Summary #10

In "Up Against Wal-Mart" Karen Olsson uses employee accounts, statistics and Wal-Mart policies to inform her readers of how crude Wal-Mart can be. She starts off with a first hand account of an ordinary employee at Wal-Mart. She lets her readers know that this woman, Jennifer Mclaughlin, is a mother who has been with Wal-Mart for three years and "earns only $16,800 a year" and she is considered "high paid". She relies on Medicaid to insure her son because of the price of Wal-Mart's insurance. Now this wouldn't be that big of a deal if this was a little company. However, as Olsson puts it "The company is the world's largest retailer, with $220 billion in sales, and the nation's largest private employer, with 3,372 stores and more than 1 million hourly workers." (344). In other words, this isn't some small company. With the unfairness of all this going on the workers started to sue the company and try to create unions to help get themselves better pay and insurance. "Workers in 27 states are suing Wal-Mart for violating wage-and-hour law..." (344). Do not think Wal-Mart is standing by while this happens. To fight back against these unions Wal-Mart has laid off employees suspicious of favoring or trying to organize an union. In one incident they laid off an entire meat-cutting department after the workers voted to join the UFCW, a union that was organized. The company also "hired a consulting firm named Alpha Associates to develop a 'union avoidance program.'"(347). The retailer also is accused of being unfair between sexes. "(Wal-Mart) also faces a sex-discrimination lawsuit that accuses it of wrongly denying promotions and equal pay to 700,000 women." (344). Now why should we be worried about what is going on at Wal-Mart? Olsson answers this nicely by stating the words of Bernie Hesse, an organizer of the UFCW, "these are the jobs our kids are going to have." (354).