March 30, 2007

No rulebreaking at Wal-Mart!

Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules. ...The investigators — whose résumés evoke Langley, Va., more than Bentonville, Ark. — serve as a rapid-response team that aggressively polices the nation’s largest private employer, enforcing Wal-Mart’s modest by-the-books culture among its army of 1.8 million employees. Wal-Mart is certainly not the only company, or even the first, to investigate its employees, a practice used widely in corporate America to guard against fraud and protect trade secrets. But despite the retailer’s folksy Arkansas image, few companies are as prickly — or unforgiving — about its employees’ wayward behavior, a legacy of its frugal founder, Sam Walton, who equated misconduct with inefficiency that would cost customers money.

posted by HawthorneWingo 17 years ago
  • Wow. I had an idea, but had no idea that they took it to that level. Fascinating read. Thanks for the post, HW. Mr. Scott conceded that the team has been unusually busy lately. “You almost have to laugh,” he said of executives engaging in egregious conduct. “You can’t make this stuff up.” A product of the environment in which they work perhaps?
  • A product of the environment in which they work perhaps? I don't think so. Most big companies have these strict policies for their executives. It's probably a positive byproduct of the Enron scandal, but nobody wants to be seen partying it up on shareholder's money anymore. I briefly worked for a huge multinational after they swallowed up the smaller company I was at. They had a policy of instant termination for any executive who used the company expense card for non-business use. Even for as little as a few hundred dollars.
  • They had a policy ... Yep. Everyone has a policy. Ever read the Soviet constitution?
  • What I was meaning to say is that, perhaps, execs engage in such egregious conduct partly in response to the restrictive policies that they are bound to in the work environment (irregardless of the company, I wasn't singling Wal-Mart out). Surely plain-vanilla human nature is to blame for a good portion of such behavior, but part of me thinks there's a streak of "rebellious" nature amongst execs that likes to peek out and say, Aha! I got away with it!
  • No...haven't got around to that yet. Care to explain?
  • Having a policy is one thing, applying it is something else, rocket. The Soviet constitution provided for fair trials and no torture, among other things, that they really had no intention of following. I'm cynical about corporations -- I served on a jury on a wrongful termination trial where the corporation had hundreds of pages of policy that they ignored when it applied to them, enforced when it applied to the employee ;)
  • Clarification: "them" in my previous reply meant "their executives"
  • It's true in my own experience/observations - the more draconian the emplyer, the more the employee feels he's entitled to whatever misbehavior he can get away with as compensation.
  • Apologies in advance for the derail- Ever read the Soviet constitution? Strangely enough I've never even been asked that before. (Not that I was now either). Is it the 1977 Soviet Constitution? It has the word "peasants" in Article 1. Well the English translation anyway.
  • A little cynicism is healthy, Zorgon, but at least for the corporation in question, they seemed to do a good job of enforcing it. At the quarterly meeting I attended they listed four executives who were fired for egregious spending. If only governments and public corporations could do the same.
  • Corporate fascism. Only in America, China, Burma, and other totalitarian states.
  • So Walmart claims they sent an investigator to Guatemala to investigate whether 2 employees were involved in a relationship because they believe that such fraternizing somehow costs the company money? Um, hello? What about the cost of sending the investigator to Central America in the first place? If I were a shareholder, I'd be screaming my head off about wasteful spending. For a company so driven about bottom-line efficiency, I'm shocked they'd allow expenditures of this nature.
  • Jay, I think that something like that is likely seen as a preventative expense -- it may cost them a lot in this instance, but it would be seen as stopping such activities in the future. By way of example, a while ago, I was at a firm which represented a local casino, which was just getting off the ground. They were getting sued left right and centre with all kinds of negligence suits, slip 'n' falls, all sorts of garbage claims. The casino would make settlements on claims with merit, but didn't want to make settlements just to get someone to go away. They would up taking a lot of people to the mat during those first few years and ruining them in the process. It cost the casino a lot of money to do it, but it got out the point that they were playing hardball, and that you'd better be a serious claim if you were going to take them on. The initial outlay of that strategy was pretty big, but in the long term, it was going to save them a lot of money...
  • If only governments and public corporations could do the same. Heartily agree!
  • None of it seems particularly relevant until the end of the article when it is sort of off-handedly mentioned that the affair-having manager had criticized the conditions he'd found in the company's central american factories and the investigation may have been realiatory . Why wasn't this point developed? As the story stands, it's a series of somewhat odd over-exuberant policy enforcement on Walmart's part, but nothing terribly egregious. Then, right at the end, this bombshell is dropped and ignored.
  • Reasons one would want to be a manager for a company: 1. The pay is tremendous. 2. The job carries with it a sense of pride or prestige in the community. 3. You get to use your status to sleep with people under you who wouldn't give you the time of day ordinarily. Wal-mart is going to have to come up with a Number 4 on this list, because they just ran out of reasons to be a manager there.
  • Church lady don't care about no conditions in no central american factories.
  • Leaving aside the big issues, there's something somewhat comedic about someone who was a top killer ace spy at the CIA who quits and now works for Walmart.
  • Wal-mart have a new slogan "Arbeit macht frei"
  • StoryBored, After the cold war ended, a lot of FBI and CIA folks found work in the private sector becoming corporate spies. There are a few books on the subject that I highly recommend reading. (don't remember the titles). The French have the honor of being number one in corporate espionage.
  • ARBEIT MACH FREI: Was a phrase used on the gates of Nazi concentration camps, Dachau and Auschwitz, which means "work makes you free". In case anyone besides me was wondering. MonkeyLion, by coincidence I read about the French being no. 1 in corporate spying recently in a book called "The Spys among us". It implied that their intelligence services regularly partner up with French companies for corporate espionage fun & games.
  • ...the affair-having manager had criticized the conditions he'd found in the company's central american factories and the investigation may have been realiatory Could it be? I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.
  • Leaving aside the big issues, there's something somewhat comedic about someone who was a top killer ace spy at the CIA who quits and now works for Walmart. Money don't get everything it's true But what it don't get - I can't use! Now gimme moh-hooo-nay! That's what I want!
  • I used to fight the Eastern blocs, But now I spy for the Big Box. For Capitalism I risked my neck; Now capitalists sign my paychecks. Now that Russia’s our good neighbor I keep an eye on the cheap labor. The Cold War was exciting times, Now I save Walton nickels and dimes.
  • A Wal-Mart employee, who was fired last month for intercepting a reporter's calls, says he was part of a sophisticated surveillance operation. Security worker Bruce Gabbard was fired last month after 19 years with the company for intercepting a reporter's phone calls, the paper said. Gabbard said he recorded the calls because he felt pressured to stop embarrassing leaks. But he said his spying activities were sanctioned by superiors. Gabbard said that as part of the surveillance, the retailer infiltrated an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting last year and deployed monitoring systems to record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network. Schwiiiing!
  • Freakazoid. Sprawl-Mart iz wack.
  • Wal-Mart has hired Democratic P.R. experts to help improve its reputation on such issues as low wages, miserly benefits, sex discrimination, and union busting. .
  • Oh and, The image of the company is not helped by the immoderation of Sam Walton’s widow and children, who together control forty per cent of Wal-Mart’s outstanding shares, and who are worth roughly eighty billion dollars; they are, by a striking margin, the richest family in America. (They are worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.) Just a fun image to kick around. The 80 Billion Dollar Family. Buh-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na