In Robert Greenwald’s 2005 film, W: The High Cost of Low Price, the documentary filmmaker and political activist opposes the rhetoric of Walmart’s CEO Lee Scott to the experiences of current Walmart employees, both in the United States and internationally; former Walmart employees and associates; small town business owners; shoppers; and community activists. The film opens with CEO Lee Scott addressing an audience of Walmart employees and associates at an convention intended to inspire the corporation’s employees to ‘keep up the good work,’ while interspersed throughout the film, families whose small businesses were forced to close due to competition from the multinational corporation share their stories, and employees from the manager level to the nightly cleaning crews share their experiences of trying to raise families and pay household and medical bills on an average Walmart yearly salary of $13,000. Greenwald’s …show more content…
Lehman recounts that due to the hours demanded by the company, often without any additional compensation, “It [made] it difficult at Walmart to have a good family life” (17:00). The former manager recollects every manager except one that he encountered was guilty of changing employee hours on the computer with a simple click if the hours worked for the week exceeded the allotted budget. Lehman was shown how to make the simple adjustment by another manager. Interspersed throughout the wage theft report, the Hunter family, who owned a small hardware store for forty-three years, recalls how their business declined nearly overnight when Walmart moved into the local vicinity. Employee after employee shares their hardships of being forced to work overtime without compensation, fearing the ease with which they could be replaced if they refused to do so, and all the lost time with their families because of forced work
One has to work hard to consider their values in particular issues and how strongly they feel. This is the choice many people make when they invest in mutual funds, and have no idea where their mutual funds are invested. Many vocal opponents to shopping at Wal-Mart might discover they hold investments in the Wal-Mart. There are 1050 mutual funds that are invested in Wal-Mart, some of the largest mutual funds in the world. There are many people who have no idea where their investments lie. If you want to be true to your value against shopping at Wal-Mart, you need to be careful to remove yourself from investments that support Wal-Mart. You have to review your investments and find out where your money is invested.
Wal-Mart represents the sickness of capitalism at its almost fully evolved state. As Jim Hightower said, "Why single out Wal-Mart? Because it's a hog. Despite the homespun image it cultivates in its ads, it operates with an arrogance and avarice that would make Enron blush and John D. Rockefeller envious. It's the world's biggest retail corporation and America's largest private employer; Sam Robson Walton, a member of the ruling family, is one of the richest people on earth. Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way: by roughing people up. Their low, low prices are the product of two ruthless commandments: Extract the last penny possible from human toil and squeeze the last dime from its thousands of suppliers, who are left with no profit margin unless they adopt the Wal-Mart model of using nonunion labor and shipping production to low-wage hellholes abroad." (The Nation, March 4th 2002 www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020304&s=hightower).
To this day, when I walk into Wal-Mart and come face to face with a manager I once worked under they give me dirty looks. People report that managers will trash talk you to another job that applied for if that job contacts Wal-Mart about you. Wal-Mart has unrealistic workloads for some overnight stockers, their managers aren’t the best in the world, and their policies are harsh. This is why I constantly call Wal-Mart a communist regime; not because it shares the ideals but because it is just bad for everyone in general. Hopefully one day a high positioned power will restore the order and peace that once was Wal-Mart according to the history they teach you in training and that their policies and workloads may become more realistic and doable.
When we think of the well-known private employer “Wal-Mart” what exactly comes to our minds? We may think of Wal-Mart as being a convenient, useful, low price department store that contains our everyday goods and necessities. On the outside perspective, we are generally appreciative of the fact that Wal-Mart exists and is able provide for our needs. But do we ever think of what happens inside the company? While customers may be happy, the employees can be considered as angry, disappointed, frustrated, and struggling do to harming executive wage decisions. While many employees are getting cut from their full time positions to part-time, they are also getting a decreased pay. In this theoretical application paper, I will be applying the father of conflict theory Karl Marx’s theoretical concepts to a Wal-Mart news article. There are many different theoretical concepts that I will be applying throughout this application essay. These major concepts applied are capitalism, Bourgeoisie, Proletariat, haves, have-nots, exploitation, class consciousness, and objectification.
The success of Wal-Mart has yielded admiration and sometimes condemnation from numerous stakeholders. While some people applaud the retail giant for improving the living standards of citizens, creation of jobs, and improving the welfare of its employees, others argue that the retail giant has disrupted communities, brought down small retailers and compromised the living standards of
The Wal-Mart Corporation is a multi-billion dollar low-cost retail organization, consisting of 6400 stores and 1.8 million sales associates worldwide. Wal-Mart’s influence on the retail world and the enormity of their corporate size is unparalleled. Wal-Mart can easily report sales of $312.4 billion dollars per fiscal quarter and net profits of $3.8 billion dollars. Wal-Mart promises her customers "Always low prices. Always!" and upholds this motto by providing low prices to her customers and high return on investment to her stockholders. One way that Wal-Mart has managed to maintain a competitive edge over other low cost retail giants and provide low prices is by cutting wages and by not offering too many company benefits to their employees. Full-time employee working at Wal-Mart only make $8 an hour, while only 45% of the workers can afford to be covered by health insurance. Wal-Mart also increase part time employees from 20 percent to 40 percent so that they do not have to cover all of their employees for health insurance . Although Wal-Mart may not provide excellent benefits to her employees, it successfully performs as a legitimate business operating in a capitalistic society. Wal-Mart upholds the primary fiduciary duty to satisfy her stockholder and follows free the market libertarianism model, which states that a business should not interfering with the free market. In a free market Wal-Mart has a direct responsibility to her primary stockholders rather than the employees of a company.
During the 1950’s and 60’s in northwest Arkansas, a surplus of unskilled labor existed due to “increasing mechanization of agricultural work”. Leveraging this pent up demand for employment, Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, provided these agricultural men with prideful responsibilities as managers of his retail stores, while employing their wives and daughters as low wage clerks (Lichenstein, 2011). Forty to fifty years later, in an economy sagged by high unemployment, particularly among an unskilled, low educated workforce, the practice of promoting men to run stores while women are forced to settle for low wage labor remains prevalent at Walmart. In fact, statistical analysis from plaintiffs in the 2001 Dukes v. Walmart lawsuit showed that women comprised nearly 70% of hourly employees, but only 33% of management positions (Hymowitz, 2011). The overwhelming disparities between men and women in management relative to the proportion of those in hourly positions further cements the continual existence ...
Today Wal-mart has a higher GDP than the entire country of Switzerland, but don’t worry they’re pretty neutral about it. But there has also been news about how they treat there employees. In 2004 an article was released entitled Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, and soon after Washington got involved. The bad publicity took a toll on Wal-mart and in fact is still today, Maryland passed a law in January, 2006, that said larger employers, such as Wal-mart, must spend at least 8% of their payroll on health benefits for their employees, and now many other states have followed suit. The bad publicity also made it so 8% of customers shop elsewhere because of what they’ve heard, this has caused lower expected sales around the holidays during 2004, and 2005. Some things they’ve done is in 2006 they paid employees on average 9.36 dollars, while other major retailers like Target and Sears pay on average 11.08 dollars. While this can be easily denied by Wal-mart, another way they have gained bad publicity is from something called off-the-clock work. If they had not finished their job they had to clock out and then still finish their job, meaning they wouldn’t get paid for
Within an excerpt from, “The United States of Wal-Mart,” John Dicker explains that Wal-Mart is a troubling corporation. Dicker begins his article by discussing why the store is so popular within the news in an age of global terrorism, coming to the conclusion that Wal-Mart has a huge scope in the United States and that it has more scandals, lawsuits, and stories than any other supercenter. Continually, he goes on to explain that Wal-Mart outsources jobs and their companies demands makes it hard for employees to have livable wages and good working conditions. Furthermore, Dicker addresses the claim that Wal-Mart provides good jobs, by destroying this perception with statistics showing how employees live in poverty and that their union scene
In present day, the fast increasingly science is already achieved most material demands of people living in this world. The demand of spirit is becoming more and more necessary. One of the most efficient method to build mental civilization is reading books. The demand of books pushes the increasingly number of writers. It is more and more important for writers to own a master skill which help them to attract readers. As everybody knows that people, especially who are living in cities, are relying on the chain stores in their daily lives. Yet people also begin to discuss whether chain store is beneficial or harmful. This article, “In Praise of Chain Stores,” wrote by Critic Virginia Postrel, is an essay about this discussion. The writer illustrates the bad influences of the chain stores in the first paragraphs that the appearance of them decreases local flavors of American cities. Every place looks the same due to chain stores and it might decrease the number of tourists. However, she refutes this idea in the next paragraphs: chain stores could offer many kinds of goods which could not be supplied
Selling in Minnesota by Barbara Ehrenreich is about the disadvantages of working as a Walmart employee.the author talks about her experience with Walmart from the beginning when she stared orientation. Throughout the story the author is informing readers about what Walmart is doing to the workers and reasons not to work there for example she states “you might lose even your wages and benefits because she they would all be a risk…” with the little pay at Walmart that was given, Ehrenreich knew that it wasn't worth the labor hours what was given to her. She really didn't have a choice back in Minnesota because there wasn't a lot of jobs available and the wages were low. That is why she choose to stick with Walmart even though she didn't like the business that they were dealing with.
Mallaby admits Wal-Mart can treat their employees and other retailers unfairly, but as a result everyone can share in the 50 billion in savings that American shoppers consume annually. The pay that employees get is the price they must pay for low priced merchandise. Because of the minimal pay to employees, Wal-Mart strengthens its’ consumer buying power. Giving the American shoppers the savings they need, Wal-Mart’s has ultimately been them successful. Wal-Mart has potentially wiped out the middle class as an employer, but the employees can now work and ...
Wal-Mart maintains aggressively, a distinct and consistent corporate culture through out its operations. The issue is that local managers and supervisors are given unguided discretion on the hiring, firing, promoting, and disciplining of employees (Hart, 2006). These individual managers bring with them their own beliefs, biases, stereotypes, and assumpt...
The first Wal-Mart store opened in July of 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas by Sam Walton who believed that the future of retailing was in discounting and to avoid competing with established giants like Sears and Woolworth, Wal-Mart’s stated out of the large cities in the beginning and this strategy help avoid competition, while in rural areas Wal-Mart began growing their customer base by offering ways to save money and shorter travel distance, Sam Walton felt the best way to make customers happy was to provide the low prices every day (Farhoomand, 2006). The company needed to continually find ways to control the operating costs so the savings would then be passed on to Wal-Mart customers in the form of lower prices than the competitors. Walton was opposed to having any kind of employee unions for its company and saw them as a disruption and an inconvenience (Farhoomand, 2006). The continued search for lower prices made him aware of business related travel cost, Wal-Mart executives stayed in low cost hotels when they traveled and the cost related to the services provided by suppliers, Wal-Mart helped suppliers improve operations and efficiency to produce lower cost. Walton wanted the suppliers to correct any nonessential or insufficiencies existing in their business structures as a way of gaining lower prices and higher value products for its Wal-Mart stores. To further push savings Wal-Mart forced cost down by eliminating the middleman and buying directly from the manufacturers. This cost saving also applied to executive salaries Walton felt providing employees with stock options, training opportunities, and allow employees to grow and develop would be a better way to engage and involve them in his vision (Farhoomand, 2006).
"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices." Top Documentary Films. Web. 8 Aug 2011. .