Wal-Mart on the Spot

Over the years we’ve heard a lot of stories about Wal-Mart screwing up by the numbers in human resources situations – the low pay, the lack of benefits, the attempting to take away a settlement from an employee who had been permanently disabled in order to recover the company’s insurance costs, the crappy working conditions and hours, and so on. This has sometimes contributed to the company’s public image problem, and it has definitely led some people who work there to believe that they can sue the company for anything they want, since no jury is going to side with the evil retailer over the innocent employee they’ve been screwing over. According to a story that broke last week, however, this does not appear to be the case. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your point of view…

You can see the original story on the Herald-News site published and maintained by the Sun-Times, but the gist of it is that a former Wal-Mart employee sued the company claiming that she was wrongfully terminated on the basis of her race and her religion. The company was insisting that the former employee was fired for cause, and that neither race nor religion had anything to do with it. In last week’s ruling the court found for the company – which seems much less surprising when you realize that the incidents over which the former employee was terminated involved “screaming over” a lesbian co-worker about how God does not accept gays, they “should not be on Earth,” and the co-worker was going to hell. To make matters worse, there were five witnesses to the incident, and the company was also able to prove that the fired employee had been made aware of company policy against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that such behavior was a termination offense…

The case doesn’t really lend itself to an ethics post, since there doesn’t appear to be any “other” side to this one. Religious discrimination and harassment of other employees can not be tolerated in any workplace, and Wal-Mart had followed state and Federal law to the letter, both in enacting the policy and in communicating to the employees. In fact, if the defendant in this case had been almost any other company it would be a total non-story; the facts appear to be that the company did nothing wrong and the plaintiff (the former employee) had no case. The only explanation I can imagine for why an attorney was willing to bring this action at all, let alone why the court was willing to hear it, is that the company’s abysmal record on human resources practices made it just barely plausible that there might actually be some basis for the lawsuit. Although if Wal-Mart remains as careful and thorough as they appear to have been in this case, that reputation may begin to recede…

We were all taught the fable about not judging a book by its cover back in elementary school; those of us who study human behavior are often reminded that even individual people are rarely one homogenous structure, and most large organizations can not be, by their very nature. It’s beyond question that Wal-Mart has some incompetent managers in its hierarchy, and some fundamentalist idiots in its rank-and-file, just like any other large company that has ever existed. To assume that any specific manager within the structure must be incompetent because some of them are is asinine, however, and so is assuming that any managerial action the company takes must be a violation of state and Federal labor laws. Of course, it’s also stupid to assume that workplace behavior that would be illegal for the company is perfectly acceptable for an employee, provided that he or she is deeply religious and a member of a traditionally oppressed minority…

But that’s a post for another day…