Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart

by adminSociology

Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart

Liza Featherstone

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0465023169

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


On television, Wal-Mart employees are smiling women delighted with their jobs. But reality is another story. In 2000, Betty Dukes, a fifty-two-year-old black woman in Pittsburg, California, became the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, a class action, representing 1.6 million women. In her explosive investigation of this historic lawsuit, journalist Liza Featherstone reveals how Wal-Mart, a self-styled "family-oriented," Christian company: Deprives women (but not men) of the training they need to advance. Relegates women to lower-paying jobs like selling baby clothes, reserving the more lucrative positions for men. Inflicts punitive demotions on employees who object to discrimination. Exploits Asian women in its sweatshops in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth. Featherstone goes on to reveal the creative solutions that Wal-Mart workers around the country have found, like fighting for unions, living-wage ordinances, and childcare options. Selling Women Short combines the personal stories of these employees with superb investigative journalism to show why women who work these low-wage jobs are getting a raw deal, and what they are doing about it. A new preface to the paperback edition will reflect on Wal-Mart's response to this lawsuit and its critics-including this one.

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The Waltons were friends, Sam was at best lukewarm to the idea.8 Ortega speculates that the retail mogul may have disliked Clinton’s liberalism: she had been actively crusading for a higher sales tax to fund the state’s abysmal school system, and for high school health clinics to distribute condoms and other contraceptives.9 In November 1986, the persistence of the Walton women paid off, and Hillary Clinton became Wal-Mart’s first female board member, a position for which she accepted $15,000 a.

Then it turned to management.” In earlier times the employees had a sense that their opinion mattered, but in her later years at the company, “the associates weren’t listened to as well as in the earlier days.” For example, Wal-Mart had long had a tradition of holding “grassroots” meetings to find out what employees’ concerns are, and to get their ideas about how the business could be improved. These meetings embodied Wal-Mart’s notion that workers mattered: an employee could raise any issue she.

Evaluation. In 1993, Lucky agreed to pay nearly $75 million in damages: $1.2 million to the six named plaintiffs (the representatives of the class), $59.1 million to be distributed among the 14,000 class members, and $13.7 million for plaintiffs’ legal fees. (This was one of the settlements that later helped Seligman to start the Impact Fund.) A class member’s individual cut could range from $100 to $10,000, depending on her seniority and how much of her potential earnings she’d lost to Lucky’s.

Dead-end jobs, and that its performance as a corporate citizen leaves much to be desired.” A Wal-Mart spokesman, Jay Allen, told the paper, “They didn’t give us good marks on listening. Sometimes it was as basic as the parking lot was not clean, and that’s not treating the community with respect.”12 Clearly the report also found problems with public perception of the way women were treated, because in response to the study, new ads were created that presented Wal-Mart as a company that offers.

Superstore in Inglewood, he invited Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott on the air for a fawning interview, taking no calls. In early April 2005, journalists of all races were invited to a special conference near Wal-Mart’s Arkansas headquarters to hear company executives make the case that “Wal-Mart is good for America.” This event was, by all accounts, a bust for the company. Wal-Mart had been expecting at least 100 people, but only 53 showed up. There were many awkward moments—a journalist who attended.

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