Who Would Want To Work For Wal-Mart?

Bare-Knuckle Enforcement for Wal-Mart’s Rules

Given the poor record Wal-Mart has regarding its treatment of employees in terms of wages, breaks, overtime and adhering to federal and state labor laws, never mind its muscle tactics regarding its suppliers and vendors, as well as its record for hiring cleaning crews that abuse and break our laws regarding those here illegally, it's hard to imagine why anyone might want to work for Wally World ab initio. But when its managers and senior employees are held to a "code of ethics" that the company itself violates in principle and via de facto abuses of the employee-employer relationship (including serious anti-union efforts) by way of dogged private investigation and relentless monitoring of employee behaviors on and off the job, who in their right mind would care to work for the bastards that run the show?

Wal-Mart has a long history of ignoring its employees. Several documentaries on Wal-Mart and Sam Walton have revealed that Old Sam used to pay his early crews miserably and in a miserly manner. In fact, it was Mrs. Walton that intervened on behalf of early Wal-Mart employees to force Old Sam into giving into demands from employees for a fair wage in light of Wal-Mart's meteoric rise to the top prior to Old Sam's death. While there are a lot of things to admire about Wal-Mart's systemic approach to marketing and providing people with reasonably priced goods, its record regarding dealing with people--employees and communities--really sucks.

One also has to ask where are the ethics of these past federal, state and local law enforcement folks that seem to be flocking to work for Wally World in its efforts to micro-manage the lives of Wal-Mart employees... are there not some limits on how an employer can invade the privacy and private lives of employees? There certainly should be.

The investigator flew to Guatemala in April 2002 with a delicate mission: trail a Wal-Mart manager around the country to prove he was sleeping with a lower-level employee, a violation of company policy.

The apparent smoking gun? “Moans and sighs” heard as the investigator, a Wal-Mart employee, pressed his ear against a hotel room door inside a Holiday Inn, according to legal documents. Soon after, the company fired the manager for what it said was improper fraternization with a subordinate.

Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules.

Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter’s telephone calls.

The investigators — whose résumés evoke Langley, Va., more than Bentonville, Ark. — serve as a rapid-response team that aggressively polices the nation’s largest private employer, enforcing Wal-Mart’s modest by-the-books culture among its army of 1.8 million employees.

Wal-Mart is certainly not the only company, or even the first, to investigate its employees, a practice used widely in corporate America to guard against fraud and protect trade secrets. But despite the retailer’s folksy Arkansas image, few companies are as prickly — or unforgiving — about its employees’ wayward behavior, a legacy of its frugal founder, Sam Walton, who equated misconduct with inefficiency that would cost customers money.