In the article Up Against Wal-Mart, Karen Olsson exposes the largest retailer in the world by listing many of the retailer’s flaws such as worker mistreatment and discrimination. Throughout the article, Olsson uses anecdotes from employees that have worked at the company and statistics to support her arguments. Ultimately Olsson’s piece serves to harshly criticize Wal-Mart due to low pay wages, unpaid overtime, and gender inequality. From the start, Olsson relies on actual employee interviews to support her arguments against Wal-Mart. By introducing Jennifer McLaughlin, a young woman who has been working for Wal-Mart for three years but makes under $17,000 a year, the author builds tension between the worker and the company.
The article “Labouring the Walmart Way,” author Deenu Parmar talks about how Walmart is able to achieve selling goods at a lower price then any average superstore. The author goes on to explain that Walmart’s antiunion efforts, employee selection, low prices and high retention rate all contribute to their major success. Walmart’s stance on ant unionism allows them to keep wage cost down and keep all their profits up. Not allowing a union keeps Walmart with the power to keep low wages and force unpaid overtime.
In the essay titled “Labouring the Walmart Way”, author Deenu Parmar explains the unhealthy effects of Walmart, how to stop them, and the challenges of doing so. Parmar begins by detailing how Walmart has done little for local economies. By hiring financially vulnerable people, the franchise insures that no one would dare to unionize; thus ensuring employees will only earn the bare minimum, and thus out-competing local competition. Parmar also goes on to explain how a local community removed Walmart. They were able to do this through the use of fierce union protests that made the store unprofitable.
This is most likely because they choose to mistreat and exploit their employees for higher profit gain. Based on quotes from former and current Wal-Mart employees and Olsson’s own words, a union is definitely necessary for Wal-Mart. From reading this essay, I see just how obvious the mistreatment is; constantly overworked employees are struggling to keep themselves afloat as their superiors are pressuring them to work more with no pay. This has been illegal for well over 50 years and unionization was deemed lawful in the 1840s. This being said, I feel that Olsson’s claim of underrepresentation is completely
‘Is Wal-Mart Good for America?’ On PBS Frontline, May 11, 2015 ‘Is Wal-Mart Good for America?’ is a documentary that examines the relationship between Wal-Mart’s rapid growth and its impact on the US economy ever since it blossomed in trade productivity in the mid 20th century. The documentary, published on February 2014 by PBS Frontline, conveys a deep understanding of how Wal-Mart changed the living standards of many Americans and took consumerism and retail logistics in the U.S. to another level; by cutting costs through offshore outsourcing to China and employing cheap Chinese labor. The documentary focuses on the changing relationship between big retailers and manufacturers and the transition in pricing and decision-making.
She uses many real-life examples to explain how cruel society is. People always suffer from bad services from Walmart’s employees, but clients do not realized employees have unpaid extra working hours and poor benefits. For example, Olsson uses statistics shows readers how had salary Walmart’s employees earn, “The average hourly worker at Wal-Mart earns barely $18,000 a year at a company that picketed $6.6 billion in profits last year.” (Olsson). Wal-Mart employees are not getting paid enough for their hard workers.
"Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" gives a provocative examination of the effect Wal-Mart has had on the U.S. economy. The documentary highlights the changing connection amongst makers and the purported "big box" retailers, exemplified by Wal-Mart, that has added to the insolvency of some American organizations and a developing unemployment rate. While Wal-Mart supporters tout the upsides of one-stop, ease shopping, others are frightened at both the outsourcing that has made these low costs conceivable and how extensive retailers influence littler, neighborhood organizations. Cutting edge inspects the champs and the failures as it archives how: Worldwide retailers are superceding makers in settling on choices about item quality, sort and cost.
The desire to gain fair working conditions and better rights fuels workers to be apart or create labor unions. Barbara Ehrenreich a low-wage worker at Walmart experiences poor working conditions. She is not allowed to sit on the job and cannot take unscheduled breaks. She works for hours and only gets 15 minute
During his campaign Bernie Sanders said something that resonated with me “Corporate greed is a scourge on this country”, and the biggest example of this is Walmart. The owners of Walmart are one of the wealthiest family in America, they make billions of dollars each year, yet, they ride on the backs of taxpayers by taking advantages of the benefits and tax breaks at their expense in order to subsidize their businesses. There are so many reasons why Walmart is bad for America; it has put so many small retailers out of business; they have filled our landfills with cheap garbage; they have destroyed countless millions of acres with their sprawling mega stores; they have forced the elimination of domestic manufacturing with its cheaply sourced goods AND most importantly, they have created a class of poorly paid workers who need public assistance to get by. No business operating in America should be allowed to pay less than a living wage for its employees. They're exploiting the system, yet they refuse to accept their responsibilities as Americans.
Many vendors and suppliers are forced by Wal-Mart’s low price guarantee goal by cutting down on their production costs to satisfy their organization's profit margin as well as Wal-Mart’s demands. For this reason, many of Wal-Mart’s vendors have taken heed of the mass retailer’s production move to cheaper production locations, such as China where the workers are paid minimal wages to produce goods for Wal-Mart, resulting in over $18 billion in goods which has an impact on the American workforce. In regard to the American workforce, Wal-Mart has been in the media for under compensating their employees by allowing minimal hours at minimum wage, resulting in part-time jobs with no healthcare benefits. (Ferrell, Fraedrich & Ferrell, 2013).
In 2003, federal agents held a massive raid on sixty-one stores in twenty-one states, finding 250 undocumented workers. Wal-Mart’s janitorial staff, which was hired through a contractor, was also found to have undocumented workers. In the end, Wal-Mart settled with prosecutors to the tune of $11 million [2]. The cherry on top of the labor issues at Wal-Mart is the healthcare offered by Wal-Mart, or lack thereof.
Walmart’s negative impact in not only for local business, but also have local employees. According to the case 3 statues that Walmart mainly mainly to hire part-time jib employees, and their employees not only part-time job but also full-time job all without any benefits. According to the case, less than 1% of that could provide affordable health care for associates, and Walmart not paying employees for overtime and making employees work through daily scheduled 15-minute breaks. Even more serious, almost Walmart employees’s profits is lower than other employees. And Walmart employees cannot use their profits to cover their life, their almost employees’s income below the poverty line.
This unjust act could be solved by unionizing together in order to help transform Wal-Mart into a better
In short, Wal-Mart’s labor practices are clearly immoral. Looking from the CEO and board of directors’ point of view, besides looking at where the company should be heading towards, they also know what is going on within the company as they receive feedback and complaints. In an example, there were complaints to corporate executives about the pay disparities and sexual discriminations but received little or no
Yet there has been very little change in the company’s behavior. In my opinion, the size alone makes Wal-Mart vulnerable to many issues. It has to be incredibly difficult to create an effective human resources department that can address all employees’ issues. Obviously, the biggest and probably the real problem is that Wal-Mart’s executives focused only on increasing profits and they have no interest in improving the working environment. They benefit from having low minimum wage and they take advantage of loopholes in the labors law to cheat employees out of wages and
