"Up against Wal-Mart" by Karen Olsson

By drawing a picture of a main character, Jennifer McLaughlin, in her essay “Up Against Wal-Mart,” Karen Olsson wants to warn people about the fact that Jennifer’s story could happen to anyone who works for Wal-Mart. On one hand, a regular retail job at Wal-Mart is too hard to handle by many workers because of understaffing at every store. On the other hand, a retail job at Wal-Mart is lower paid than in many work places in the United States. With little more than minimum wage, it is difficult to manage expenses, especially when one has a child like Jennifer did and trying to afford health insurance. There is an obligation for every parent to keep their children healthy by providing health care insurance. Wal-Mart with 3,372 stores expects too much from employees and should increase wages and provide an affordable health care insurance plan, according to the author. Also, Olsson wrote, today with the slow economy, Wal-Mart makes more money than before which has lifted the company owner into a top place on the Fortune 500. The director of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (WFCW) says that the company employees cannot live on Wal-Mart paychecks. According to Olsson, Wal-Mart violated several federal labor laws; forcing employees to work overtime without pay, denying equal pay for 700,000 women employees, and providing poor working conditions. The employers did not satisfy federal laws, and went farther by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters, to prevent Wal-Mart from unionizing. In order to avoid the union, the company maintained headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, used surveillance cameras to monitor workers, and trained managers to develop anti-union tactics for their subordinates. The final breaking point for employee’ spirits concerning the union in Wal-Mart stores was in February 2000, when the meat-cutting department at the store in Jacksonville, Texas, employees voted to join the WFCW. This was the only place out of 3,372 Wal-Mart stores in the U.S. where the workers successfully organized a union, but two weeks later, the company eliminated all meat-cutting departments in all stories nationwide.
According to Olsson, Sam Walton was the founder of Wal-Mart in 1945 when he bought a franchise variety store in Newport, Arkansas. Following his competitors’ innovations, Walton lowered prices to generate larger sales that produced a lot of money for future company expansion. As a person, Walton was a miser, drove an old pickup truck, and shared hotel rooms on company trips. Like any miser who hates expenses, Walton thought that workers’ salaries were a large expense for his company. He kept his employees’ salaries as low as possible under minimum wage by hiring a professional union buster who lectured his workers on the negative aspects of unions, and convinced them to believe in a profit-sharing program. A few years later, Wal-Mart hired a consulting firm to develop an anti-union program. On the other hand, Wal-Mart workers suffered because they could not retire because of lower wages, and the need to make enough to support their children. According to Olsson, Wal-Mart’s expectation of its employees is huge and includes the responsibility for replacing 90,000 items that customers have removed from the shelves, or put in the wrong places, or dropped on the floor. Performing all of these duties plus cleaning and dusting the items while giving attention to customers would be a big deal even for Hercules from Greek mythology. To get the job done with understaffing, Wal-Mart occasionally forced employees to work overtime without pay. By keeping the company policy of not paying overtime, owners of the company made more than 50 million a year. To escape the responsibility in court, Wal-Mart officials blamed individual department managers for not reporting overtime hours worked by employees, but at the same time, they forced workers to work overtime. The overtime company policy at Wal-Mart is practiced more often when the employee has children or wants to be a manager to support his or her family.
Even though, Olsson wrote, two-thirds of Wal-Mart employees are women, women make up less than ten percent of the top store managers, and that average has continued from 1975 up to present days.
The company impudence does not stop with sex-discrimination. In Bentonville, for example, the company controls the air conditioning, the music, and the freezer temperature in each store.
The author brought back focus to her main character Jennifer McLaughlin when writing about her boyfriend Eric who after graduating from high school, started to work at the some Wal-Mart store as Jennifer. Nevertheless, Eric who started as a cashier and regularly performed duties as a customer service manager was promoted to manager after a long period of doing extra work without pay. He was the first worker who arranged a meeting with UFCW for a small group of workers at the same Wal-Mart Supercenter#148. Unfortunately, the effort was caught by managers who started watching pro-union workers closely. Troops from Bentonville, was what the author called Wal-Mart officials which she compared to soldiers, required a long meeting which included an anti-labor video against unions. At that moment, McLaughlin spoke to Wal-Mart officials with an open mind about her dad who had health insurance because he was in a union. She drew attention to the issue of health care. Jennifer questioned officials about who is going to help her child if he develops epilepsy without the assistance of a union that makes a company pay for health insurance. The official became flustered and wanted to talk with her after the meeting, but then, nothing happened except the continuation of the mission to ignore any union sympathizers.
According to Olsson, the troops from Bentonville carefully instructed managers to work with every employee who might be a union supporter. Even Eric had to say something against the union, but he later said that he had no choice but to agree with management. Eric’s attempt to unionize the Wal-Mart Supercenter #148 failed because almost every employee who signed the anti union cards was watched by officials. Even the union organizers who tried to interview some of the store managers or representatives from Bentonville failed because the company was determined to ward off unions. Nevertheless, according to Olsson, to bring about improvement in wages and working condition in Wal-Mart stories, the community around those stores must be convinced to stand up against Wal-Mart. Even today, 27 million Americans currently work for minimum wage, and nearly 2 million of that group work at Wal-Mart. If people do not take action against unfair practices these jobs might be the jobs for our kids in the future.

"Progressive Wal-Mart.Really." by Sebastian Mallaby

According to Sebastian Mallaby in his essay “Progressive Wal-Mart. Really,” the giant retailer might be helping Americans fight medical inflation, but, at the same times they are enriching shareholders and putting rivals out of business. Also, asserts Mallaby, Wal-Mart is against retailers who advertise campaign and confuse poor Americans about food prices. Since Wal-Mart discount on food is big enough to boost the welfare of American shoppers by 50,000 billion in a year. Nevertheless, most critics say that Wal-Mart has caused an annual loss of wages for American workers in the retail sector, but when it opened a new store, wrote Mallaby, they received twelve times more applications that needed for the low benefits and unattractive job they had posted. Even if Wal-Mart busted the union and still pays lower wages to its workers, the purchasing power of the wages remains the some quantity product at the Wal-Mart low priced shelves. According to Mallaby, if one really wants to find the real cost of Wal-Mart’s lower prices, that person should go to China to see how their workers sweat for pennies to keep Wal-Mart’s shelves stocked with goods. Even worse, many Chinese earned less than Wal-Mart subcontractors paid for their labor. Also, according to Mallaby, accusing Wal-Mart as a parasite on taxpayers is unfair because other retail firms have a slightly lower percent of workers on Medicaid plans. Wal-Mart says workers should be thankful to the company that keeps Medicaid people employed.
According to Mallaby, companies like Wal-Mart treat their workers poorly and maintain poor work environments because the company rulers are not saints. All Americans have to know that Wal-Mart is the center of a global technology that drives economy, and in these days of world crisis, the economy should be thankful for the $200 billion that Wal-Mart consumer gains annually.

The Growing Gulf Between the Rich and the Rest of Us by Holly Sklar

According to Holly Sklar from the essay “The Growing Gulf Between the Rich and the Rest of Us” since 1975 all the gains in household income have been enjoyed by only 20 percent of households in United States (U.S.). Since 2000, wrote the author, America’s billionaire club has gained 76 more members, but on the other side, the poverty count in U.S. during the some period had grown with more than five million people. Furthermore, Sklar credits infant mortality in the U.S. as almost the same as Malaysians, but Malaysia’s gross domestic product is lower than the quarter of the U.S, and infant death rates among black children in Washington D.C. is the same as in Kerala, India- a third world country. According to Sklar, one who wants to arrive up the very top, the realm of Forbes 400, richest Americans, one should daily invest in his or her bank accounts more that a million for two years. The members of the Forbes 400, wrote Sklar, include Bill Gates with $51 billion, Walton family heirs, and even Stephen Bechtel Jr. who got rich from hurricane reconstruction disasters and shoddy work from Iraq to Boston. Also, inscribes Sklar, combining the Forbes 400 wealth totals more than the gross domestic product of Spain, the world’s eighth largest economy, but when comparing to the number of Americans who live in poverty would take the combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas. Millions of Americans can not afford adequate health care, housing, child care, food, and transportation which are basic expenses required to live normally in society. Nevertheless, wrote Sklar in the essay, inflation touches middle class Americans by lowering their budgets from $46,129 in 1999 down to $44,389 in 2004 because the Bush administration used hurricane “recovery” to camouflage real policies that brought windfall profits to companies like Bechtel. Those who created inequalities, according to Holly Sklar, between the rich and the rest of Americans, took pant in widening the gulf that weakened the U.S. economy and may even destroy the American Dream.

Reality Television: Oxymoron by George Will

When television was permeating America, according to George Will in his essay “Reality Television: Oxymoron,” in the United States, some shows were imitations of Fear Factor. The NBC programs attract viewers by offering fee to some simpletons for confronting their fears. In order to targeting watchers, American TV producers, according to Will, use Jackasses to perform some unspeakable nonsense foolishness. Also, the author gave examples of foolishness such as, eating maggots splattered with frog excrements or promising more violent football with cheerleaders’ breasts exposed. Nevertheless, Will marks that NBC used graphic violence and sexual puerilities in their prime time television shows which destroyed some optimistic viewers’ notions of selective program taste. That taste which Will called, celebration of personal “choice” because many adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children nowadays. Moreover, the author of “Reality Television: Oxymoron” determined that Americans need to amuse themselves from every day life and are becoming increasingly desensitized. Entertainment when seeking a mass audience has become coarse by shocking an unshockable society. According to George Will some shows that give pleasure to the spectators cannot be justified because the pleasures are contemptible and coarsen that drive into the culture spiraling downward. Even if the mass audience is looking for justification of watching perversity, television shows and the purveyors who supply the market cannot distinguished from the heroin pushers and moral inferiors, according to Will. Also, in order to satisfy a mass audience, one needs “pro-choice” or Russian roulette with a real bullet as a real chance to see violence if there is a strong spontaneous demand for televised degradation.

Can You Hear Me Now? by Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle begins her essay “Can You Hear Me Now?” with gratitude to technology that gave people connections and alienations. The author believes that the power of communication takes control over humans and subverts them by using a psychoanalytic pun “virtuality and its discontents” to engage humans’ minds. According to Turkle, business people today lose touch with their human instincts by working around the clock with technological devices they cannot afford to lose connection with their communication devices. The author also wrote about how new technology in communication tethers people’s souls by creating avatars that could deploy them into virtual lives. Nevertheless, Turkle mentions in her essay that a new communication culture plundered people’s leisure time, even the time to think uninterrupted for themselves because of their communication addiction. Technology influenced people’s minds by making them addicted to electronic devices; laptops, palmtops, cell phones, or Black Berry that navigate their lives as tethered slaves who can lose their minds when the device crashes. Moreover, communication devices damage teenagers’ lives too, by not allowing them to take responsibility when they try to find their own space in the society. Cell phones, with a parent on speed dial, make them think differently about themselves. Also, on top of this, there is the technology that sharing thoughts and feelings instantaneously with others. Communication devices, Sherry Turkle wrote, lead to virtuality and its discontents. According to the author, people’s virtual lives on Face book or My Space had been observed by secret government agencies and this state of mind makes people vulnerable to political abuse. When the high school and college student gives up their privacy to Web sites, according to Turkle, people receive more validation than violation by government agency. Author of “Can You Hear Me Now” used a metaphor to explain the real purpose of creeping government agencies as a panopticon prison where the guard stands at the center of a prison room and disciplines prisoners by watching them all the time. Communication devices have become the main resource for people ignoring human communication in society. Things, the author wrote, are no longer simple, there are links to object like the answering machine, anonymous avatars, or voice-recognition protocols that people have to deal with in a variety of manners when they communicate with each other. It is like a small jump to trust a non player character by putting one’s trust in a robotic companion. To support her opinion, the author uses her daughter’s selective taste, showing that while visiting a museum the new generation admired looking at robotic animals because they performed the same exercises that were expected, but the live animals cannot be seen as dangerous because they are not acting. Turkle used another example about a nursing home in Japan to solidify her opinion. This example was when Aibo, Sony’s household-entertainment robot performed doctors and nurses jobs for the elderly. People were satisfied with Aibo because it was not dangerous, would not betray people and never died. Even that robot can benefit people, but it is bad for people as a moral being. The question is not the ability of that robot but what kind of intimate relationship can people develop with these machines?

Your Trusted Friend

The author of “Your Trusted Friends,” Eric Schlosser narrated, about a friendship between McDonald’s and Walt Disney that gave them a big advantage at the market industry in the all world. Schlosser started with describing Ray A. Kroc Museum as an old building that remained U.S. history, and a new campus of Hamburger University near by it. The author continued with reflected on similarities between two founders of these corporate giants, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney. They were both born with a year apart in Illinois, and both had ambition to create a new American industry. Kroc and Disney dropped out of high school and late gained education thought out work training experience that companies provided. In their advance, both men knew how to find and motivate the right talent, but the most importantly Disney and Kroc were masterful salesmen in the art of selling things for children. At the beginning, Walt Disney signed licensing agreement with many U.S. firms for selling their product by using Mickey Mouse in their ads in early 1930s.
In 1938 before the opening ceremony for Snow White, Disney made licensing deals to sell toys, books, clothes, and records for the film. In 1954 in his first television series, Disneyland provided updates on construction work at the park. In all of his work, Disney tried to tie the commodities together into friendly patriotic idea to drive the kids’ attention. Ray Kroc on other hand, disposed own experience in radio station hired a gag writer to made a publicity film to get McDonald’s in the news. To take opportunity of a baby boom after World War II, Kroc wanted to create a save and clean place for American kids. By understanding the food test is important Kroc started food industry with reminding people about his show business knowledge. Kroc invited all children who loved McDonald’s commercials to bring their grandparents. Kroc’s first mascot was a winking chef with a hamburger for a head, and later changed it to Bozo’s Circus, a local children’s television show. Kroc hired TV star, Willard Scott, to invent a new clown who can make better a fast restaurant appearance. Scott gave an idea to Kroc for changing the name from Bozo to Ronald McDonald’s. The star was born with a new name, but Willard Scott was gaining overweight and got fired by company. In the late 1960 McDonald’s and Walt Disney declining fortune, kids of the sixties were rebelled them. In answer to that aggression McDonald’s rivaled Mickey Mouse for name recognition. Kroc made plan to create his own Disneyland. Kroc bought land in Los Angeles to build a new Western World park. McDonald’s executives opposed the idea of building Western World because it would divert funds from restaurant business, and they might lose millions. Instead of investing in a large park, McDonald’s industry built Play-lands next to every McDonald’s restaurant in the United State. McDonald’s used everything to drive kid attention, from songs, toys, clowns, to focus sorely on them. The growing children’s advertising has been driven efforts for McDonald’s to increase not just current consumption, but also in the future. McDonald’s advertisers had snatching into children’s dreams for getting idea about their tastes, development, fantasies. These advertisers observed children at the shopping malls, and their artworks. The big restaurant chain industry used children creativity to build a new mascot. Also, internet became useful tool for assembling data about children. Using television adverting with television programs was confusing method for children who cannot comprehend commercial from real purpose. Although the fast-food chains spends billions on television advertising such as conventional ads, and building play-land in these restaurants brought parents and children to spend money because of missing kids play area in many regions in the U.S. Also, the fast-food industry used toy manufactories for giving away simple toys with children’s meal. Distributing numerous versions of toys encouraged many repeating visits by kids and adult collectors to obtain complete sets. For example, happy meal are marketed for children between the ages of three to nine, and many adult collectors bought Teenie Beanie Baby and threw away the food. As some people said, these restaurants distributed for us fast food from cradle to the grade. The competition between fast-food restaurants changed the aspect of toy with some sports leagues stars or some Hollywood movie stars in the past few years. In main time, McDonald’s restaurants started to recruit people inside the industry by changing the official executives. Walt Disney Company signed ten years global marketing agreement with McDonald’s Corporation for McDonald’s exclusive right to studio’s output of film and videos, and gave to Hollywood studio additional advertising for every film in May, 1996. The life’s work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc come to final phase uniting both companies in perfect synergy where some one can get happy meal in the happiest place on earth.

Don't Blame the Eater by David Zinczenko

The author of “Don’t Blame the Eater”, David Zinczenko is the editor of Men’s Health magazine and author of numerous health care books. With his essay “Don’t Blame the Eater” Zinczenko wants to emphasize that the real problem of health care as related to obesity is our lack of information. By using controversial information from parents who sued Mc Donald’s industry, Zinczenko wants from us to think that a suite is not the real solution to the problem. Most of us, the author wrote, are neglected by parents in earlier ages and that makes us victims of the fast food industry. Even Zinczenko was one of the children hurt by the fast food industry and for that reason, he understands the problem. When the author grew up and joined the Navy Reserves, he educated himself through reading a health magazine. That magazine opened his eyes to a new nutritious way of living. Many of kids today may not have that option of avoiding obesity lead to related health problems, and they go straight into these fast food restaurants. The result of eating in these restaurants is astonishing, and it is always reflected in additional cost for health care paid by our tax payers. Today, the author wrote, Americans pay a fifty times larger bill for the health care system than forty years ago. The most recent trouble with our choice is disorientation about domain and supply in the market economy. Advertisements by big fast food restaurants have blurred our vision, and even labeling the food packaging does not keep us from consuming it. Also, obesity according to Zinczenko is consequence of people’s lack of awareness when choosing a nutritious low calorie food instead of McDonalds or Burger King. If people think that the author’s advice is not good for them they might be the next plaintiffs against the fast food industry. Zinczenko truly believes that the fast food industry is not responsible for our obesity, the real reason is not making informed choices before we swallow the food.