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News :: Labor |
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Wal-Mart's own audit shows labor laws broken |
Current rating: 0 |
by NYTimes via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
12 Jan 2004
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"Their own analysis confirms that they have a pattern and practice of making their employees work through their breaks and lunch on a regular basis," said James Finberg, a lawyer who has assisted several suits against Wal-Mart. "What this audit shows is against their own company policy and against the law in almost every state in which they operate." |
January 13, 2004
In-House Audit Says Wal-Mart Violated Labor Laws
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
An internal audit now under court seal warned top executives at Wal-Mart Stores three years ago that employee records at 128 stores pointed to extensive violations of child-labor laws and state regulations requiring time for breaks and meals.
The audit of one week's time-clock records for roughly 25,000 employees found 1,371 instances in which minors apparently worked too late at night, worked during school hours or worked too many hours in a day. It also found 60,767 apparent instances of workers not taking breaks, and 15,705 apparent instances of employees working through meal times.
Officials at Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, employing 1.2 million people at its 3,500 stores in the United States, insisted that the audit was meaningless, since what looked like violations could simply reflect employees' failure to punch in and out for breaks and meals they took.
"Our view is that the audit really means nothing when you understand Wal-Mart's timekeeping system," said Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for communications. She said Wal-Mart did nothing in response to the audit, saying it always strives to comply with the law.
But missed breaks and lunches have become a major issue in more than 40 lawsuits charging Wal-Mart with forcing employees to work without pay through lunch and rest breaks, and several lawyers and former employees who have sued Wal-Mart said the audit only bolstered their cases. They said that many employees continued to complain of missing meals and breaks.
"Their own analysis confirms that they have a pattern and practice of making their employees work through their breaks and lunch on a regular basis," said James Finberg, a lawyer who has assisted several suits against Wal-Mart. "What this audit shows is against their own company policy and against the law in almost every state in which they operate."
Several lawyers who sued Wal-Mart also noted that over the years Wal-Mart had ordered its employees to make sure to clock out when they took lunch and breaks.
And John Fraser, who ran the federal Labor Department's wage and hour division during the 1990's, called the sheer volume of apparent violations surprising and troubling. "When you find the frequency of this kind of violation in such a large employer, such a pervasive employer, it has to be a source of great concern," Mr. Fraser said.
The audit was conducted in July 2000; a copy was given to The New York Times by a longtime Wal-Mart critic hoping to pressure the company to improve working conditions. Wal-Mart has asked various courts to seal the audit for the last two years — and they have complied — ever since the company gave copies to lawyers who accused it of making employees work off the clock.
The audit, written by Bret Shipley, a Wal-Mart auditor, indicated that time-clock records for thousands of workers showed tens of thousands of missed lunches and breaks. Ms. Williams said employees had probably taken their lunches and breaks but just failed to record them.
She and other Wal-Mart officials also asserted that time-clock records could have been wrong in indicating that minors had worked illegally during school hours. Schools might have been closed on a given weekday, they noted. "The audit that Shipley pulled together doesn't reflect actual behavior within the facilities," Ms. Williams said.
Wal-Mart officials, she said, always tried to comply with the law and repeatedly told employees to take lunches and breaks. Wal-Mart policies state that employees working seven or more hours a day are to receive a meal break and two 15-minute rest breaks. Federal law does not require lunch and meal breaks, but most states do for employees working seven or more hours a day.
Several months after the Shipley audit was finished, Wal-Mart stopped requiring employees to clock out and in for 15-minute breaks. Wal-Mart officials said they eliminated this requirement for their employees' convenience, but Frank Azar, a lawyer involved in the off-the-clock suits, said Wal-Mart did this to make sure no paper trail could show that employees were not taking breaks.
The audit warned that its findings could hurt the company. "Wal-Mart may face several adverse consequences as a result of staffing and scheduling not being prepared appropriately," it stated.
Commissioned to help Wal-Mart executives determine whether employees were taking their meals and breaks, the audit came as the company was facing several lawsuits accusing it of off-the-clock work and failing to give breaks.
Ms. Williams said that company auditors more senior than Mr. Shipley had determined that the methodology he used was flawed. "This audit is so flawed and invalid that we did not respond to it in any way internally," she said.
But several current and former Wal-Mart employees confirmed in interviews that violations of state law on child labor and breaks were a recurring problem at many understaffed Wal-Mart stores.
Leila Najjar said that when she worked for a Wal-Mart in a Denver suburb at age 16 and 17, she sometimes was forced to miss breaks, work past midnight and work more than eight hours a day even though Colorado bars minors from doing that. Time records from a court case showed that her store sometimes forced her to work illegal hours.
During the holidays, Ms. Najjar, a recent graduate of the University of Colorado, recalled, "the store closed at 11 and there were nights we had to stay to clean up until 12:30, 12:45. It was a long day, and I was tired the next day at school. And sometimes, I'd have to work 10, 11 hours on a Saturday or Sunday."
If the same rate of violations were found throughout the Wal-Mart system, that would translate into tens of thousands of child-labor violations each week at Wal-Mart's 3,500 stores and more than one million violations of company and state regulations on meals and breaks.
Company officials said such extrapolations were misleading, noting that many of the seeming time-record problems could be explained by legal behavior.
Wal-Mart employees clock in and out by swiping their identity badges, which the time clock reads electronically. Ms. Williams said employees sometimes forgot to swipe when they arrived at work or when they took lunch. Sometimes, she said, workers missed breaks not because management pressured them but, for example, because they wanted to finish early to take a child to the doctor.
John Lehman, who ran several Wal-Mart stores in Kentucky, said he was sure that large-scale violations on child labor, breaks and meals continued at Wal-Mart. In the months after the company distributed the audit internally, he said, store managers like him received no word to try harder to prevent violations.
"There was no follow-up to that audit, there was nothing sent out I was aware of saying, `We're bad. We screwed up. This is the remedy we're going to follow to correct the situation,' " said Mr. Lehman, who said he quit in 2001 because he was disgusted with the company's treatment of employees. He now works for a union trying to organize Wal-Mart workers.
"Wal-Mart stores are so systematically understaffed that they work minors just like they do adults," he said. "They don't have enough workers to take care of the business. Yes, their prices are low but then the stores are so understaffed that workers often don't have time to take their breaks or lunches."
Maria Rocha, who ran the restaurant inside a Wal-Mart in Dallas, said her workload was so great and the restaurant so understaffed that she never took breaks and often missed lunch. "It was just too busy to take a break," said Ms. Rocha, who quit in October. "There were a lot of customers, and the managers would be mad if you took a break."
Verette Richardson, a former Wal-Mart cashier in Kansas City, Mo., said it was sometimes so hard to get a break that some cashiers urinated on themselves. Bella Blaubergs, a diabetic who worked at a Wal-Mart in Washington State, said she sometimes nearly fainted from low blood sugar because managers often would not give breaks.
As for claims of child-labor violations and stores too understaffed for worker breaks, Ms. Williams said, "In a company that has more than 1 million people in the U.S. alone, I have no doubt that in some individual instances that can happen."
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Comments
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Re: Wal-Mart's own audit shows labor laws broken |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -2
12 Jan 2004
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This is hard to believe. Missed breaks and an early return from lunch? Did anyone die or starvation? Maybe it was an ambitious worker (I realize this is frowned upon) trying to show his/her boss something in an effort to get ahead.
Is this the kind of brutality we can expect when the Urbana store opens?
Jack |
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Re: Wal-Mart's own audit shows labor laws broken |
by Jim M
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 8
13 Jan 2004
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As a former employee of Walmart (in both Minnesota and in Champaign) I must agree with this message. On numerous occasions I was given more work to complete in an 8 hour shift than is humanly possible. My alternatives were to not complete all of the assigned chores and risk an ass chewing or to skip one (or both) of my 15 minute breaks. Several times I clocked out for lunch and returned to the floor and worked. This was my own decision and I accept full responsibility for it. Walmart did not force me to do this, they make it very easy to do though.
Probably the worst day is the day after Thanksgiving. With the holiday madness that envelopes the retail world working a 10 hour day on that Friday with only 2 15 minute breaks isn't unheard of. |
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WAL-MART, WORLD'S LARGEST RETAILER, FOUND GUILTY BY PORTLAND, OREGON JURY FORCED WORKERS TO WORK UNPAID OVERTIME |
by STEVEN GREENHOUSE, NEW YORK TIMES
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Jan 2004
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A federal jury in Portland, Oregon, found Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, guilty yesterday [December 18] of forcing its employees to work unpaid overtime in the first of 40 such lawsuits to go to trial. In the four-week trial, dozens of Wal-Mart workers testified that under pressure from their managers they frequently clocked out after 40 hours and continued working. "The company's witnesses said this absolutely never happens at Wal-Mart, and the jury didn't believe them," said Shane Youtz, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs. "Our witnesses said, `What happens at Wal-Mart is, if you want to work there a long time, you have to work off the clock' It's part of the culture there." In the lawsuit, 400 current and former employees from 18 stores in Oregon accused the company of violating federal and state wage laws by systematically pressuring them to work unpaid overtime.
After deliberating for four days, the jury concluded that Wal-Mart had shown a pattern of widespread and unwavering violations. Damages are to be decided in a separate trial. Bill Wertz, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, which employs more than one million workers in its 3,300 stores nationwide, said the company was disappointed by the verdict. "We tried to demonstrate to the jury that we have a strong policy against requiring our workers, our associates, to work off the clock, and that any violations were scattered and infrequent.
We apparently did not make our case well enough." Lawyers for the plaintiffs said Wal-Mart lost credibility when it put more than 50 managers on the stand to testify that they had never seen employees work off the clock. The Oregon suit was not a class action. Instead it involved a mailing sent out to 15,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees in Oregon that invited individuals to join the lawsuit.
Lawyers have sued Wal-Mart in more than three dozen states, seeking to gain class-action status in asserting that the company squeezes tens of millions of dollars of free work out of its employees each year by pressuring or encouraging them to work off the clock. "This case is about people working for free for America's largest employer," the plaintiffs' main lawyer, James Piotrowski, said in his closing argument last Friday. "It's about managers who learned how to put the pressure on." Carolyn Thiebes, the lead plaintiff who worked as a personnel manager at stores in Salem and Dallas, Oregon, said in an interview that Wal-Mart frequently piled on too much work for 40 hours, so she often put in five to 15 extra hours off the clock each week.
She said she feared that she would get in trouble if she put in for overtime or if she was seen as not finishing her assigned responsibilities within 40 hours. Ms. Thiebes testified that several Wal-Mart employees had formed what she called "the Over-40 Club," in which members worked more than 40 hours a week and then asked managers to subtract hours from their time cards so the cards showed that the employees worked only 40 hours.
She also testified that Wal-Mart was so averse to paying overtime that her bosses sometimes asked her to use her computer to erase hours from employees' time records to help hold down costs, especially overtime costs. Federal law required that workers be paid time-and-a-half for all hours over 40. "This verdict is great," Ms. Thiebes said. "I feel like somebody finally listened to me. I'm hoping that this sends a message to all Wal-Mart associates to come forward and speak up." Mr. Wertz and other Wal-Mart executives said the instances of off-the-clock work were isolated. "Our policy calls for disciplinary action to be taken against any manager who requires or even tolerates off-the-clock work," he said. Daniel Corey, a former lawn and garden manager for Wal-Mart in Pendleton, Oregon, testified that he feared he would lose his job if he took more than 40 hours a week to finish his job and then put in for overtime. "Because it's such a small community, jobs aren't that good there," Mr. Corey testified. "You held on to your job.
I feared losing my job. I feared getting fired." In a class-action lawsuit in Colorado, Wal-Mart reportedly paid $50 million two years ago to settle a case involving 69,000 workers in that state. In another case, it agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a case covering 120 workers at one store, in Gallup, New Mexico |
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Re: Wal-Mart's own audit shows labor laws broken |
by C.L.B.
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 5
16 Jan 2004
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Prior to the Hanford, Ca. store closing at 10:00 P.M. I over heard a conversation that made me stop dead in my tracks. A teenage employee in a very stressed voice asked the manager to let him out of the employee exit. She told him to go back to work. He told her he had already worked the limit the law had set and that he had school the next day and that he was tired. She said to him "do you want to quit?" He said "no" She then told him to go back to work. When he told her that he had already clocked out she said " go back to work if you want your job". I do not remember the date and I do not know either of their names, but what I say hear is the truth, and I have nothing to gain by this. |
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