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Hundreds of Walmart Employees Say They've Been Punished For Taking Sick Days (vice.com)
A new report from the workers advocacy group A Better Balance alleges that Walmart consistently punishes employees for taking sick days, even if they have proper documentation from doctors. From a report: A Better Balance interviewed and surveyed more than 1,000 Walmart workers about the company's absence control program -- which awards disciplinary "points" for absences regardless of reason -- and found the retail giant to be in violation of multiple laws. "Giving a worker a disciplinary 'point' for being absent due to a disability or for taking care of themselves or a loved one with a serious medical condition is not only unfair," the report reads, "in many instances, it runs afoul of federal, state, and local laws." Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove told the Times that the allegations are false, and that the company "understand[s] that associates may have to miss work on occasion," and that they "have processes in place to assist them." The report's worker testimonials say differently. "I came down with a stomach flu and I had to call in due to vomiting and high fever and got a point cause of being sick," recalls an Illinois employee named Veronica. "I hate the fact we got to worry about getting fired cause we caught the flu."
Use the bodies of your dead and sick coworkers as a ladder to climb your way to success!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It means that maybe someone should investigate to see if it's true. Let us know when it's more than an agenda-driven allegation. Thanks.
This falls under the "stuff that matters" part of the slogan.
There was an article a couple days ago about how white-collar employees in the US are afraid of using their vacation time...this seems like a good bookend to that. The bottom line is that there are very few nice, generous employers anymore. I work for one that actually treats us pretty well; we have on-your-honor sick days and reasonable amounts of vacation. However, stores like this are necessary to show once in a while that employers will take advantage of you at any turn, and some of them are quite bad.
You see stuff like this a lot in low-margin, low-paying employers with what they consider a disposable workforce. I'm sure Amazon is guilty of this with their warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc. I guarantee that with steady jobs getting scarcer every day, and a constant narrative depicting business owners as superhuman infallible beings, nothing is going to get better. People are going to be happy to have any kind of job that gives them a steady paycheck, and that's even more true for those at the low end of the skills curve.
When I see stuff like this, it makes me wish labor unions were more powerful like they once were. Unions would never have backed down on something like this, and union members were happier because of it. All those coal miners and manufacturing workers voting last November should realize that they would have been much better off had they been represented by a strong union. Working families used to be able to survive on one income, and now that's very difficult for most people to do. I'm still hoping the pendulum swings back the other direction before things get bad enough to have another revolution or civil war on our hands in the US.
Everybody gets sick sooner or later. Some people are fortunate enough to be on the tail end of the curve when it comes to luck, being one of them doesn't make you morally better.
Of course you might be one of those people who come to work and spread your germs around to the coworkers and customers. That doesn't make you morally better either; it makes you worse.
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They exist to remove the incentive of you going to work and spreading your germs, among other things. But sick days is also a form of insurance, in which risk is pooled over the entire workforce. Statistically your compensation might end up a wash either way if you just look at the expected value but if you look at the statistical spread there is no comparison, particularly for low-paid workers who don't earn enough to put aside savings. If you're making $100,000 a year, a week without pay is nothing. If you're making $15,080 a year, it could mean losing your apartment or sending your kids to school without food.
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Penalizing workers for staying home when they're sick is a really bad idea. Because, naturally, people will come to work sick rather than risk a penalty, potentially spreading the illness to other workers and to customers. This seldom ends well, either for the parties involved or for the company.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It doesn't always happen in that order: make $15K/year, then have kids.
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And non-US workers wonder why US works don't use vacation and sick days when they have them...
Companies that get caught doing this need to made an example of. Major fines. The fines can't be small enough for a business to chalk it up to the 'cost of doing business' because that's what they do already.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Colleague implies a degree of equality in status. The hourly grunts on the sales floor are not equal to anyone who calls them associates.
That exposes the utter foolishness of a blanket policy like this. It encourages people to come in with communicable illnesses and they get passed around and productivity drops rapidly. Sure, there are people who abuse sick time, but there are patterns that emerge. This is a case where they could learn from Dr. Demming. Take action to investigate a level of frequencies that are significant outliers. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons, and in that event I suspect a bit of compassion will pay dividends. In the case of what turns out to be abuse of the policy, one can take corrective action.
Our company imposed a policy saying that you had to phone and speak to your supervisor in the morning if you were going to be out sick. I have taken very few sick days over the years. I pointed my supervisor to my lack of absences. Then I told him that when I **am** sick, that I usually need sleep to recover and that having to get up to call him would impede my recovery. I told him that when I knew I wan't going to make it in that I would immediately email him and periodically notify him of the progress of my recovery. He was fine with that.
Generally, if you treat people like adults, they will respond well. Just deal with the corner cases...