-Mart employees and former employees can talk about Wal-Mart’s failure to live up to those responsibilities.

What you get there is a look behind Walmart’s PR curtain to see what employees are really thinking, but too afraid to tell their supervisors since they don’t have a union to protect them. Indeed, let’s start this series there, in the category that Wal-Mart Watch calls corporate culture.

Here’s Suzy on those anti-union meetings:

“During the meeting, the H.R. Manager asked questions with regards to why unions were developed and what makes a company vulnerable. It was the exact same meeting everyone else was subjected to. Apparently, these captive audience meetings are NOT interactive, and audience participation is forbidden. In fact; Associates are subjected devastating retaliation, directed at your livelihood, if the Associate is pro-union. My answers were: ‘Unions were developed to ensure employees worked in a safe environment with pay that is reasonable, hours that were not excessive. Unions eliminated child labor.” My answer to the question: ‘Why do employees seek out unionization?’ was, ‘Management fails to follow up on legitimate issues, poor pay, poor health care, and overall dissatisfaction with management.’”

Of course, she got fired. Here’s anonymous on the same meetings:

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, it’s that Wal-Mart associates are actually fired for having anything to do with the union. I attended a meeting that was conducted by a market manager. We were not told to not vote for Obama; we were told that if a Democrat president is voted in that the first bill to be reviewed is the union bill and if it passes we will loose benefits, pay, etc. They informed us that it is in our best interest to vote Republican. I already know that Wal-Mart executives are major campaign backers for the republican party.”

This behavior is illegal, but what does Walmart care? Of course not because the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board doesn’t enforce the law. In fact, I just read yesterday that the NLRB won’t investigate a case where a union organizer was physically assaulted!

What Walmart offers as an alternative is an open-door policy. Here’s Anonymous on that:

“The open door policy? A thing of the past. If you have a problem with the way things are, you have to be careful with who you speak to, or you will find yourself on unemployment. Unethical practices and sexual harassment? They happen at all Wal-Marts, many people are just afraid to speak up for fear of losing their paycheck. At my store, we never have enough help at the front end or on the floor, which has caused a lot of undue stress. You can talk all day long to management about how things are and it’s like talking to the wall! When you do get someone in management to listen, they turn it all around to make them look like they haven’t done a thing wrong.”

Next time, I’ll cover scheduling.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 1103 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under Employment, Organized Labor, Wal Mart Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.