Wal-Mart is Disgusting, and Lifters impact workers less than you think





You might be thinking, “Ram? Why don’t you see that lifting hurts employees?” As a retail employee, I understand. But the issue isn’t the lifters. It’s corporate, and their board of directors. Wal-Mart, like every American retail store (except for like Wegmans and Costco,) finds any reason to cut employees pay, when they can afford not to.

Wal-Mart has the #1 spot on the Fortune 500 list, making $14.7 Billion a year in profit, $482 Billion in revenue. The average Wal-Mart employee is paid roughly $15k a year, and with 1.5 million employees, that’s $21 Billion dollars being payed to these workers, barely making a dent in revenue.

And in employee wage, I’m not including wage cuts. Wal-Mart forces workers to work off the clock, skip breaks, and other shady things, while not paying them their actual wage for these hours. One of their shadiest moves was forcing their low-level employees to buy brand-new $50 uniforms from their own company in 2014, which brought their own profit up, while scamming employees who (many of which) live off of food stamps.

Wal-Mart, a massive corporation, finds any reason to cut employees pay. From ‘indecent effort,’ to expensive new unnecessary uniforms, to theft. Wal-Mart loses $3 Billion a year to theft, which isn’t even 1% of their profit. This massive company could easily afford to pay their employees $15 an hour, and theft still wouldn’t make a dent.

Did you know an average member of the board of directors makes $196,253 a year? $196,238 more than their hard-working employees. The board of directors contribute to wage-cutting their employees, and they couldn’t give a damn how their workers are affected. Legally, they can cut your pay, as long as they tell you, and as long as it isn’t discriminatory (which they still do.) Wage-theft actually leads to more shoplifting.

Wal-Mart, and almost every big American retailer, uses unethical treatments to their employees, and the government couldn’t care less. Their cheap prices come from sweat shops, where women and young children work in hazardous conditions, and they aren’t payed nearly enough. And of course, these sweat shops aren’t located in the U.S. due to America’s labor laws. But, Wal-Mart uses American prison work as well.

Prisoners, primarily female, are used to work long hours to harvest crops, and other intense work, for usually only $2 an hour. Of course, Wal-Mart doesn’t directly pay them,as it would negatively affect their image. They use organizations such as Martori Farms, “which forces imprisoned U.S. women to spend long hours harvesting produce in the hot sun without water, sunscreen, or food,” According to Grunge.com.

You get your unethical “Grown-in-America” sticker, and you don’t think any further about it. Yes, theft is an issue, it always has been. But theft is not the problem. Many shoplifters steal products because they are also exploited by their own jobs, and can’t even afford necessities. Of course, some lifters are homeless people who can’t even get a job because they don’t have an address (which needs to be changed,) and some are kleptomaniac teens who can afford these products and couldn’t give less of a shit, and I urge them to get help.

Lifters dont even make a dent in yearly revenue, so instead of attacking them, attack these big corporations who want any reason to commit wage-theft. Lifters are not the issue, these companies are.

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