Names and locations in the part that follows will remain anonymous due to the pending lawsuit in this case.
Back around the end of September, a friend of mine began working as a night stocker at Wal-Mart. He's openly gay, and Wal-Mart is supposed to have a zero-tolerance policy on anything that creates a hostile work environment.
Three weeks after starting there, he was getting harassed by coworkers, including his openly homophobic manager. He was pulled into the office. They complained about how even though he had his work done (and had often done more) he was leaving at his scheduled time. Keep in mind that he doesn't have a car, and his ride to and from work (another coworker) was leaving at the same time. He obeyed the company rules and did as he was told while others did not. Yet, they never were talked to, only he was. In one incident, a female employee complained because after he finished with his aisles, he came over to help her and then stopped to go up front to assist a pregnant customer with her purchases out to her vehicle. When he returned, the female coworker that he was helping was complaining to the management that he'd stopped helping her and left her with all the work to do.
On the weekend before Halloween 2005, another employee tore into him in front of the store's management. At one point, she used the words "fag" and "white trash".
Management did nothing.
A friend of my friend saw the incident and reported it to Wal-Mart's corporate offices. The woman who'd harassed him was to be suspended without pay, and the management of the store was to be investigated.
A week later on Friday, November 4th, my friend was injured when he was pinned between an overly stacked pallet that fell over and a frozen foods gondola in one of the aisles. Other Wal-Mart employees simply laughed at him when that happened. A customer had to help him get the boxes off of him.
He was taken to the hospital with a sprained ankle.
That following Monday evening, he and his boyfriend went in to do some shopping. My friend went to get his schedule and ran into his manager, who told him that he didn't want to see him in there on crutches again and to stop faking his injury.
The following night, he was to be a door greeter so that he could stay off his ankle and let it mend since it had been severely swollen. Instead, he was put back to stocking shelves, aggravating his injury.
According to his doctor, he now has nerve damage, possibly permanent.
On Friday, November 11th, he went in to work as a door greeter. He was fired 15 minutes after he got there. The management told him that he'd been there less than 90 days. That was their reason for firing him. They also already had hired a replacement for him and had the replacement working, which meant that they'd planned on firing him for some time before then. The woman who was harassing him was working. She told him, "Better you than me."
While waiting on his ride home afterwards out in the parking lot, she kept coming out, giving him the finger, and yelling "Faggot!" at him.
There was a manager outside who did nothing the whole time.
Wal-Mart's HR department contacted my friend the following week to follow up on his report of the harassment at the store. They had no idea that he'd been injured or fired.
My friend will be suing Wal-Mart. He was looking at having to have surgery on his leg as he didn't have any feeling in it from the knee down. The numbness was from the nerve damage caused by his former manager who forced him to work on his injury. Fortunately, the surgeon he went to see decided to instead try electro-stimulation treatment which allowed him to regain the use and feeling in his leg. Apparently, when his manager had forced him to work on his leg without crutches, the strain on his injury was so great that his leg shut itself down out of selfpreservation.
If you think Wal-Mart is such a great place to shop, think about the abuse that employees go through to get those products out to you. Wal-Mart doesn't care about their employees, and all they want from customers is our money. If you think about shopping at Wal-Mart, imagine seeing one of the employees there getting harassed, a pallet of products falling on the employee, and then that employee getting laughed at while he is injured and then later fired so that Wal-Mart can try to squirrel out of having to pay for that person's injuries.
Is that the kind of place you want to shop? I don't, and I will never shop at another Wal-Mart as long as I live.
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