Honor Working Mothers at Wal-Mart
What better way to honor the women in our lives than to fight for fair pay, equal treatment and dependable health care access for working women everywhere? Wal-Mart Watch is proud to launch our Women’s Rights Network, a compendium of news related to women’s rights at Wal-Mart. Visit this site to read more about the benchmark Dukes v. Wal-Mart class-action gender discrimination lawsuit, women’s testimonials on Wal-Mart’s health care plan, and many other issues facing women who work for and shop at Wal-Mart.
Click here to visit the Women’s Rights at Wal-Mart network >>
Click here to visit our women’s rights blog, an archive of news stories related to women’s rights at Wal-Mart.
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, May 11 | 29 comments | Permalink
Happy Mother’s Day
What does mom REALLY want for mother’s day?
Courtesy of MomsRising.net
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, May 11 | 0 comments | Permalink
Inequality Persists in the Workplace
On Mother’s Day, working women tell it like it is [People’s Weekly World]
Dedra Farmer was so good at her job as a Wal-Mart department manager in Oklahoma that her bosses assigned her to train new Tire and Lube Express Division managers, all of whom were men.
After she got done training them, the men went to work for $2,000 more a year than she got paid.
It’s much the same story in the Windy City.
Alice Banes, 29, a sales worker at Macy’s State Street store, told the World, “You have to be better than the men at work. You have to take care of family and still do better here at work just to prove you can hack the job and be a mother at the same time. It gives me a lot of stress.”
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, May 11 | 0 comments | Permalink
Falling Behind the Curve: Partnership Benefits, Non-Discrimination Policies, and Wal-Mart
During much of 2006, Wal-Mart seemed to be moving in the direction of an inclusiveness that the majority of Fortune 500 companies, and nearly every one of Wal-Mart’s major competitors had already embraced: most notably including same-sex couples into health and benefit plans. In August, Wal-Mart took the step of joining the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, with Dee Breazeale serving on their corporate advisory committee. Wal-Mart also took other positive steps and communicated with other Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) organizations such as Human Rights Campaign.
There was hope that with the release of the 2007 benefits guide Wal-Mart would join Walgreens, Costco, Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears Holding Corporation, Federated Department Stores (Macy’s), Nordstrom, Gap and most of the Fortune 500 in extending partnership benefits to same-sex couples. However, when Wal-Mart’s 2007 Benefits Guide was released to its employees, partnership benefits were not included, and Wal-Mart limited benefits only to opposite-sex married couples. This was a major disappointment, because it signaled that very little had actually changed at Wal-Mart.
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Posted by Research Team on Wednesday, May 09 | 33 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart Fights to Dispense Contraception
In a recent court case Wal-Mart was in the unusual position of fighting to distribute contraception. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a Wal-Mart employee’s request to avoid all potential contact with customers seeking contraception. The employee argued that filling the prescriptions violated his religious views; Wal-Mart argued that his request (which would have excused him from waiting on customers and answering the phone) rendered him useless as an employee.
Court Rules Wal-Mart Should Accommodate Pharmacists – Within Reason [Focus on the Family]
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that a Wal-Mart pharmacist who refused to even answer phones for fear the caller would ask for contraceptives was too demanding, LifeNews reported.
When Neil Noeson applied for the pharmacist position at Wal-Mart, the company agreed to accommodate his religious objection to filling prescriptions for contraceptives. The company even offered to allow Noesen to only interact with male customers and women who were unlikely to request birth control.
After starting the job, he then demanded that he not be required to answer the phone, because the caller might ask him to fill a prescription for a contraceptive.
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said the bottom line is that the court’s decision was reasonable.
“The pharmacist was given every possible accommodation he asked for before he started the job,” he said. “The federal anti-discrimination law requires only ‘reasonable accommodation’ of an employee’s religious beliefs.”
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, May 09 | 0 comments | Permalink
‘Better Health Care Together’ Coalition Meets in New York
The Better Health Care Together coalition, formed in February 2007, is a joint effort between Wal-Mart, the Service Employees International Union and several leading corporations advocating for universal health care. Two new companies - Qwest and General Mills - have recently joined the coalition.
Broad Coalition Calls for Health Care Reform [Time]
Most politicians, voters and analysts alike have all assumed that the 2008 presidential campaign, like the midterm elections in 2006, would continue to be a referendum on Iraq and little else. But the growing call for comprehensive health care reform from representatives of major corporations, labor unions, America’s governors, interest groups, and the public has become so strong that it could actually give the war a run for its money.
A Wednesday meeting in New York City involving prominent members of all those groups was the latest manifestation of the passionate and organized drive to get presidential candidates (and the next president) to make health care reform the top domestic priority.
Organized by an ad hoc organization called Better Health Care Together, the meeting was meant to publicize the group’s shared principles and to announce both new members and a drive for commitments to reform from the presidential candidates of both parties.
The coalition was launched in February of this year and has adopted four principles: quality, affordable health insurance for every American; individual responsibility for protecting and maintaining health; improved value for health care dollars spent; and broad participation in finding a solution. Their hope is to have the system on the path to change by 2012 by making it a centerpiece of the 2008 election debate.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, May 09 | 10 comments | Permalink
Women’s Reactions to Eco Initiatives
A cornerstone of Wal-Mart’s environmental intiative has been its heavy marketing and promotion of compact fluorescent light bulbs. The Washington Post ran a story yesterday describing female consumers’ - Wal-Mart’s largest demographic by far - impressions of the bulb. The full story is available below, but Feministing.org had some interesting points to add as well. What does this mean for Wal-Mart’s environmental product push? Will the company achieve its goals if women don’t buy their new eco-friendly products?
Fluorescent Bulbs Are Known to Zap Domestic Tranquillity [Washington Post]
Alex and Sara Sifford, who live here on the Oregon coast, want to do the right thing to save a warming world.
To that end, Alex Sifford, 51, has been buying compact fluorescent light bulbs, which use about 75 percent less power than incandescent bulbs. He sneaks them into sockets all over the house. This has been driving his wife nuts.
She knows that the bulbs, called CFLs, save money and use less energy, thus cutting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change. She knows, too, that Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey and the Department of Energy endorse them. Still, the bulbs, with their initial flicker, slow warm-up and slightly weird color, bug her.
“What really got me was when my husband put a fluorescent in the lamp next to my bed,” recalls Sara Sifford, 53. She said she yelled at her husband for “violating the last vestige of my personal space.”
Experts on energy consumption call it the “wife test.” And one of the dimly lighted truths of the global-warming era is that fluorescent bulbs still seem to be flunking out in most American homes.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, May 01 | 25 comments | Permalink
SEIU and Wal-Mart
Stern brings US union into modern era [Financial Times ]
In spite of spending tens of millions of dollars every year on public relations, Wal-Mart, the US retail giant, continues to suffer from a declining image and stagnant sales.
Much of that can be attributed to Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, America’s fastest growing union with 1.8m members.
Mr Stern, whose union broke away two years ago from AFL-CIO, America’s largest union federation, is the principal funder of Wal-Mart Watch, one of the retail group’s harshest critics. With plans to spend $60m (€44m, £30m) in the 2008 presidential election – more than any other union – SEIU also hopes to be something of a kingmaker in the Democratic presidential race.
Yet Mr Stern, whose Washington DC headquarters sits next to the capital’s plushest think-tanks on Massachusetts Avenue, talks more like a modern chief executive than a union boss from the era of smoke-filled rooms.
In a move that scandalised his colleagues in Change to Win, the federation of unions that he helped set up in rivalry to AFL-CIO, Mr Stern recently formed a partnership with Wal-Mart and Intel to push for universal health coverage.
Although he remains a critic of Wal-Mart – “you cannot change your image unless you change the reality,” he says of Wal-Mart’s public relations efforts – Mr Stern is emerging as America’s foremost union leader of the post-industrial era.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, April 27 | 7 comments | Permalink
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