Sarah Hendee
I decided to choose the aspect of Wal-Mart from Barbara Ehrenreich’s chapter about Minneapolis for the midterm. In the book, Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich is a retail worker in the women’s department at a Wal-Mart store in Minneapolis. Her firsthand experience at working at this corporation, notorious for bad employment, opened the door for many various controversies to explore.
Who are the parties involved?
Wal-Mart-all the higher ups, CEO Mike Duke, store managers and other corporation executives
The employees
A union for retail workers, UFCW: United Food and Commercial Workers
A group similar to a union, OUR Wal-Mart: Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart
What brought them to the table?
Employees around the country have been suing Wal-Mart for various reasons for years about poor employee rights and benefits. This is what brings in the unions. The two groups mentioned above are trying to for a union for employees so they get the wages they deserve and overall fair employee benefits. In response to these unionizing efforts come in the Wal-Mart executives.
What are they saying to one another?
In one of the articles, a former VP of Wal-Mart describes unions as “blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.”
Barbara even said that during her orientation at Wal-Mart, she was told that unions were going to take their money and take away their voice.
Rhetorical Strategies?
The unions are obviously going to use the pathos appeal to win over the employees. They are going to use sympathy for the employees and their poor treatment by the employer. They want to play on the emotions to get the rights the employees deserve; after all they are people just like everyone else. The executives are going to use more logos to go against the unions. They want to point out why unions are illogical. They’ll probably use logic to back up why they pay their employees such low wages when they have over $10 billion in profit a year.
The map explained
I had Wal-Mart in the center for obvious reason; it is the center of the controversy. Are Wal-Mart employees being treated and paid fairly? Branching off of this, I had three main categories of unionizing, Minneapolis/Nickel and Dimed and then Employment/wages. From these I branched off into more detail. Employment/wages has the average wage for a retail worker and how much of the total workforce Wal-Mart is responsible for.
Unionizing breaks off into the two main groups associated in the battle to get Wal-Mart employees organized. The UFCW is an actual union trying to help in the fight for fairness. The OUR Wal-Mart is a union look-alike that is trying to achieve the same goal as UFCW. Mike Duke, the CEO is thrown in there because he is fighting against the union initiatives. It was also proposed in one of the articles that if his $6 million annual salary was reduced, the employees could have a slight raise.
The Minneapolis/Nickel And Dimed category is trying to relate the whole Wal-Mart controversy back to the book, Nickel and Dimed. An article showed that Wal-Mart is trying to heavily expand into Minneapolis. It is hypothesized that they are doing such projects to compete with Target. I used Barbara’s account of Wal-Mart to tie the controversy to a more narrow experience as well. She experienced the things mentioned in articles firsthand. Not only did she use her real life accounts, but she clearly did research herself on how Wal-Mart treats their employees.
Sources Cited
"Appeals Court: Walmart Owes $188 Million for Unpaid Work." - Business Management Daily: Free Reports on Human Resources, Employment Law, Office Management, Office Communication, Office Technology and Small Business Tax Business Management Daily. 25 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. <http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/14139/appeals-court-walmart-owes-188-million-for-unpaid-work>.
Blodget, Henry. "Walmart Employs 1% Of America. Should It Be Forced To Pay Its Employees More?" Business Insider. 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. <http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-09-20/news/30081785_1_minimum-wage-real-wages-employees>.
Diamond, Marie. "Barred From Unionizing, Walmart Workers Form New Group To Fight For Better Conditions." Think Progress. 21 June 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. <http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/06/21/245774/walmart-non-union-group/?mobile=nc>.
Vomhof, John. "Wal-Mart Seeking Downtown Minneapolis Spot." - Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal. 22 Apr. 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. <http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/print-edition/2011/04/22/wal-mart-seeking-downtown-mpls-spot.html>.
Wohl, Jessica. "Wal-Mart Trims Some U.S. Health Coverage." Reuters. Thomson Reuters, 21 Oct. 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. <http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/21/us-walmart-idUSTRE79K43Z20111021>.
Jake Ball: Walmart Controversy
