Wal-Mart May Value Families, but Women?
The economy being in the pits and all, I’d been thinking lately about getting a second job, just a bit of moonlighting to bring in a bit of extra mazuma.
So I went to this employment agency and told them what I was looking for, and they handed me a ballpoint pen and a clipboard and told me to sit down and fill out the job application.
Name, address, experience, mm-hmm, right, check, got it....
And then I got to the part of the form describing the job, and the work requirements:
“Must be willing to hang out at late hours at strip clubs, in the company of oversexed businessmen.”
“Must answer to nicknames like ‘Little Janie Q.’ ”
“Must accompany male executives and managers to lunch or dinner at T-and-A-themed restaurants, and be a good sport about it.”
And I’m thinking, whoa, Nellie! Just what kind of job is it I’m applying for here? Escort service?
I turned over the form and scanned it for the job title. There it was: “Assistant department manager, Wal-Mart.”
Wal-Mart? Family values Wal-Mart? All-American Wal-Mart? Heart of the Ozarks Wal-Mart, the biggest little company in America?
Gospel-true, swears a brief filed yesterday in federal court for a group of California women suing the big W for job discrimination.
From what the women have to say in that brief, the Wal-Mart working atmosphere for women really doesn’t sound much different from making a living in a strip club, except for the wardrobe.
At Wal-Mart, just as at Club Slee-Z, about three out of four employees are women.
At Wal-Mart, the women in the court brief say, there’s not a lot for them in the way of job advancement opportunities; at Club Slee-Z, too, the divide between labor and management seems pretty deep and clear.
At Wal-Mart, the women say, what you get in the way of $$ depends on what you’ve got in the way of XY -- the male chromosome. When one Wal-Mart woman asked why her pay was lower than that of a less-qualified male worker, she said she was told by her boss, an XY guy, “You don’t have the right equipment. You aren’t male, so you can’t expect to be paid the same.”
The brief is a piece of a larger argument that the court should make this case a class action: a suit not just about the hundred or so women whose declarations and depositions it details, but about the million and a half women who’ve worked for Wal-Mart in the last five years -- a lawsuit that could put an eight- or nine-figure dent in the fortunes of the Fortune 500’s No. 1 firm. A quarter-trillion dollars passes every year through the cash registers of the nation’s largest private employer, which began as Sam Walton’s little Arkansas five-and-dime.
Wal-Mart has certainly grown, but when it acts like the nation’s retail pulpit, it seems like it hasn’t completely grown up.
It refuses righteously to sell naughty magazines or oversexed video games -- but the court brief says that some of its men-in-charge think of pole-dancing as suitable business entertainment, and expect the women who work with them to sit there and enjoy the show.
Wal-Mart refused to carry an issue of Life magazine showing a naked mother breastfeeding her baby -- but the lawsuit says some of its male managers’ idea of a great place for a bas-cuisine business dinner is Hooters.
Wal-Mart has barred from its bins some CDs it finds offensive, and it has snipped obscene words and sexual images from CDs it does sell -- but the lawsuit says some of its male managers have no problem calling their women colleagues “girls” and “little Janie Qs.”
Wal-Mart stocked and then stopped selling the Kathie Lee Gifford line of clothing, which in 1996 turned into the designer label for the scandal of exploited overseas sweatshop labor -- but according to the brief still has no problem paying thousands less a year to women than to men doing the same job.
I wonder whether Dixie Chicks CDs sell for less than Garth Brooks CDs -- if Wal-Mart is stocking anything by those un-American Dixie dames at all these days.
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April has not been kind to Wal-Mart in California.
There’s this court brief released yesterday.
And at the beginning of the month, Wal-Mart stores across California stopped selling guns altogether, temporarily, after Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer found that Wal-Mart clerks broke the state’s gun law nearly 500 times, selling guns to convicted felons and letting buyers have guns before the 10-day waiting period had run out.
Wal-Mart, the nation’s biggest seller of just about everything, including guns, promises it’ll retrain its employees -- “associates” in Wal-Speak -- on the law. Too bad it evidently didn’t do the same for some of its managers.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Mona Williams, denied pervasive bias and disputed the allegations.
A woman vice president, who has since departed Wal-Mart’s premises, had the nerve to complain when the front ranks of the men leading Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club stores would slang around the terms “girls” and “little Janie Qs” in their weekly executive meetings, to speak about their employees.
When she complained, she got warned not be so overly judgmental.
Yeah, honey, lighten up. Have a little respect. For all you know, these fine men learned everything they know at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
