Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart – It was 3 a.m., Mr. Rodriguez recalled, some heavy machinery had just smashed into his ankle, and he had no idea how he would get to the hospital. The Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart subsidiary, had locked its overnight workers in, as it always did, to keep robbers out and, as some managers say, to prevent employee theft. As usual, there was no manager with a key to let Mr. Rodriguez out. The fire exit, he said, was hardly an option – management had drummed into the overnight workers that if they ever used that exit for anything but a fire, they would lose their jobs.
p. This latest allegation has been made accusing Wal-Mart of abusing its workers. While I doubt that Wal-Mart has sinister schemes to subjugate all of America into a minimum-wage third world country, it does add additional concerns to previous allegations of widespread abuses like making workers work off the clock. It seems that the Wal-Mart culture of giving individual managers, while it does amazing things for initiative and profit generating idea production, also makes the company more vulnerable to abuses by individuals at one of their thousands of stores.
Mona Williams, Wal-Mart’s vice president for communications, said the company used lock-ins to protect stores and employees in high-crime areas. She said Wal-Mart locked in workers — the company calls them associates — at 10 percent of its stores, a percentage that has declined as Wal-Mart has opened more 24-hour stores.
Ms. Williams said Wal-Mart, with 1.2 million employees in its 3,500 stores nationwide, had recently altered its policy to ensure that every overnight shift at every store has a night manager with a key to let workers out in emergencies.
This statement by Wal-Mart makes the lack of managers with keys assigned to the night shift seem to be an oversight, which they’re making efforts to correct. Serious, but not necessarily sinister.
Some of the workers complaints seem valid, but some points they’ve raised sound more like workers griping than serious instances of abuse.
Augustine Herrera, who worked at the Colorado Springs store for nine years, disputed the company’s assertion that it locked workers in stores in only high-crime areas, largely to protect employees.
“The store is in a perfectly safe area,” Mr. Herrera said.
I wonder if Mr. Herrera would make the same statement if he knew that if a worker was attacked or assaulted he would be held liable for not taking adequate precautions?
Roy Ellsworth Jr., who was a cashier at a Wal-Mart in Pueblo, Colo., said he was normally scheduled to work until the store closed at 10 p.m., but most nights management locked the front door, at closing time, and did not let workers leave until everyone had straightened up the store.
“They would keep us there for however long they wanted,” Mr. Ellsworth said. “It was often for half an hour, and it could be two hours or longer during Christmas season.”
Similarly, as long as Mr. Ellsworth is being paid for the time that he has to stay after the store closes straightening up and whatnot, I think many people would be equally sympathetic with managements position that everyone has to stay until the job gets done.
bq. One top Wal-Mart official said: “If those things happened five or six years ago, we’re a very large company with more that 3,000 stores, and individual instances like that could happen. That’s certainly not something Wal-Mart would condone.”
I think I’m willing to give Wal-Mart the advantage of the doubt on this one. The key issue seems to be that their corporate culture gives individual managers wide latitude in setting specific policy for their stores. This policy has resulted in a hard-working innovative class of store managers who have helped build the most successful retail company of our time. The fact is however, that these individuals are evaluated based upon how much profit they generate. The same freedom that makes them so effective seems to open up the system to the possibility of abuse, in which case the workers are likely to suffer. Perhaps what is needed is to add a non-profit element to managers evaluations.
Walmart Night Lock-ins
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Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart –
p. This latest allegation has been made accusing Wal-Mart of abusing its workers. While I doubt that Wal-Mart has sinister schemes to subjugate all of America into a minimum-wage third world country, it does add additional concerns to previous allegations of widespread abuses like making workers work off the clock. It seems that the Wal-Mart culture of giving individual managers, while it does amazing things for initiative and profit generating idea production, also makes the company more vulnerable to abuses by individuals at one of their thousands of stores.
This statement by Wal-Mart makes the lack of managers with keys assigned to the night shift seem to be an oversight, which they’re making efforts to correct. Serious, but not necessarily sinister.
Some of the workers complaints seem valid, but some points they’ve raised sound more like workers griping than serious instances of abuse.
I wonder if Mr. Herrera would make the same statement if he knew that if a worker was attacked or assaulted he would be held liable for not taking adequate precautions?
Similarly, as long as Mr. Ellsworth is being paid for the time that he has to stay after the store closes straightening up and whatnot, I think many people would be equally sympathetic with managements position that everyone has to stay until the job gets done.
bq. One top Wal-Mart official said: “If those things happened five or six years ago, we’re a very large company with more that 3,000 stores, and individual instances like that could happen. That’s certainly not something Wal-Mart would condone.”
I think I’m willing to give Wal-Mart the advantage of the doubt on this one. The key issue seems to be that their corporate culture gives individual managers wide latitude in setting specific policy for their stores. This policy has resulted in a hard-working innovative class of store managers who have helped build the most successful retail company of our time. The fact is however, that these individuals are evaluated based upon how much profit they generate. The same freedom that makes them so effective seems to open up the system to the possibility of abuse, in which case the workers are likely to suffer. Perhaps what is needed is to add a non-profit element to managers evaluations.