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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."
There seems to be an inconsistency, on the one hand they are employees and on the other they are associates. Which is it really?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Walmart treats employees like shit...I'm deeply shocked.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
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.
they will point you no matter the reason then if they dont like you they will try to add on points for no reason i rember in my entire stay there i missed 1 day and they tried to say i had 6 points. they also play favrets to people who kiss there ass vs those that do not. just me if that company can brake a labor law they do.
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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In case anyone was wondering how we ended up with two WalMart-related front page stories so close to each other on one day...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How is unproven allegations about the sick day policy of a retailer "news for nerds"?
There is no IT angle here I can discern.
Why is this on Slashdot? Unless, of course, they're moving full steam ahead with their "All Social Justice Warrior, all the time" format.
To unsocialized neck-beards like you? Doesn't matter. To members of the Human Race? It's "Stuff That Matters".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The tagline is in the html tag of the home page so will appear in the title bar (tab in Chrome).
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.
Nevermind, I see it's hundreds of employees out of just 1,000 surveyed. I suck.
Or maybe you don't suck. From the "A Better Balance" report: "Based on our conversation with Walmart employees as well as survey results of over 1,000 current and former Walmart workers who have struggled due to Walmart’s absence control program..."
I would expect a survey of workers "who have struggled due to Walmart's absence control program" to turn up a lot of complaints.
I worked at Stream International (outsourcing call center) about 10 years ago and you got 8 points. At 0 points they fired you. You lost points for being late, leaving early - stuff like that.
1 point per sick day - unless you had a doctors note, but 10 bucks an hour you didn't have health insurance so typically you worked sick, and you only visited the doctor if you were on deaths door.
Even after they had a tuberculosis outbreak (no I'm not kidding - the CDC got involved and required everyone to be screened) they didn't abandon this system.
My work started doing this recently. Not all that happy about it. To make matters worse, the implemented it retroactively 2 years before the program actually existed, so I'm already half way through the program. They call it "Non-disciplinary", however if you advance into the program too far you can be let go, which sounds pretty disciplinary to me. I believe I effectively do not have any sick days anymore, I'll just go to work sick from now on, unless I get hit by a bus or something, at which point work will probably be the least of my worries.
I expect it is a bargaining ploy to the Union. i.e. "You wanna get rid of it? How about those pensions?"
Though Walmart doesn't even have that I suppose.
I honestly thought this was more normal. I'm not saying it's right. However, I've worked at a software company that had a points-based attendance policy and they actually denied me a raise one year because I called off for illness a few times. It was the worst kind of phone support job and I was a lot younger but I didn't think this was unusual. I definitely thought it was unethical, though. Also stupid, as it encouraged sick people to come in and get everyone else sick, which happened all the time.
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.
to tell everyone that if you couldn't find a replacement you had to come in sick. This was at a restaurant. At the time it didn't occur to anyone to call him on it, but this was the 90s so the economy was good and it wasn't enforceable.
Every call center I ever worked in had sick people non-stop. Everybody was always sick because nobody could stay home when they got sick.
This is just how it is when you work in low pay industries in a bad economy. If you want it to stop you're gonna have to pass laws, but I'm guessing most people don't want it to stop. They might be uncomfortable with the idea of sick people forced to work or be homeless but they're much more uncomfortable with paying 5% more for stuff. Especially when they're getting paid less and less just like everybody else...
Walmart's even got a phrase for it: Save Money, Live Better. You're not destroying worker solidarity and driving working families into an endless cycle of poverty. You're Saving Money, Living Better.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If your business is earning a profit you do.
Your arguments are worth nothing if you won't put your name to them.
Your arguments are worth nothing if they fail to use some sort of basic reasoning. (hint: Not putting a name to something in of itself doesn't affect the quality or lack thereof of an argument.)
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Being fired isn't a penalty? Because the article mentions being fired for having too many points.
But hey, since you want more details, here's how Wal-Mart's point system works (or worked about a year ago when I was dating a woman who worked for them):
If you call in at least an hour in advance...
working less than half a shift is a 1 point.
working less than a full shift but more than half is 1/2 point.
If you don't call in at least an hour in advance, being absent is 4 points.
For the first 6 months, employees are fired if they gain 4 points.
After 6 months, they're fired at 9 points in any 6 month rolling period.
Even before you reach the 4/9 point limit, however, they can assign you "coaching", which is basically a disciplinary writeup by another name. It stays in your record and can be used to justify reducing your hours, denying raises, denying promotions, etc.
I'm only seeing asterisks. Maybe because I still have mod points, but posting should sort that.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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...