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Users Trash Wal-Mart On Its Facebook Site
hhavensteincw writes "Only two weeks after Wal-Mart launched its latest foray into Web 2.0 land, Facebook users have hijacked a page aimed at selling back-to-school supplies to college kids to instead post rants about the company's labor practices. Of the 100-plus comments, none relates to dorm decorating as Wal-Mart had originally envisioned."
From that I have heard, Wal-Mart pays a decent amount, far more than the minimum wage. They aggressively hire people who normally have a hard time getting a job (elderly), they have benefits, and such. So why is their a small group of idiots protesting against them? Is it only because they are a large corporation?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Last time I lived there I paid $850 for a one bedroom in Mountain View with a back yard. And that was right at the height of the tech boom in 1999.
Walmart isn't a employee friendly company. The reason their employees go on welfare is because they can't get full time work. walmart doesn't want have to pay benefits so there are few full timers.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
If someone is willing to do work for you for less, why isn't it moral to choose that person?
... americans who could have been designing technology instead?
.. products and services the world wants .. that Americans can provide.
.. there is already signs of labor shortage emerging in China ..factories are having to provide beter and better incentives for their works (google china labor shortage ) .. just to make products for export.
The alternative to Wal-mart is people starving and dying like in Africa where there is hardly any industry.
Wal-mart isn't forcing people to work at Chinese factories. People are choosing to work there instead of dying of starvation and preventable diseases on the farm.
American workers can easily do other stuff instead of repetitive and boring factory jobs. Plus with the flood of cheap goods less work would be needed. Come on gardeners get paid $50 an hour. You think a factory worker would get anything beyond minimum wage? Also, we currently have a 5% unemployment rate here. Which jobs taht people are currently doing would they have to leave to fill up the shoe making factories? Are you prepared to give up cell phones and great computer software so that you can have shoes made by americans
The world still needs cures for major diseases. There aren't cheap cars of BMW quality. Ferrari performance is not available cheaply yet. Not everyone has a large house, there is mad demand fror pre-fabbed structures so that infrastructure to be built. All of this shows there is a need for products and services
Do you think China has enough workers to construct all the machinery to develop their infrastructure? I don't think so
2.0? They aren't even at web 1.0 yet here in Canada. You can't even buy stuff online in Canada, and they have only a few select items up on their website, not even close to their entire catalog. However, there is an option to add stuff to your shopping list, and print that out for buying at the B&M stores. Which is pretty useless though, considering the items may not be at the store you shop at, and like I said, the online product selection is maybe 10% of the items they actually stock.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I work at WalMart now, I make 8.30 an hour. For telling you that I make that much, I would be immediately fired on the spot. There are about 7 pay grades, and being that I work in the Electronics department I am on grade 6. Each pay grade equals to about a 40 cent difference in pay. There are two departments that are on my pay grade: Produce and Bakery. Everyone else is on pay grades 1-3, they make around 6.50 to 7.50, and the minimum wage is 6.15. In each department there are between 1 and 3 full time positions, and over 5 part time positions depending on the size of the store. Benefits for part-time associates are basically intangible. Company policy states they are not to receive over 32 hours a week, they are usually given about 28, so they can't afford health insurance. And they have to be with the company for two before they are even eligible, full time associates are eligible immediately. My wages are capped at 10.00 an hour. I will never make more than that without a promotion. Promotions are generally handed out to friends of management. Why do I really evil though? Because on more than one occasion with more than just a few people (myself included), management has gone back to modify the number of hours recorded in the system that you worked. People have gotten fired for working overtime, when the only reason they had overtime was because management held them over working on something (unloading an especially large truck, cleaning an isle where some jackass dropped a 6-pack of Corona and didn't bother to tell anyone, running a cash register and never being relieved, regardless of the number of times they called management and told them they needed to clock out, etc). Or maybe its the fact that after all the years, not a single manager has come up from the bottom of the company? Throughout your orientation you are told that WalMart promotes from within (also that unions are evil and only want your money, but that's an entirely different subject). But I have yet to see a manager who has actually worked below their current rank. How about the "Open Door Policy" where all associates are supposed to be able to go to management whenever there is a problem, but how the door is always locked with paper taped over the window. People have been fired for knocking too many times when the door was locked and a customer wanted to talk with them. Also, my store itself has been robbed too many times to count. Not petty theft I refer to, I'm talking about men with guns demanding money or merchandise. Yet there has never been even the consideration to hire any kind of security to protect neither the customers nor the employees. Surely some part of the 80,000 salary of the BOTTOM rank managers at my store could be taken to hire an armed guard or something. But oh well, I guess I'll just suck it up and not starve and continue to follow the WalMart-provided pamphlets helping me get on government money just so I can survive.
But they conveniently ignore the fact that back when anyone could have been carrying a gun, massacres still happened, just with a different technique.
The part where their own reasoning was bullshit is where they imply that "school shooting" == "walk and shoot at point blank" and that they exist because of gun laws; It's bullshit because if that stopped working, people who want to kill a lot of people as part of their suicide will go back to bombs and sniping.
I don't remember the walmart ep all that well, but I remember that they spent a lot of time talking about how a non-representative sample of people who dislike that store were idiots, and not at all any time on how walmart up and closes any store that dares start a union, build on native burial grounds, etc. They glossed over the evils and focused on people you wouldn't want to be associated with and declared them the anti-walmart type.
P.S. In their "environmentalists are t3h dumb" ep, they pass around a fake petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide, and then say they told no lie... meaning that they really intended to ban water? Bullshit. I like watching those guys, really I do, but they produce bullshit whilst decrying other people's bovine manure: they are entertainers, not the mighty defenders of the Truth.
P.P.S. Mythbusters also "bust" myths that they simply failed to do right: It's TV, corners are cut. Watchers beware.
You can't take the sky from me...
At least from my experiences here in Canada, they stock the exact same stuff as most other discount department stores, and pay their employees about the same amount. How much do you expect them to pay people to stock shelves?
In the US, where there is no national health care, it is left up to the employer to provide health insurance. This represents a cost to the company, and Wal-Mart is pretty good at avoiding it.
Its health plans are open to part-time employees (those who work fewer than a specified number of hours per week) only after a year of employment. Meaning, as a newly hired employee, you must wait at least a year before you can get any insurance at all. (And Wal-mart may force people to work off the clock to keep their hours-per-week low.) Furthermore, the plans that they offer are too expensive for the wages that they pay; the premiums are higher, the deductibles are higher, and the coverage is lower. So many eligible Wal-Mart employees are still unable to afford health care.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
no, it isn't. workers have a right to unionize, and the tactics that walmart (and some others) use to prevent unionization are illegal.
i think some unions have unrealistic goals, and many seem to serve their leadership better than their membership. but US law isn't at all vague about the right of workers to unionize.
-esme
... and the same goes for the children in third world countries that produce the products they sell. They CHOSE to be starving third world citizens. If they cannot afford bread on what they make, let them eat cake, I say ...
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yeah...at least in some fantasy world where "U.S." cars aren't made in Mexico. Where, I understand, there aren't any maquiladora labor unions.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
You are dead wrong. The U.S. has one of the lowest levels of unionization among industrialized countries. Union density was 12.4% in 2003, roughly 2/3 of Japan's (19.7%) and 1/2 of Canada (28.4%) or the E.U. (26.3%). Statistics used are from the U.S. Department of Labor.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
even threatening to shutdown operations because the employees unionize is illegal. actually doing so, when the purpose it only thwart unionization, is definitely illegal.
as I said before, some unions have unreasonable expectations. and i can imagine a scenario where a union forms and demands wages and benefits that would make it impossible for the business to operate. and that business would be within its rights to shut down.
but that's not what wal-mart is doing. they pull every trick in the book to prevent unionization, legal or otherwise. and shutting down a location to break a union is illegal. NRLA is pretty clear on this.
-esme
Wal-mart is so damned evil...
You mean they force you to work and shop there? Otherwise, you don't really have any justification for your comment, do you?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This is just flat wrong. Some wealth is transferred, but most wealth is created. Inventing something new, increasing productivity, finding a more efficient or less wasteful organizational structure--all of these things create wealth. Every year someone invents something new, makes an incremental improvement on existing products, or re-organizes a system in order to cut out waste. The end result is more products, better products, at a lower cost. That's the definition of greater wealth, and that wealth wasn't transferred from someone else, it was created by doing new things or by doing old things in a new way.
Wealth that's transferred is done through government programs that confiscate the wealth you earn by working and inventing, and then give it to someone else.
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I have seen at first hand the running of a 'Japanese' and a 'Domestic' car plant. The staff at the Japanese plant had much higher pay and benefits.
The problem stems from statistics, and how the numbers are played with. Basically in the 'west' retiree benefits are paid from 'current' income. In the past these 'western' companies saved money by failing to invest for the future benefits they contractually agreed too. They did this by setting up shells that actually gave the investment money back to the originating company This made the companies look profitable and growing, and raised their then share price. This sort of nonsense was encouraged by the markets and governments which fed back into the management which gave more of the same. Behind the scenes everyone crossed their fingers and hoped that growth would make up the difference. There were many at the time who said it was all a house of cards, but they were starved of research funding and quite effectively silenced. Now time has caught up with these companies and governments and they have to pay, which is then, by accountancy tricks, spread across the current employee base, making current employees look way more expensive and quite unproductive.
Contrast this with Japanese companies who invested for the future benefits with strict governmental controls on how they were allowed to do it. Now these companies not only receive income from the investments, they also have a much lower cost base as they only pay out for their current workforce which makes them look less than half the price and considerably more productive.
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