Last week, Walmart CEO Mike Duke was inducted into the Network of Executive Women's CPG/Retail Diversity Hall of Fame. Ironically, at the same time, female Walmart employees across the country were continuing their protracted fight for justice against discrimination in the workplace.
Amazingly, Duke was honored for supporting women. But the facts are not on his side. Duke's company recently spent 10 years fighting the largest gender discrimination class action lawsuit in U.S. history. While Walmart poured money into disputing the technicalities of the case, a study from the case's early days found that women truly did earn less money than men at Walmart.
Mike Duke and Walmart fail to provide real opportunities for women. The study cited two causes of the gender pay gap at Walmart: Women worked disproportionately in lower paying hourly jobs, and on top of that, they earned less money than men with the same position. In 2010, a majority of Walmart managers and officials in the U.S. were men, even though a majority of its U.S. workers -- and shoppers -- were women.
To make matters worse, Walmart was already aware of its discriminatory practices long before the landmark lawsuit was filed. In 1995, Walmart hired a law firm to conduct a review to determine their vulnerability to just such a suit. The review found that women earned considerably less than men across the board, with salaried men earning 19 percent more than women. Men were also five and a half times more likely than women to be promoted into management. Walmart didn't learn their lesson then -- and there's scant evidence that Duke has learned it now.
While the CEO accepted his award at a golf tournament at a private Arkansas country club, female associates were -- and are -- seeking new avenues to make their voices heard. Almost 2,000 current and former Walmart employees have filed sex discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the past year. The complaints were filed in 48 states and every Walmart region in the U.S. Women who worked at California and Texas Walmart stores have already filed new class action lawsuits in federal courts. And numerous others are expected this year.
Earlier this month, a group of Walmart associates went to the company's annual meeting in Arkansas to confront Duke with concerns about their workplace. These associates have come together to form the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, calling for respect from the company and fair treatment in the workplace. Their ranks are growing by the day and include women like Barbara Collins, an associate and single mother of two whose oldest daughter is graduating from high school this year. Collins' wage isn't enough to make ends meet, much less help her daughter go to college. It was this worry -- that even a full-time job wouldn't be enough to help her children succeed -- that spurred Collins to join OUR Walmart and call for change for herself and women just like her.
OUR Walmart is helping Walmart's female associates find their voices -- and they're using them to call out Duke's lack of leadership in making sure women are treated fairly at Walmart. Given the 2,000 lawsuits for gender discrimination filed against Walmart, an organization like OUR Walmart is not just important -- it is absolutely necessary to ensure women are respected in their places of work.
Meanwhile, Walmart's Political Action Committee has shelled out millions in federal elections and has disproportionately supported politicians who have dismal records on issues relevant to women. Between the 1990 and 2010 election cycles, Walmart's PAC gave $2.3 million to members of Congress who received scores of 10 or less on the American Association of University Women 2011 scorecard. These are lawmakers who opposed legislation including the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act and funding for Planned Parenthood.
So instead of celebrating Mike Duke's dubious induction into the Network of Executive Women's Hall of Fame, let's honor his company's employees who are fighting from coast to coast to achieve the very inclusion and diversity for which Duke is wrongly lauded.
Follow Terry O'Neill on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Terryoneill
Karin Kamp: Is Walmart Good for Women?
Wal-Mart thrives by creating poverty. Then "poor and working-class" people shop and work there, plus rely on public assistance, because there are no decent jobs left. That's the actual dynamic.
More good news!!?
Kai
The shopping experience at Wal Mart suffers because of its poor employees. When I shop there I view the unpleasantness of dealing with some of them as a tax that I should pay to keep these women off the welfare rolls. To prove that no good deed goes unpunished, some of these loser employees have had the nerve to sue Wal Mart and thus bad mouth the best thing that ever happened to them. That's human nature I guess.
You haven't, at any point, established that any of these women DESERVE to earn the same as the men in question.
Your presumption that someone should be promoted just because she has a vagina is an absurd extreme of delusional feminist rhetoric, yet post-feminist writers routinely use it as a fundamental tenet of their arguments. Obviously, having some basic level of intellectual credibility isn't a primary consideration for many women. Which might explain the wage gap in academia.
One day, in the not-too-distant future, with the right environmental stimuli, a woman somewhere in the universe will take a look at thousands of years of recorded history and consider entertaining the possibility that a man, somewhere, is better than her at something.
The free market just called. It begs to differ.
"I will point to your following comment ... as proof that sexism is alive and well"
And since when has a woman needed more than one unrepresentative anecdote from which to generalise?
I hope we are a growing trend!!! F&F!!!
"Duke's company recently spent 10 years fighting the largest gender discrimination class action lawsuit in U.S. history. While Walmart poured money into disputing the technicalities of the case..."
Oh yes, a technicality. It was a technicality that those women were not eligible for a nationwide class; it was a technicality that Wal-Mart has a constitutional right to face accusers and respond to individual charges... the list goes on, but you get the idea.
What are note mere technicalities are that:
1--> There was zero evidence that there was an illegal practice at work at all of the locations sought to be covered under the class.
2--> The real winners of the class would have been the lawyers taking tens of millions off the top (vice the women who would have received, at best, a few hundred dollars and lost the right to sue in the future).
3--> Those women are now still moving forward with their class-action suits - in smaller suits that actually have grounds for discrimination under the law.
Another ugly fact: disparate impact doesn't have any place in employment law (frankly, there's no clear case it has a place in ANY form of law); thus you have to prove a discriminatory practice based exclusively on gender. That's a high bar, and complaining about it and citing disparate impact statistics is just another way of avoiding the legal issue.
http://www.thegreaterbooks.com/product_info.php/cPath/21_26/products_id/32