Walmart Low Cost

In the article Up Against Wal-Mart, Karen Olsson exposes the largest retailer in the world by listing many of the retailer’s flaws such as worker mistreatment and discrimination. Throughout the article, Olsson uses anecdotes from employees that have worked at the company and statistics to support her arguments. Ultimately Olsson’s piece serves to harshly criticize Wal-Mart due to low pay wages, unpaid overtime, and gender inequality. From the start, Olsson relies on actual employee interviews to support her arguments against Wal-Mart. By introducing Jennifer McLaughlin, a young woman who has been working for Wal-Mart for three years but makes under $17,000 a year, the author builds tension between the worker and the company.

Olsson shows how difficult it is to get promoted in Walmart, which contributes to her argument that Walmart does not treat their employees as they should. In addition, it shows why employees can’t have better lives because they make minimum wages for a long period, and work extra hours without getting paid for it. Olsson suggests, “he asked for a promotion, but three months later he was still doing the extra work for no extra pay” (6). Olsson’s point is that Walmart employees can’t get promoted even when they try, instead Walmart is using them and make them work harder. Increasingly during her article Olsson makes it clear that Walmart exploits their employees.

Some people may wonder how, with such low prices, Wal-Mart can sustain such a large profit margin. Well according to Jim Hightower, that answer lies within Wal-Mart’s workforce. Hightower believes that Wal-Mart is tricking its workers into thinking they are, “one big, happy family,” when in reality those workers are being exploited. According to Jim, Wal-Mart is diverting their workers from the actual issues such as, “fair wages, hiring discrimination, or unionization.” This is backed up in the 2004 documentary aired by PBS called, “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?”

She uses many real-life examples to explain how cruel society is. People always suffer from bad services from Walmart’s employees, but clients do not realized employees have unpaid extra working hours and poor benefits. For example, Olsson uses statistics shows readers how had salary Walmart’s employees earn, “The average hourly worker at Wal-Mart earns barely $18,000 a year at a company that picketed $6.6 billion in profits last year.” (Olsson). Wal-Mart employees are not getting paid enough for their hard workers.

The hugely successful enterprise is swimming in wealth, yet it refuses to pay its employees adequately to fulfill their most basic necessities. Not only this, but Wal-Mart has also frequently violated state regulations protecting workers’ rights. In one case, “. . . a California court ordered Wal-Mart to pay $172 million in damages for failing to provide meal breaks to nearly 116,000 hourly workers as required under state law” (Wake-Up Wal-Mart). In addition to violating state laws and paying nominal wages, the mega-corporation’s store managers pressures their associates into working overtime, without pay.

Jim Hightower accuses Wal-Mart of many things, such as necessitating employees to work an extra hour, on average without compensation. Also, Jim Hightower states that Wal-Mart deprives workers of equal opportunity and a decent pay rate. Jim Hightower, in a bleak fashion, depicts an image of Wal-Mart that most people wouldn’t have known about. The reason he does this is to make people aware of how employees are actually treated in a corporate America business. In the documentary about

The article “Labouring the Walmart Way,” author Deenu Parmar talks about how Walmart is able to achieve selling goods at a lower price then any average superstore. The author goes on to explain that Walmart’s antiunion efforts, employee selection, low prices and high retention rate all contribute to their major success. Walmart’s stance on ant unionism allows them to keep wage cost down and keep all their profits up. Not allowing a union keeps Walmart with the power to keep low wages and force unpaid overtime.

It is shown that the employees that work there hardly earn minimum wage, even while working full time. Wal-Mart even encourages their employees to take advantage of social programs such as food stamps(Copeland). People believe that working can get them out of poverty and in return get them out of social programs from the government, but the employees at Wal-Mart are instead being pushed into these programs, and in return are contradicting all the values and beliefs of the American Dream such as self-reliance and

Rising income inequality and wage stagnation threaten the future of America’s middle class. While corporate profits break records, the share of national income going to workers’ wages has reached record lows. Wal-Mart plays a leading role in this story. Its business model has long relied upon strictly controlled labor costs: low wages, inconsiderable benefits and aggressive avoidance of collective bargaining with its employees. As the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., Wal-Mart’s business model exerts considerable downward pressure on wages throughout the retail sector and the broader economy.

‘Is Wal-Mart Good for America?’ On PBS Frontline, May 11, 2015 ‘Is Wal-Mart Good for America?’ is a documentary that examines the relationship between Wal-Mart’s rapid growth and its impact on the US economy ever since it blossomed in trade productivity in the mid 20th century. The documentary, published on February 2014 by PBS Frontline, conveys a deep understanding of how Wal-Mart changed the living standards of many Americans and took consumerism and retail logistics in the U.S. to another level; by cutting costs through offshore outsourcing to China and employing cheap Chinese labor. The documentary focuses on the changing relationship between big retailers and manufacturers and the transition in pricing and decision-making.

In the essay titled “Labouring the Walmart Way”, author Deenu Parmar explains the unhealthy effects of Walmart, how to stop them, and the challenges of doing so. Parmar begins by detailing how Walmart has done little for local economies. By hiring financially vulnerable people, the franchise insures that no one would dare to unionize; thus ensuring employees will only earn the bare minimum, and thus out-competing local competition. Parmar also goes on to explain how a local community removed Walmart. They were able to do this through the use of fierce union protests that made the store unprofitable.

First, Olsson’s article and how this represents the mistreatment of its employees. This article discusses how Walmart employees are

because they are paying such cheap prices for manual labor, and allowing undocumented people to work for their company. This argument could also appeal to pathos, especially if someone watching it is also an undocumented working or was one in the past. Seeing how people are taken advantage of simply because they are undocumented is often not fair and to have such large companies such as Walmart continue to be a part of it and act on that is quite shocking indeed. The third argument that is presented in this documentary was the factory conditions that workers outside of the United States put up with in creating products for Walmart.

Walmart was founded in the summer of 1962 by Kingfisher, Oklahoma native Sam Walton. Although Walton’s original vision for the store was relatively modest, the half century since its founding has seen Walmart morph into one of the biggest companies in the world. Today headed by one Doug McMillon, Walmart boasts more than 5000 stores in the United States of America alone and employs more than 1.5 million people. Walmart is undoubtedly an American institution, yet each Walmart store feels like its own little country. Walmart seems to have its own laws and customs and the people who shop their on a regular basis appear almost primitive in their behavior as they go about raiding the store’s shelves and wrestling with fellow customers for discount flat screen televisions and bulk packages of two-ply toilet paper.

Walmart’s hard pill to swallow: Antidiscrimination Walmart, a US-based multinational retail corporation operating a chain of departmental stores, hypermarkets and grocery stores, is the world’s second largest public corporation. The corporation has faced the brunt of workplace prejudice allegations. Six women who worked for Walmart have sued the company for its inferior pay packages and promotion scope as compared to their male counterpart despite having better qualification, performance, and experience. According to these women’s 2010 court of appeals opinion, they were paid lesser than their male counterpart and had to wait longer for a promotion to an in-store management position. They demanded that Walmart must compensate its female workers