Lets be specific. This letter is regarding the bangor maine wal-mart store.
I am an employee who has been with the company for several years. My gender isnt really relevant since were not seen as people most of the time anyway here. Dont get me wrong most of the staff are good friendly people and not all of our management is bad at all. However semi recently there was a company wide change to the system that produces our yearly bonuses.
For example we have our profit sharing bonus AND we have our safety expense bonus. Basicly if we sell enough goods or enough idiots manage to not fall down in our store and make us pay for it we actually get a bonus. However even the safety bonus is moreso based on bottom line profit than actual safety. And the safety team is just laughable.
Well.....when it was nearly time for our bonuses to arrive the company must have decided that they were too large and they could put that money elsewhere. So all of a sudden it changed just in time to nix both of our bonuses so therefore we got niether. At the store meetings the excuse we recieved was detailed in how the new system works etc and the store manager co manager and one assistant have all mentoned that it upsets them and that they would have liked to get bonuses themselves. So they went from there to make it sound like our fault for so many customer accidents and so many back injuries on the recieving team. Now on the subject of those back injuries.
There are very few members, usually 3-4 SOMETIMES 5 unloaders per night. And if everything isnt done specificly on time on many occasions every unloader gets written up. Many have been written up over 5 times and gotten d days over it. Its just corporate pressure to try to get them to quit to hire newbies for lower wages.
But the injuries come from being told to go faster and often carry several boxes at a time or you wont be done in time. To do team lift items themselves etc. And then when someone gets hurt the safety team has an orgasm and runs out to say how foolish they were to work that way. And managment nods behind them the whole time.
So that helped butcher the safety bonus due to this wonderful new system. Also we have 4 or possibly more workers in positions that by company standard are full time positions and these associates are working 40 hours per week and have been flat out told they will never be made full time. By state law after a certain amount of time passes working full time hours you HAVE TO be made full time and they are aware of this. At the week that that point is reached that associate will be scheduled for part time hours for that one week to break the cycle then restart it the following week. Anyways back to what i was saying before.
Everytime some moron trips on their own feet or doesnt watch their kid and it falls out of a cart or some kid throws a ball and hits another kid WE pay for it.
Now here is the bangor store specific part. Remember how i said managment was whining about how they wish they could have gotten a bonus?
A store manager at this location often would get a bonus of at LEAST $80,000 annually! Usually 100k or more from their own mouth this is confirmed. Well we found out where the bonus money REALLY went to. A couple of us were on our way to speak to managment and heard them talking and waited outside and listened to their meeting for a couple minutes.
The store manager still got an $80,000 bonus and each assistant manager who normally makes 25,000 a year salary was just upped to $50,000 in this area because of undesirable living conditions which basicly translates to the same winter that they lived through in this state their whole lives anyway. Most of the whole store knows now that we were lied to in the meetings and its not been mentioned by anyone in managment at all nor will it be im sure.
We cant talk about it in store because they will find a way to get rid of us if they hear it.
When that anti wal mart movie was released an unloader told me that they were told that if they talk about that movie they will be terminated on the spot. Several people have put in notice several more are going to shortly, and the company still wins because they will put some pimple faced kid in there for starting wage to work 25 hours a week. If you work in a wal-mart store sometime listen in on a managment meeting or two, you might be surprised what you learn.
There are much shadier things going on in this company, hell in this store, but as long as you remember to smile managment will never care enough to think you might know something.
