Walmart Case Study

Wal-Mart is a billion dollar company that has thousands of stores and millions of employees. Naturally issues are going to arise in any organization, but when there is a company as large as Wal-Mart, these issues will be public and become headline news. Wal-Mart has been the center of attention over the past decades regarding the ethical and unethical practices within the organization. Many lawsuits were filed by current and previous employees in regard to the unethical practices of Wal-Mart. Some of these unethical practices are making employees work-off-the-clock, sexual discrimination, health benefits, and the use of illegal aliens for employment, unions, and child labor laws. In the following paragraphs, this case study will be broken down into further explore these unethical issues with Wal-Mart and how Wal-Mart decided to handle each of these issues

The major issue regarding Wal-Mart recently is the “off-the-clock work” that management enforces inside their stores. According to Stanwick and Stanwick (2009), between 2000 and 2001, 11 states had pending lawsuits against Wal-Mart for “refusing to pay overtime for workers and failing to compensate workers when they worked during their scheduled breaks.” The company settled many of these lawsuits, but the practices still continued throughout the years. One employee stated in his or her complaint against Wal-Mart that management was making employees work at night and locking them inside the store and refusing them to leave. If something would have come up like an emergency, these employees were faced with either leaving the store to get help or losing his or her job.

Laws have been put into place to protect employees who work more than the required number of hours each week and Wal-Mart is breaking these laws and should be punished. According to Meeks (2012), “unless you are specifically classified as an “exempt” worker, your employer must pay you over time wages for any hours