Yeah, CEOs of multi-billion dollar giant multinational corporations should have a low salary cap. Say $25/hr or so, right? Because he isn’t much more important than the kid bagging groceries.
You can accuse Walmart of underpaying employees all you want but the CEO’s salary has no bearing on whether they are an ethical company or not.
Because the companies who are more or less required to sell at Walmart are as victimized as the consumers who have nowhere else to buy things.
Their hourly wage is 20%-30% higher than Walmart’s., because they allow their workers to unionize. Target also does not have such blatant labor violations. I’ve never heard of a Target worker forced to work off the clock, and there’s no rampant sexism when it comes to hiring managers. Also, they stay out of communities where they’re not wanted. In addition, they’ve never donehttp://www.ufcw324.org/3walmartstoriespage.html#key. AFAIK, Target is an ethical business. I’m sure they’ve done a few sleazy things, being a giant chain store and all, but I still think it’s miles ahead of most other “big-box” department stores.
I’ve been inside a Target exactly twice. I couldn’t find what I was looking for and their prices were too high.
I agree Wal-Mart should pay their employees more. Until they do, though, why the hell should I shop at Target and spend extra money I can’t afford just to prove an imaginary point?
What really burns me up is that so many of these poor workers are the uneducated and possibly illegals, so they don’t know they have any rights, or what rights they do have.
I remember they had this one guy cleaning up Xylene that had spilled. Just a rag, no respirator, no protective gear.
I was so mad I went straight to the manager. He tried to wiggle out of it by saying all that wasn’t necessary. Shut right up when I started quoting specific passages from the Code of Federal Regulations that deal with worker protection, right to know, etc.
Well, it’s not imaginary. It goes along the lines of why should you vote when whomever wins/loses by 1 million votes. That’s not to say I wouldn’t take the lower price. But I still recognize that the ONLY way to hurt a business is to not shop there, and encourage others to do the same. (Warning, extremely far fetched example to follow) If wal-mart was killing a baby for every 1000 cd’s sold, do you really think that not shopping there would only be proving an imaginary point? And do you think you’d really have much trouble boycotting them to the point that you could put them under, or at the very least change this one practice? (Yes, I know they’d be jailed/whatever first, but I can’t think of something sufficiently heinous but borderline legal/get-away-able-with)
If the violations were so blatant, they surely would have been taken care of by now. I’m sure the ACLU wouldn’t allow such obvious practices to occur.
Forced to work off the clock? Well, if someone is dumb enough to accept this, maybe they should be happy anyone would hire them. The very idea of someone asking me to work for free makes me want to go punch someone right now. And rampant sexism. Where is the trusty ACLU to help with this scourge? I can’t cite anything, but I seem to recall some sort of law barring this practice. If it’s so obvious it should be taken care of after the first lawsuit.
Speaking of staying out of communities where an entity is not wanted, let’s get back to the ACLU. Duluth, MN kinda liked it’s 10 Commandments monument. But the ACLU made sure the “will of the People” was thwarted with a suit.
I guess the protection of people hinges on whether or not a suit can bring victory. Piss on everyone else. :rolleyes:
The McDonald’s I worked at as a teenager was really bad about that and child labor violations. Sure, I put up with it. I was young and stupid. For all the talk that today’s teenagers are all rotten, some can be easily intimidated.
One of the bad effects of Wal-Mart, GE and other corporations that have the power to dictate prices to suppliers, is the pressure they apply to their vendors. They tell a vendor that they expect them to cut prices by X% a year, or they will buy from someone else. Maybe the vendor can do this for a while by reducing profit margins and becoming more efficient. They eventually get to the point where they have cut all the fat out of their production processes, and their choices are limited to moving production off-shore, where labor and regulatory costs are smaller. In the process of saving a few nickels on the price of a product, they destroy American jobs, support third-world sweat shops, and create health and environmental problems in other countries.
Well, that’s likely true as well. The horror story of the young man cleanng up Xylene happened right in front of me. And that IS a horror story IMHO. Damn stuff’ll melt your brain (figuratively speaking) and fix your baby making abilities but good (yeah, after repeated exposure, but leaning over a 3 foot pool of the stuff breathing in those lovely fumes…).
Another time, an earsplitting screech of some malfunctioning alarm was going off, and instead of shutting down the damn store until they could get the managers or IT guy to fix it, they made the clerks just keep on working in it.
Umm Hello? OSHA? Exposure limits for noise pollution? (yes, there IS a decibal limit to which workers can be exposed, and over what period of time). I left the store, but after asking one young man how long it had been going off. He said "since I got here four hours ago. :eek: Wrote them a scathing letter on that one too. Although I’m sure they just ignored it.
But the article itself named a figure of 10% for the locking in of employees I have never worked there, so other than seeing incidents form a customer’s viewpoint, I don’t know what it’s like on a day to day basis, but I remember employees in a small town in TX telling me that they had to work overtime wtihout overtime pay, and that they didn’t get holiday pay.
I’ve long boycotted Walmart as much as possible, just because of the treatment of the employees by the managers in our local stores, and that was just for stuff like the xylene incident, and yelling at them in front of customers.
The article also sounded as if this sort of thing was winked at, and the manager Ms. Williams who was being interviewed sounded to me as if she was doing and awful lot of spindoctoring.
Your defense of Wal Mart fell to shit, so now you want to attack or impugn the ACLU? How is this at all related? Is the ACLU taking the role of OSHA now? Or do you just completely lack any comprehension as to what the role of the ACLU is, kind of like your lack of comprehension about Wal Mart and low prices?
Join us next week, when Duffer will pit people who think child labour is bad because without it, his poor teacher friend would have to pay $3 more for sneakers.