The Bully of Bentonville

by Anthony Bianco

  A description of my childhood might be: A. Happy. B. Average. C. Unhappy.

  Which one of the statements is true of you: A. I like a neat and tidy home. B. I don’t mind a messy house as long as it’s clean. C. I’m indifferent regarding neatness.

  I sometimes have pretty wild daydreams. A. Agree. B. Undecided. C. Disagree.19

  When journalist Barbara Ehrenreich was tested at a Wal-Mart in the Twin Cities, she was told that she had made a mistake. “Roberta takes [my survey] off to another room, where, she says, a computer will ‘score’ it. After about ten minutes, she’s back with alarming news: I’ve gotten three answers wrong—well, not exactly wrong but in need of further discussion…. When presenting yourself as a potential employee, you can never be too much of a suck-up. Take the test proposition that ‘rules have to be followed to the letter at all times’: I had agreed with this only ‘strongly’ rather than ‘very strongly’ or ‘totally,’ and now, Roberta wants to know why.” Ehrenreich was hired anyway, an error the company had cause to regret when her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, an exposé of working poverty, became a bestseller in 2001.

  Not long after Glass became CEO, the company began giving all new hires an employee handbook that perfectly, if unwittingly, revealed the dilemma of a company that mistrusted the very employees it nominally sought to empower. The manual was full of homespun advice of the sort that grandmas used to knit on samplers, like “Look for the good in others” and “Avoid idle gossip.” At the same time, it set out all sorts of precise and rigid rules governing dress, comportment, and work routines. Hourly workers were not allowed to date one another unless each obtained the written permission of their store manager’s boss, the district manager—the very sort of anti-fraternization rule that Walton had flouted years ago while working for J. C. Penney in Des Moines.

  Even with the slowing of turnover under Scott, the typical Wal-Mart entry-level worker stays on the job less than a year—not nearly long enough to qualify for the profit sharing that helped cement the loyalty of earlier generations of employees. While many long-time associates still believe devoutly in the Wal-Mart Way and tend to break spontaneously into the company cheer at the annual meeting or other large company gathering, their numbers have dwindled sharply at a company that hires new workers at the unheard-of rate of nearly 800,000 a year. Today, the typical Wal-Mart associate lives not on a farm but in a suburb, thinks of Sam Walton as that old guy whose picture is on the wall, and doesn’t know Lee Scott from weatherman Willard Scott.

  She is someone like Jonnie Monroe, a twenty-two-year-old rock musician who went to a Wal-Mart store in Olympia, Washington, to buy a can of spray paint one day and applied for a job instead, intending to work only long enough to buy an amplifier for her band. She sailed through two interviews and a drug test and was hired in February 2004, as a full-time cashier making $7.91 an hour. Her training consisted of shadowing another cashier and watching a video that included scenes of a sinister-looking union organizer working a parking lot. “It was weird, like an after-school special,” said Monroe, whose supervisor made her cover up the small tattoo on her arm after a customer complained.

  Monroe soon made friends with a co-worker, but within a few weeks the Customer Service Managers, or CSMs, separated them, making sure they worked in different sections of the store and eventually on different shifts. Wal-Mart discourages associates from forming friendships with the people around them, apparently because it both fears such fraternization will result in lost productivity and because there is a greater chance such bonds will facilitate unionization. If Monroe made even the smallest computational error, she had to call a CSM to fix it while customers waited impatiently. “Customers scream at you and there’s nothing you can do,” she said. Monroe was told not to joke around with her fellow workers or to make political comments, even on her breaks. Monroe came to particularly dread the “opening ceremony,” otherwise known as the Wal-Mart cheer: “You guys treat me like crap, you won’t let me switch shifts, you won’t let me dress like myself, won’t let me act like myself, and now you want me to be, like, Yay, Wal-Mart?” 20 Monroe quit on the spot after eleven months when her boss refused to allow her time off to attend her brother’s wedding in Chicago. On her way out, Monroe thought to herself, “I never want to come back here even to shop.”

  In her book, Ehrenreich quoted a co-worker named Marlene, who echoed many of Monroe’s complaints: “‘They talk about having spirit,’ [Marlene] says, referring to management, ‘but they don’t give us any reason to have any spirit.’ In her view, Wal-Mart would rather just keep hiring new people than treating the ones it has decently. You can see for yourself there’s a dozen new people coming in for orientation every day…. Wal-Mart’s appetite for human flesh is insatiable. We’ve even been urged to recruit any Kmart employees we may happen to know. They don’t care that they’ve trained you or anything, Marlene goes on, they can always get someone else if you complain.” 21

  Scott rarely mentions Wal-Mart’s turnover rate when he steps forward to argue that the company is a great place to work. Instead, the CEO focuses attention on the application rate. “We had 500 job openings, we had 5,000 applications,” said Scott of a new store opening in Phoenix. “Maybe it’s different where you live, but where we live, people don’t line up to get a new job that pays less and has less benefits. The world does not work that way.” Actually, it does when better-paying jobs for the unskilled are scarce. As the writer John Dicker aptly put it, “Wal-Mart’s claim that the number of applicants for its jobs reflects the quality of its jobs is like saying soup-kitchen lines are a referendum on soup.” 22

  Wal-Mart’s investments in technology have reduced its relative degree of reliance on workers, who tend to be more expensive to maintain and less readily programmable than their digital helpmates. Baggers disappeared from Wal-Mart stores years ago. Now the company, like other big-box chains, is eliminating as many cashier jobs as possible by adding self-service checkout counters in many stores. Wal-Mart cannot mechanize its stores to the same extent it has its distribution centers, because store work involves sorting and stocking merchandise and interacting with customers. “While we at Wal-Mart pride ourselves on our cutting-edge technology,” Scott recently acknowledged, “retailing remains a very labor-intensive business.” 23

  In Walton’s day, department managers drew up weekly work schedules for the workers they supervised. Today, a computer in Bentonville makes these decisions, making it much harder even for sympathetic store managers to accommodate the scheduling needs of their workers, many of whom must work a second job elsewhere to make ends meet. Wal-Mart boasts that about 75 percent of its hourly store associates are full-time, compared to 20 percent to 40 percent at competing chains. This sounds like a significant difference—until you realize that Wal-Mart considers twenty-eight to thirty-five hours a week a full-time shift.

  When Wal-Mart’s sales for the first half of 2005 fell slightly below projections, headquarters promptly slapped new restrictions on store managers’ ability to deviate from the staffing schedules generated in Bentonville that might add to their labor costs. At the same time, the company began shifting more of its employees to part-time status in an attempt to further reduce payroll and fine-tune its computerized matching of labor supply with customer traffic. “We didn’t do as good a job as we should have in managing the wages in our stores,” admitted Tom Schoewe, Wal-Mart’s chief financial officer. 24

  Among the employees caught in the cost squeeze was sixty-one-year-old Reva Barrett. A recently divorced mother of six, she began working at Wal-Mart in 1990 as a sales associate in Pinellas Park, Florida. Since the late 1990s, Barrett had worked as the Supercenter’s Community Relations Manager, a full-time, salaried position. In mid-2005, the store’s new manager summoned her as soon as the teachers appreciation banquet she had organized ended and told her that her position had been eliminated. She was allowed to stay on as a cashier, but only if she took a pay c
ut and agreed to make herself available from 7 A.M. to 11 P.M. Barrett decided to stay, but she also hired a lawyer and filed a complaint alleging sex and age discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Wal-Mart used to be a pillar of this community, but it looks to me like they flushed the toilet on community involvement,” Barrett said. “I’m that piece of toilet paper that sticks to the side and just won’t get flushed down.” 25

  At Wal-Mart, store managers are under enormous pressure from headquarters to continually reduce labor costs as a percentage of sales—to increase productivity, in other words. On a factory assembly line, making workers more productive often involves simplifying repetitive tasks so that they can be performed faster. Wal-Mart has done some of this in its stores, equipping clerks with handheld computers that automate inventory record keeping by scanning bar codes. For the most part, though, Bentonville has wrung productivity gains out of its labor force not by refining jobs, but by forcing employees to do more work in the same amount of time at the same pay. By most accounts, Wal-Mart deliberately understaffs its stores, making managers responsible for seeing that the work gets done one way or another—as long as it does not involve letting non-salaried workers rack up overtime. (Laws in most states require employers to pay time-and-a-half to workers after an eight-hour day or a forty-hour week.)

  Dawn Douglas lasted six months as a Wal-Mart associate in Kingman, Arizona, quitting in May 2005, with a sore back strained by lifting too many oversized television sets into customers’ cars. She had left a $6.25-an-hour job at a local Whataburger to join Wal-Mart as a full-time sales associate in electronics, starting at $7.10 an hour. After a few months, Douglas was raised to $7.40 an hour. She put in thirty to thirty-five hours a week, mostly working the night shift, which allowed her to help out at the pet-grooming business that her mother owns. “It was nice,” said Douglas, who is twenty-four years old and single. “I liked the job and everything, dealing with the customers.” 26

  Douglas’s opinion changed radically after the discount store where she worked was converted into a Supercenter. The electronics section expanded from three aisles to five and added a music section, even as the staff shrunk. “For some reason, they started thinking it was overmanned,” Douglas said. “I was the only person in the department. They started forcing me to lift 200- to 300-pound TVs by myself—twenty-seven- to thirty-two-inch TVs. Then they would get mad when I was out in the parking lot and wasn’t there to guard the equipment. It was kind of a Catch-22.” Reluctantly, Douglas was also pressed into service lifting heavy merchandise onto high shelves or risers. “There are supposed to be two people—one to make sure the ladder doesn’t collapse—but sometimes I did it by myself,” she said. “I’d let [the supervisors] know I needed help, but their attitude was ‘Either do it, or get another job.’” She already had another job, and quit Wal-Mart to work full-time as a groomer at her mother’s business, Pepi’s Pet Haven.

  Kate Moroney, who works the 10 P.M. to 7 A.M. overnight shift in a Florida Supercenter, is mainly responsible for stocking frozen foods in the deli department freezers. However, she is also required to answer the phone and assist customers. After the department managers leave, she often is left alone to cover other departments, including food, greeting cards, small appliances, and housewares. At management’s request, Moroney recently trained as a cashier and is now frequently paged to the front of the store to run the cash register when the store is busy. If she cannot find the time to finish stocking the frozen-food section, the morning crew has to do the job, putting it behind schedule and in danger of rebuke from the day-shift supervisors. 27

  To honor the home office’s overtime prohibitions, some managers allegedly flout the company’s avowed policies—not to mention state and federal labor laws—by forcing workers to work through their breaks or past the end of a shift or by simply erasing hours already worked from electronic time cards. As a sixteen-year-old working in a Wal-Mart in a suburb of Denver, Leila Naijar claimed in a lawsuit that she was forced to miss breaks and put in more than eight hours per shift—in violation of a state law protecting minors. “The store closed at 11 and there were nights we had to stay to clean up until 12:30, 12:45,” Naijar said. “It was a long day, and I was tired the next day at school. And sometimes, I’d have to work ten, eleven hours on a Saturday or Sunday.” 28

  Included in the 2000 Wal-Mart audit that found massive violations of wage-and-hour rules in 128 stores were 1,371 instances of minor-age employees working excessive or inappropriate hours (as when school is in session). By its own admission, Wal-Mart ignored the audit, but soon had to pay a $205,000 fine imposed by the state of Maine for violations of child labor laws in each of its twenty stores in the state. Later, the U.S. Labor Department charged Wal-Mart with eighty-five additional violations, including the use of dangerous machinery such as chainsaws and cardboard balers, in three more states—Arkansas, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. In early 2005, Wal-Mart settled the federal charges by paying a meager fine of about $136,000. But the company stirred a political hornet’s nest by negotiating a sweetheart deal with the Bush Administration Labor Department to give it fifteen days’ notice before any future inspections for child labor infractions, as well as a ten-day grace period to bring a store into compliance if violations were found. The department’s own inspector general found these “significant concessions” unwarranted, stating, “There was little commitment from the employer beyond what it was already doing or required to do by law.” 29

  When a Wal-Mart store is verging on exceeding its monthly labor budget, managers have been known to send workers home and replace them with assistant managers, who, as salaried employees, are exempt from overtime regulations and thus can be pressed into service without financial consequence to the company. Assistant managers have filed class-action suits in at least four states, claiming that Wal-Mart should have paid them overtime when requiring them to fill in for hourly workers. One suit brought by night-shift assistant managers in Michigan asserts that they were nothing more than “glorified stockers who unload trucks, move products into the store, and stock shelves.” Kim Comer, a Michigan plaintiff who spent thirteen years as an assistant manager in various stores, claimed that in addition to her managerial duties she often had to spend a full eight-hour shift working as a cashier, the position that she had first filled in joining Wal-Mart out of college. 30

  Shortly after Glass took over as CEO in the late 1980s, Bentonville began giving store managers the option of locking janitors and other night-shift workers into stores until morning—a practice to which none of the other national retail chains resorted. “Locking in workers, that’s more of a nineteenth-century practice than a twentieth-century one,” said Burt Flickinger, president of the consulting firm Retail Forward, after a New York Times article brought the Wal-Mart lock-ins to light in 2004. Imprisoning third-shift employees was one way to keep them from stealing merchandise or drinking beer in the parking lot while their managers were home asleep. However, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams insisted that the lock-ins were just another way of putting employees first. “Doors are locked to protect associates and the store from intruders,” she claimed. 31

  Michael Rodriguez was stocking shelves in the Sam’s Club in Corpus Christi, Texas, about 3 A.M. one night when another worker, driving an electronic cart, ran into him and crushed his ankle. “I was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that had been hit by a car,” Rodriguez recalled. As usual, the store was locked, and there was no manager to let Rodriguez out to go to the emergency room. Rodriguez would have gone through the fire exit had he not repeatedly been warned that using it for any reason but to escape a fire was grounds for dismissal. Finally, a co-worker succeeded in rousing a manager by telephone and the door was unlocked an hour later.

  Although Wal-Mart still permitted overnight lock-ins as of 2004, the number of stores that engaged in the practice had dwindled to about 10 percent of the total. Did this reflect a new enlightened attit
ude on the part of the company? Not really. An increasing number of stores were open for business round the clock, which meant that managers could not lock employees in without also locking customers out. At least Bentonville no longer allowed managers to chain shut emergency doors—as some did when the lock-ins first began. Headquarters prohibited the practice after a stocker in Savannah, Georgia, collapsed and died inside a store while paramedics waited outside for the door to be unlocked.

  On October 23, 2003, federal officials mounted one of the largest illegal-immigration crackdowns in years, raiding sixty-one Wal-Mart stores across twenty-one states and arresting 245 janitors from Mexico, Mongolia, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Poland, Russia, and other countries. Ten of the arrested janitors worked directly for Wal-Mart; the rest were employed by contractors that Bentonville had hired. Reporters, citing anonymous sources, wrote that prosecutors had recordings of Wal-Mart managers conspiring with contractors to hire illegals.

  There seems little doubt that the Wal-Mart executives who approved the dubious contracts knew in a general sense that the janitorial industry was rife with undocumented workers. Over the last two decades, all sorts of companies have awarded their business to a new breed of fly-by-night cleaning contractors who specialize in hiring illegal immigrants at low rates. “These companies are pretending they’re not the employer,” scoffed Delia Bahan, a lawyer who successfully sued several California grocery chains for nonpayment of overtime to hundreds of janitors from Mexico. “The contractor is willing to work people seven days a week, not pay payroll taxes, not pay workers’ comp taxes. The companies don’t want to do that themselves, but they’re willing to look the other way when their contractors do.” 32