Pink Magazine: Who will save Wal-Mart’s soul?
Pink Magazine - “a beautiful career, a beautiful life” - devotes the cover story of its July/August issue to the top women of Wal-Mart. Included in the write up are Wal-Mart heavy-hitters Susan Chambers, Pat Curran, and Linda Dillman, as well as execs Betty Marshall, Wan Ling Martello and Rosalind Brewer. The title of the story: “Can These Women Save Wal-Mart’s Soul?”
What follows seems to be a Victorian-era lesson on the moral superiority of women, with Wal-Mart in the role of a beast/man to be civilized by the women of its executive workforce. Says one analyst in the article, “To be likeable you have to be more civilized, and to be civilized, you need to have women rising up the corporate ladder.” Emily Post would have been so proud.
Glibly passing over details like class action discrimination lawsuits and “longtime criticism surrounding associate wages and benefits,” the article emphasizes the “result of a more sympathetic female touch on the controls” of the company: greater likeability, emotive advertising and “female styles of collaborative management.” In one fell swoop, author Joanne Cleaver manages to insult both women AND Wal-Mart, simultaneously calling the retailer an untamed corporate heathen and relegating women to the role of doting school marms.
This ill-conceived characterization of Wal-Mart’s female executives is both misguided and misleading. If Ms. Cleaver had looked beyond the talking points of these few well-positioned women, she would have seen serious, systemic problems with Wal-Mart’s treatment of female employees. Susan Chambers is quoted in the piece saying “We’re not saturated [with women leaders] by any means,” and that’s an understatement. Wal-Mart is currently being sued by 1.6 million female associates for gender based discrimination. Ironically, fighting discrimination in the workplace is the subject of the article directly after the Wal-Mart piece in this magazine. If ending workplace discrimination is something that concerns the Pink editorial staff, perhaps it should reconsider writing a feature on the company embroiled in the world’s largest class action discrimination lawsuit.
The article also fails to take in to account the other women of Wal-Mart: the hundreds of thousands of women working in Wal-Mart’s stores around the world. Those women, who make bare minimum wages and are the unfortunate casualties of the insufficient health care plan this article so extensively discusses, might not agree with Susan Chambers’ cheerful descriptions of company policy. Nor would the millions of women working in the sweatshop-like conditions of Wal-Mart’s supplier factories around the world. Some estimates put the female-to-male ratio in Shenzhen factories at 7-to-1, meaning women disproportionately bear the brunt of Wal-Mart’s inhumane sourcing practices as well. They would most likely have a different view of Wal-Mart, too.
Pink Magazine’s article is right about one thing - Wal-Mart’s soul does need saving. But executives buzzwords aren’t the way to do it. We hope Wal-Mart will someday make advances for women working all the way along its supply chain, not only promoting more women to executive positions, but paying better wages and providing better health care for store employees as well as sourcing from factories with fair working conditions for women overseas. Until Wal-Mart looks at the entire scope of its production chain, it hardly deserves accolades for progressive leadership.
Can These Women Save Wal-Mart’s Soul? [Pink Magazine]
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, June 25 | 16 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart’s Legal Troubles Grab The Spotlight
The Northwest Arkansas Morning News released over the weekend a Kim Morrison piece on some of the largest legal cases currently pending against Wal-Mart, and most of the findings really shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point. There is, of course, the Dukes gender discrimination suit, and the multitude of wage and hour cases pending - the full extent of which you can also see here, on Wal-Mart’s SEC filing. The two largest wage/hour cases to date - Savaglio and Braun/Hummel - have resulted in combined judgments of over $350 million against Wal-Mart, although the cases are currently in the appeals stages, so Wal-Mart has yet to pay a cent.
What you might find really interesting in the story is the way a company the size of Wal-Mart plans ahead for the day it will have to make a possible million billion-dollar payout:
“It’s not like they wouldn’t be able to pay the light bill if they had a billion dollar settlement,” said Patricia Edwards, fund manager with San Francisco-based Wentworth, Hauser and Violic. “It wouldn’t be good, don’t get me wrong. But the low point in cash last year at quarter end was just short of $5 billion.”
Edwards said Wal-Mart reserves cash for potential future lawsuit payouts so there would be a reduced impact on shareholders in the event of such a case. With Wal-Mart’s ability to absorb some of the impact, a billion dollar payout may show up in earnings as a loss of 5 cents per share, Edwards said.
Well that is certainly good to know, that Wal-Mart - instead of making sure its female employees are treated equally, and ALL of its employees are provided adequate breaks and paid for the overtime they work - has socked plenty of money away underneath its $150 bargain mattresses to pay for its legal shortcomings.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Corey Himrod on Monday, June 23 | 2 comments | Permalink
Legal Blog: Anita Loya Needed A Lawyer
Wal-Mart has, unsurprisingly, been the target of more lawsuits than one can count over the years. The company’s treatment of it workers and “save money at all costs” mentality has resulted in a flood of legal challenges ranging from single plaintiff suits to multi-million dollar class actions. Dukes v. Wal-Mart is of course one large example (the largest class action in American history, actually), as are the myriad wage/hour/overtime class actions the company faces.
Just as important as those large class actions, however, are the countless suits filed by individual plaintiffs – the tiny David trying to win justice over Wal-Mart’s Goliath. We at Wal-Mart Watch will be focusing on one of these stories each week, highlighting those cases that warrant further attention because of the light each sheds in its own way on how Wal-Mart does business.
Anita Loya (And yes, that is her real name…)
Ms. Loya was an employee at the Wal-Mart store in Deming, a small city in the southwest corner of New Mexico about sixty miles west of Las Cruces. In January of 2006, Loya filed a complaint against her store manager, Les Williams, claiming she had been discriminated against and sexually harassed. Amazingly enough she was not fired, and in fact Wal-Mart did indeed investigate her allegations. Meanwhile, Loya transferred in May to a Wal-Mart store up in Silver City while the investigation was ongoing. The parties entered into mediation in June 2006, but that tactic failed, and soon after Les Williams was officially the ex Store Manager at the Deming Wal-Mart.
That, you would think, would be the end of our tale. The victim was at a new store. The guilty party, following investigation, had been terminated. Done? Finito? End of story?? Unfortunately, not so much.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Corey Himrod on Friday, June 20 | 75 comments | Permalink
Legal Blog: Florida Woman Fights Discrimination
Wal-Mart has, unsurprisingly, been the target of more lawsuits that one can count over the years. The company’s treatment of it workers and “save money at all costs” mentality has resulted in a flood of legal challenges ranging from single plaintiff suits to multi-million dollar class actions. Dukes v. Wal-Mart is of course one large example (the largest class action in American history, actually), as are the myriad wage/hour/overtime class actions the company faces.
Just as important as those large class actions, however, are the countless suits filed by individual plaintiffs – the tiny David trying to win justice over Wal-Mart’s Goliath. We at Wal-Mart Watch will be focusing on one of these stories each week, highlighting those cases that warrant further attention because of the light each sheds in its own way on how Wal-Mart does business.
Tenna Hopkins was hired by Wal-Mart as an associate way back in 1984 – the year the Russians and others boycotted the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles;” the year the Space Shuttle Discovery made its inaugural flight; the year the first Apple Macintosh went on sale. On August 21, 2006, 22 years later, Tenna Hopkins was a store manager at a Wal-Mart Store in Daytona Beach, Florida. On August 22, 2006, Tenna Hopkins was out of a job.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Corey Himrod on Friday, June 13 | 5 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart’s Image Continues to Plague It
A report released today by market research firm Clark, Martire and Bartolomeo revealed some rather unsurprising news: consumers do not perceive Wal-Mart to be a gay friendly business. While this may be great news to some supposedly ”pro-family” associations, it’s bad news for Wal-Mart. According to the same report, gay and lesbian consumers are nearly 70% more likely to patronize a business they perceive to be gay friendly. For example, Apple, who recently surpassed Wal-Mart as the top music retailer, was perceived to be the most gay friendly of any retailer.
Unfortunately, these consumer perceptions are backed by Wal-Mart policy. The Human Rights Campaign’s 2008 Buying for Equality Guide gave Wal-Mart a ‘red rating’ which reflects that it offers no domestic partner benefits and its discrimination policy does not include gender identity and/or expression. Wal-Mart refuses to address the concerns of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community citing its policy to avoid “highly controversial issues”. The real controversy, however, is Wal-Mart’s stagnant social policies and an inability to adapt to the growing needs and demands of an increasingly diverse population.
Posted by Michael Mignano on Tuesday, May 13 | 2 comments | Permalink
Op-Ed: Wal-Mart is Anti-Woman
Laura Santina over at CounterPunch has more to say about Hillary Clinton’s involvement with Wal-Mart, and how the Senator’s time on Wal-Mart’s board has impacted the presidential hopeful’s reception among women:
The sad, hollow Hillary Clinton-as-feminist myth melted down when I learned that she had served for six years on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors while she was the wife of the governor of Arkansas. A feminist, even a Republican feminist, wouldn’t serve on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors. Wal-Mart is not only anti-worker and anti-union, but it is anti-woman. Two thirds of the Wal-Mart employees are women, ten percent are managers. A gender bias class action suit against Wal-Mart on behalf of one million women is currently pending...We can do better.
Hillary’s qualifications aside, Santina’s comments are sadly true. Wal-Mart stores profit off women - not only at the register, but by underpaying female employees, failing to promote them fairly and cutting corners on health care for the company’s lowest-wage workers - most of whom are women. More on our Women’s Rights action page here.
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, April 24 | 7 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart Pays the Price for Not Securing Embarrassing Footage
News of Wal-Mart managers’ behavior has spread across the ocean to the U.K., where the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent are all reporting on it. The Telegraph calls the last few days a “PR disaster,” and this story from the Independent compares Wal-Mart’s video archives to the Nixon Watergate tapes. More embarrassing than the fact that these tapes were released is the fact that this is only one example of a corporate culture rife with sexist overtones. From the Dukes v. Wal-Mart case to inadequate women’s health coverage on the company medical plan, Wal-Mart needs to shape up and respect women in the company. Click here to learn more about Women’s Rights at Wal-Mart.
For sale: the video archive Wal-Mart should have erased [Independent (U.K.)]
The tape recordings that Richard Nixon made, almost obsessively, of everything that went on in the Oval Office helped bring down his presidency. And now a similarly thorough archive of video footage threatens to create a world of embarrassment – and legal liability – for Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.
About 15,000 videotapes of Wal-Mart executives at work and at play over the past 30 years have suddenly become available to the public thanks to a series of blunders by the retail giant – which paid too little attention to the company it hired to make the tapes before abruptly terminating their relationship two years ago.
The company, Flagler Productions Inc, depended on Wal-Mart for 90 per cent of its revenue at the time the plug was pulled in 2006, and had just moved into a new 20,000 sq ft building in its home base of Lenexa, Kansas.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, April 11 | 539 comments | Permalink
A Company In Need Of Change
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post.
Wal-Mart’s dirty laundry is getting more global exposure today just a week after the Debbie Shank story. It has not been a good month for Wal-Mart public relations. To use a sports term, these are turnovers, and they expose the weaknesses of Wal-Mart’s high priced image.
When Wal-Mart Watch started we promised to tell a new more truthful story about the company. In doing so, we have often been critical of Wal-Mart but we have also been willing to applaud when they took steps in the right direction.
Undeniably, over the past three years Wal-Mart has gotten better at hiding the truth from us and from the media usually by obfuscating rather than clarifying the real issues. Their so-called health care reform is just one example. And thanks to the millions they are spending on Edelman Public Relations, they have received some good coverage in the media.
Occasionally though, they fumble the ball and we get to see clearly what is behind the façade. The video of Wal-Mart managers dressed in drag aired on NBC Nightly News last night (April 9, 2008) is a great example.
Read the rest of this story ...
Posted by David Nassar, Executive Director on Friday, April 11 | 38 comments | Permalink
View Wal-Mart Watch's videos on YouTube