?I watched people who couldn’t even afford to buy Tylenol for their sick child, and that broke my heart.” -?Cyndi Murray, defacto Workers’ Rights Educator, Walmart
Cyndi Murray started working for Walmart 14 years ago in 1999 as a fitting room assistant. Now, she has a reputation for helping other employees know their rights, and as co-founder of OUR Walmart, an organization created to fight for respect in ?the workplace, helps workers navigate the rights Walmart managers will not tell them about. Again, Walmart managers will not educate their workers as to their rights under the law and in fact they go out of their way to keep workers in the dark and intimidated into not exercising their rights.
Murray says it was not so bad when she first started but in the past six years she has seen a ‘downward spiral’ in the way managers handle employees’ rights, such as insisting employees who have doctor’s notes lift heavy boxes, and hiding from them the fact that they can pick up extra shifts online to help supplement their meager incomes. Murray herself was harassed by a manager at one point. Murray has chronic back problems and had a doctor’s note stating the weight limits she could lift. Her manager called her into the office one day to inform her she was going to have to start lifting heavy boxes. Murray told the manager she had a note from her physician her personnel file.
“So she throws an empty folder at me across the desk,” said Murray. “So I said, ?Okay, well, I’ll call my attorney and I’ll have him fax you my medical restrictions.? Well she stood up on the desk ? and spit is coming out of this lady’s mouth ? she said, ?What are you doing? Threatening me?? I said, ?I’m not threatening you.” Murray added as she left the room, “This is over. You’re not going to talk to me like that. This is intimidation.??
As she left the meeting with the manager, another worker who was an organizer for a previous attempt to hold Walmart accountable fort their treatment of workers handed her a card from an earlier group attempt to make change.
?Right then and there, that’s what made me stand up,? she said. ?Because it wasn’t just me. They started doing it to associates for a long time, ” said Murray. “I decided then that I was not going to stand by and let it happen.?
Another circumstance Walmart seems hesitant to make accommodations for is pregnancy. In a story covered by the Washington Post, another co-worker of Murray’s,?Tiffany Beroid, gave her manager a note from her doctor explaining she has a high-risk pregnancy and needed to be assigned light work. Management informed her they had none, and sent her home, effectively giving her time off without pay. As a result, Beroid was unable to finish her nursing degree, and her husband had to work 18 hour days for the family to survive. Publicity of the incident forced Walmart to quietly change their policy, though too late for Beroid.
Many employees at Walmart, though hired to be ‘full-time’ employees, are told the hours are not available for them to work 40 hours in a week. Murray says this is not true. According to Walmart’s employee handbook, now only available online on their ?training computer terminals,??employees are able to pick up extra shifts and select scheduling to suit their schedules. Employees still have to get a manager to allow them access to the computer, and it takes time to find the handbook contents. Murray, a key organizer in the employee’s organization OUR Walmart, believes that the company made the handbooks accessible through the work terminals only once they realized people were actively using them. Though she believes that’s a fight for another day, she really wants people to be aware of their new rights.
?I really need Walmart workers to be educated about the fact that they have an available shift in their CBL terminal,” said Murray, “because it’s just hard for us to reach other associates.?
If you wish to learn more about OUR Walmart or your rights as a Walmart employee, you can visit the organization’s website here.
h/t AlterNet
edited by tw
