“What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s civil rights,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich. “I learned this at the very beginning of my stint as a waitress, when management warned me that my purse could be searched at any time.”
Ehrenreich, a journalist, spent several months in 1998 working as a waitress, as a maid and finally as a salesperson at Wal-Mart, where she earned $7 an hour.
Her goal was to investigate how difficult it would be to pay for housing, food and other expenses on those earnings. What she also discovered was a world in which workers were treated with very little respect. Drug testing was routine. At Wal-Mart, she was lectured on “time theft,” which essentially meant having conversations with co-workers. (It was a theft of Wal-Mart’s time.) She and other middle-aged women workers were patronized by their younger male boss.
In short, workers were viewed with suspicion and treated like children.
This is not news.
Every parent who ever warned a kid to go to college has this in mind – avoid low-paid, dead-end jobs where you are worked hard and treated badly. (Not that college is a guarantee of a higher-paying job.) The problem is that low pay and poor working conditions are considered by many to be an individual problem, solvable by getting a better job, not as a problem that we as a group need to address.
Comes now, however, a big lawsuit against Wal-Mart. The largest retailer in the world has been hit with the largest class action discrimination suit to date. It’s no slap on the wrist.
The suit says the company discriminates against its female employees in promotions, pay and job assignments. It says women are largely relegated to lower paying jobs and systematically denied advancement opportunities.
In addition, the plaintiffs say that Wal-Mart’s treatment of its female employees includes a sexually demeaning atmosphere, where female employees are told that “women do not make good managers.”
An advocacy group called Wal-Mart Versus Women puts it this way: “Women in every major job category are paid less than men with the same seniority, even though female workers receive, on average, higher performance ratings and have less turnover than men.”
The company denies any pattern of discrimination. It's keeping its head low, saying it will defend the case on its merit.
Wal-Mart has, however, has been brought before the National Labor Relations Board numerous times and in March was required by that body to post notices in all its stores admitting to violations of labor law.
Wal-Mart has 1.2 million workers in the United States, of whom two-thirds are women. This suit has the possibility of making a real difference in the lives of a lot of women.
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