Not that I was ever a big fan of Wal-Mart to begin with but this finally cinches it for me.
A Wal-Mart employee was terminated last summer because she turned over a photograph to police of an abused child. In sorting through a batch of photographs she came across a photo of a bruised child who was crawling through what appeared to be a pile of marijuana with $50 and $100 bills lying around. The child has since been removed from the home and placed in foster care.
Wal-Mart terminated her employment because she did not follow their standard rules for handling questionable photographs. The policy states that a management team must make any decisions about such photographs. As the lady’s attorneys argued, this directly violates state law that requires anyone who is witness to abuse or suspected abuse to report it to authorities. The U.S. District Court upheld the decision to terminate the employment.
I’m not sure what pisses me off more about this situation–the fact that a woman was terminated from her job for upholding the law of the state or that Wal-Mart considers the confidentiality of its customers more important than the well-being of a child and the law. We have all worked at places where “management teams” are set up to handle things. Do they ever get around to doing anything in a timely manner? This child’s well-being could have been jeopardized further in the time it took for a group of suits to decide if something should be done with the photograph.
Now, I know this is a sticky area. I realize that if discretion were left up to the individual employees, stuff like pictures of babies in bathtubs might be confiscated and sent to police as child porn. However, the fact remains that if state law requires that any suspicion of abuse or neglect be reported, then there is no need for a management team to review any pictures. The purpose of the management team handling the issue is so they can decide when and if to proceed with actions. What if there was a picture of a child being abused and it just happened to be the daughter of the head of the management team’s friend and he/she decided to just toss the picture so as not to get the friend in trouble? There should be no question and no committee to run these things through.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those “anything for the children” nuts. However, I don’t see how a corporation this large can get away with having a rule that blatantly contradicts the laws of the state!
I hate Wal Mart. Ever since Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder, died his heirs have run the place to hell without benefit of a handbasket. Sam would have been right there with the employee I have no doubt.
The late Mr. Walton used to donate things to charity all the time. Case of diapers got busted in shipping? Donate to the local shelter. Housewares packaging damaged? Donate to local women’s shelter. Now they have this policy in place that says, nope, has to be destroyed if it can’t be returned. Selfish bastards. They say it prevents employee theft. :rolleyes:
And as far as I know, that law is in every state. It has been in any state I’ve lived in. You risk criminal prosecution if the state finds out you knew or suspected something and didn’t report it. [ideally. most state child welfare workers are too overloaded to get to everything, but it’s possible]
I’ve always had this paranoid fear of Wal-Mart because my crazy ex-girlfriend worked there, last I heard. Granted, it was at a Wal-Mart many tens of miles from where I live, but I didn’t need the reminder.
[Devil’s Advocate]
I’m sure that there’re people who’d pounce on Wal-Mart for “violating people’s privacy” or the like if employees acted on their own discretion. Remember, we live in a day and age when the phrase “You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t” has never held truer.
[/Devil’s Advocate]
(Sorry… just didn’t want to add a simple “Me too” post)
I agree, SPOOFE. There really is no blame-proof way of getting around this but I think they have chosen the wrong route. I mean, since when do you expect total and complete confidentiality from a retail store? Grocery stores share your purchase histories with marketing companies. Does this mean that if I buy some diarrhea medicine at the corner drugstore and someone comes in after me with the same problem, I can sue the pharmacist if he refers to me and the medicine he suggested because he violated my confidentiality?
I work in a hospital where we have to respect patient confidentiality. This is one of our most important rules. However, if someonme is in danger or a child is being abused, that rule can be bent. The same should have applied here.
I agree. Very few people, I think, believe those hokey “Old man wants a hug” Wal-Mart commercials to be an accurate presentation of the store’s attitude. At best, this case demonstrates gross negligence on the part of the store’s management - that is, being unaware of the law - and at worst, stupidity.
Christ. I mean, I can see having the policy in place. To encourage an employee to go to a manager or somebody before they go to the cops with a baby-in-the-bathtub picture. But the woman actually helps an abused child, her concerns were justified, she’s obeying the law- and they still fire her!!! They put their “policy” before the law and before the fact that this women did the right thing? Ick.
Mine if I include my own little rant?
I once applied for work at Wal-Mart. Well, I needed a job, they were advertising for photo techs. I had an idea I could get some more commercial experience. About five minutes into the interview I knew this was not what I wanted to do, but I thought I should go through with the process, since I was there.
They give you this test. About 20 questions, along the lines of :
And other stuff mostly about drinking and stealing.
It was so humiliating. I don’t know what was more humiliating, the way they were questioning my honesty or the way they were questioning my intellegence.
PS I got the job. That is they said I could have it if I come back and pee in a cup. I declined.
It seems to me that there’s an assumption that the management would not have gone to the police. The woman wasn’t fired for obeying the law, just for circumventing the proper company channels in which to do so. She broke the rules, plain and simple, and deserved to be fired. If the management had decided not to report the incident if the employee had gone through the process, then they should be strung up by their various genitalia until said genitalia become gangrenous(sp?) and rot off. Then they should be forced to eat them with a nice butter sauce and a bottle of ripple.
But there doesn’t seem to be any indication that this would have happened and, as it seems, the company is in the right in terminating her for breaking company rules.
Not to turn this into a Great Debate, but how so? Is it the usual automatic assumption that Wal-Mart is always wrong? If not, then it has to be understood that Wal-Mart has a right to expect its employees to follow the rules. (Trying to think of a good analogy here)…OK. If a cop pulls over a car and discovers several kilos of heroin, he or she is a hero and has done a service, right? What if it’s later found out that the cop pulled the mule over because he was black/hispanic/whatever? Is that cop’s violation of the rules OK?
Look again at the case of the baby in the tub–and IIRC, something like this really happened–where do you draw the line? Who makes the decision? If it were you, would you rather it were the career manager or the 16 year-old working part-time to support his X habit? Wal-Mart, I’m sure, is trying to avoid tons of liability and lawsuits by ensuring that people in a better position to judge do so. I’m sure that this employee signed an employment agreement to follow all of Wal-Mart’s rules, not just the ones she agreed with. What about the discussion of her ethics in that case?
The plain and simple reality of it is that the ends do not always justify the means, because the means can sometimes be worse than the ends. IMO, Wal-Mart was clearly within its legal and ethical rights to terminate the employment of someone who thought she could make her own rules in the workplace.
What if the ACLU decided to sue on behalf of the photographers, claiming that their right to privacy was violated? As a corporation, Walmart is in a much better position to defend itself than some 16 year old employee. The rules are in place to PROTECT both Walmart and its employees.
I believe it was in Ohio that a clerk was fired from a convenience store because he thwarted an armed robber by grabbing his gun. Management said that while they were glad he was successful, he still had violated the “Never resist” policy that was created to ultimately protect him, and other clerks. So he was fired.
I can see both sides here. Wal-Mart is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise with thousands of employees and hundreds of stores. It has to have uniform policies and procedures in place to ensure that it operates as smoothly and as equitably as possible. Policies also need to be flexible enough to handle uncommon circumstances.
That said, most policies are not born in a vacuum. Some corporate lawyer didn’t sit down one day and just “make up” the policy. The management team exists to protect not only the corporation as a whole (against lawsuits) but also the individual employees (against lawsuits). The team concept exists so one individual can’t show favoritism and sweep certain situations under the rug for personal gain. Even the assumption that management wouldn’t have done anything is false. Since she didn’t follow procedure, we’ll never know what management would’ve done.
This is not an easy position to be in. I worked for a radiology practice’s billing department. Once a month, when statements went out, a man would call to threaten suicide. Seems his wife had been diagnosed with cancer, she had no insurance, and the husband didn’t know how to handle the stress. Once, I heard a group of hysterical, screaming, obviously frightened kids in the background. I went to my supervisor and asked her if it were possible to call children and youth services and adult protective services because this man was obviously in need of some help. She took the information from me, and told me it was her responsibility to make the phone calls. She said that if she did it in her official capacity of manager, the corporation would be behind the action, but if I took it upon myself to call, I was on my own. (and yes, she did call, and the county and state were able to help the woman get medical assistance for her bills. I don’t know what, if anything, was done about her husband or the kids.)
I feel for Ms. Gasper, but by not following procedure, she martyred herself for the cause.
LOL, I’d forgotten about that application…I filled it out a few years back. I never got to the drug test though…Was I not supposed to answer honestly when they asked what I’d do if I found a large wad of bills on the floor?
Back to the OP, that really sucks for the poor girl who did the right thing. But I can also see where Walmart’s coming from, in these days of lawsuits and liability. She took a chance, and it backfired. But at least she knows she did the right thing
Oh, I saw a documentary the other day, with judges across the US declaring how flagrantly Walmart continually broke laws regarding disclosure of evidence and other matters relating to lawsuits.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, evilbeth, I’ve heard enough bad things about Wal-Mart on this board and in the news to convince me to put them on my do-not-patronize list too. Luckily there’s a Target nearby and they have just about everything I need. I just hope Target doesn’t have any dirty little secrets I don’t know about!
The question is this–let’s say she shows the picture to her managers, and they decide (for whatever reason) not to turn it in to the police. Who is criminally liable for not reporting it–her, or Wal-Mart? Both, perhaps?
She probably should have taken it to her managers, with the understanding that if they didn’t go to the cops, she would.
No, she would have followed procedure. After she reports it to her managers, she can assume that it will be handled competently.
Besides, who’s going to come forward and say, "Hey! Why didn’t the photo lab report this photo? A lot of photo lab workers don’t look at every photograph.
