Low Wage Work in America
As well known to all Americans Wal-Mart pays low wages. They often hire people for 30 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week and provide minimal health care benefits. For the past few years, issues concerning the company have become important as well and have begun dominating the news. In particular, Wal-Mart treatment of its employees has raised many issues in public and business discussions. Wal-Mart refers to its employees as associates a term intended to bestow a more lofty status than the term employees. Many different employee-related issues with respect to Wal-Mart have been the focus of much news coverage, the company has been accused of hiring too man part-time workers; offering jobs that are actually dead-end jobs; paying low wages and poor benefits; forcing workers to work off the clock, that is to work overtime without overtime pay; and taking advantage of illegal immigrants. There are also issues with regards to gender discrimination against women, who occupy most jobs at the company. Coupled with these allegations of employee mistreatment, the company which currently is not unionised has fought unions and unionization everywhere it locates. Several years ago, a series of predawn raids by federal agents were conducted in which they rounded up 250 illegal immigrants working as cleaning crews in 61 Wal-Marts across 21 states. Though not technically employees of the company, the company was accused by federal officials of knowing that its contractors were using the illegal immigrants as employees. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement program claimed it has wiretaps revealing that Wal-Mart knew contractors were using illegal workers in their cleaning crews. Wal-Mart continues to fight against the charges, because it reports that the company was cooperating with the government for as long as three years in federal investigations in Chicago and Pennsylvania. Wal-Mart reports that it was led to believe that it was not a target of the investigations