"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.