THE CONSIDERABLE gap between Walmart’s declared corporate values and the way it actually conducts business widens even more during the holiday season.
This season, shoppers frequenting the world’s largest retailer are encouraged to select the name of a child and to purchase and donate her wished-for gift from one of the “giving trees” located in stores. Throughout the year, the company works hard to give the impression of corporate generosity, giving, for example, to food banks.
However, many of Walmart’s own employees (or, as they are referred to in Walmart-speak, “associates”) are forced to rely on these same types of programs to get by—such as Christmas gifts for their children (purchased by strangers) and groceries from food banks.
Walmart, the United States’ largest employer, employs 1.4 million Americans; that’s five times as many as IBM. Walmart manufactures the very problems that it proudly claims to alleviate, which is worse than doing nothing at all. The deception would be laughable were it not tragic. Walmart seeks praise for funding food banks and providing toys for children in need, when they are a big part of the reason people struggle to buy food and gifts in the first place.
“A lot of people I work with can’t make ends meet,” Linda Haluska, a 53-year-old mother who has worked at Walmart for nine years, told Sojourners. “[Corporate managers] talk about their appreciation for us. Why don’t they show that appreciation by paying us fairly?”
For the past three years, Haluska has been a part of Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). Though the company is notoriously anti-union—Haluska spoke of being forced to view propaganda videos detailing “why union isn’t the right choice for Walmart” after corporate learned that a union organizer had been talking to workers at her store—OUR Walmart is gaining members.
OUR Walmart isn’t exactly a union, but already it connects thousands of Walmart workers with one another via social media.
Solidarity between workers is a major goal of OUR Walmart. Haluska joined three years ago, when she began noticing the troubling ways in which management strove to “conquer and divide” employees, “pitting them against each other” by, for example, assigning unreasonably large tasks to one shift and then, when the next shift arrives to find an overwhelming backlog of work, blaming the previous shift.
This common tactic, Haluska said, along with the constant threat of firing, kept workers’ resentments directed at one another instead of toward management.
Another goal of OUR Walmart is to demand respect from corporate management. “We want to let the Waltons [the owners of Walmart] know that we are people, that we have families, and that our work puts them where they are.”
Some of the practices Haluska described, while not illegal, show evidence of gross disregard for the well-being of workers. One OUR Walmart initiative, Respect the Bump, urges Walmart management to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers. Haluska described a pregnant woman with severe swelling being refused simple accommodations that would allow her to keep working, and an older man with arthritis being asked to move entire pallets of merchandise. Additionally, Walmart is cutting health insurance for another 30,000 part-time workers, while raising premiums on the rest.
“There is no sympathy for basic human conditions,” Haluska said.
“When you shop at Walmart,” Haluska said, “there is so much more involved than just getting the best deal” in the form of a low retail price. “Customers don’t understand the domino effect of buying just one particular product ... it goes all the way down to how our economy works.”
Gifts mean nothing when they are mere symbolic nods to the obligations one already has; it is not a “gift” to give my children the basic things to which they are entitled. So it is with Walmart. Until each worker is paid a living wage and treated with decency and humane respect, all the “giving tree” drives in the world amount to little more than fancy wrapping on an empty box.
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