Wal-Mart Exploratory Essay

The first Wal-Mart Discount Store opened its doors in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 by its founder, Sam Walton. Walton believed in customer service and hard work, which got him to expand to twenty-seven countries in forty years. Today, Wal-Mart serves more than two hundred million customers weekly.
Wal-Mart established its Ethical Standards program in 1992 to monitor working conditions in its supplier factories. The program covers a factories compliance with local and national laws and regulations, compensation, hours of labor, no forced/prison labor, no underage labor, no discrimination, freedom of association and collective bargaining, health and safety, environment, and the right to audit by Wal-Mart. The main method for conducting an audit

While they conduct quite a few audits, research shows that most of these audits were announced, giving the suppliers time to ‘fix’ or cover up their errors. Research also shows that the more unannounced audits they performed, the fewer factories were rated green for having low or no violations. In 2003, where 99 percent of audits were announced, 21 percent of the factories had no or little violations. By 2006, where only 26 percent of audits were announced, which is still high, only 6 percent of the factories managed to have little or no violations. When asked why the drastic change in passing factories, Wal-Mart said that it resulted due to increasing standards for the factories. However, all of the factories had a warning and time to improve their policies before their audits, as the increased standards were issued a year in advance. The main violation from 2003-2006 was underage labor and forced labor. Other violations consisted of failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, and safety

Even though the Dukes case was overturned due to not sharing enough in common to qualify for a class action discrimination suit, which would have been the largest in history, neither the lawyers nor the women have given up. Why did this nationwide class action suit fail? It is believed that women in different stores have different managers who made their decisions for different reasons and not all the same reason. Over the years, there have been many discriminatory cases due to women getting treated differently than men. There has been no significant improvement in gender discrimination for the company even though it should be an easy policy to enforce. But as it was become more and more difficult for people to win a class action suit, requiring them to file suits based on smaller issues or areas, it has become economically impossible for some people to afford going to court. Overtime, these cases just go away and the discrimination will continue as