March 28, 2007

WalMart -- Playing Hard Ball With Employees, Too

Well, I guess it isn't just outsiders who WalMart uses its resources to go after -- they spare no expense when investigating rules violations, too.

The investigator flew to Guatemala in April 2002 with a delicate mission: trail a Wal-Mart manager around the country to prove he was sleeping with a lower-level employee, a violation of company policy.

The apparent smoking gun? “Moans and sighs” heard as the investigator, a Wal-Mart employee, pressed his ear against a hotel room door inside a Holiday Inn, according to legal documents. Soon after, the company fired the manager for what it said was improper fraternization with a subordinate.

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.

Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporterÂ’s telephone calls.

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.

WalMart is already famous for its strong-arm tactics for dealing with customers and others who litigate against it -- one older lady of my acquaintance was injured when a damaged changing station fell open as she passed it, striking her on the head and sending her tot he hospital. WalMart offered her a settlement for less than the amount of her medical bills, despite the fact that the evidence pointed to their own shoddy maintenance -- telling the injured 75-year-old that if she didn't accept it the company would "keep this thing in court until after you die, and we know that you need money to pay your medical bills now."

Nobody plays the game harder than WalMart.

Posted by: Greg at 10:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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