Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Wal-Mart and the Culture of Striving

Nelson Lichtenstein explains why Wal-Mart has so few female managers:

There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.

Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.

For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.

The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.

So here is the situation: Wal-Mart wants managers who are committed deeply enough to getting ahead in the company that they will move between cities and put in long hours for a job that doesn't really pay very well. "Young men in a hurry" take this job, because they see becoming an assistant manager as a rung on a ladder that will take them someplace good. Since Wal-Mart management is a sort of cult that likes to promote from within rather than hire outsiders, some of these young men will indeed rise high in the company. During the decades of the company's rapid expansion, most could count on becoming store managers at least -- so long as they demonstrated the necessary commitment to the company and its culture.

This sets up a clash between the classic right-wing view that a company, especially a very successful one, has the right to run itself however it wants, and the old-style pro-union leftist view that people have a right to a decent job without having to work crazy hours or buy into some corporate claptrap. What a new-style capitalist leftist like me is supposed to think, I am not sure. As I just wrote about the sex-discrimination suit, I am skeptical of attempts to regulate how companies hire and promote workers. The union model of organized labor doesn't seem to be working these days, since workers don't much want to be organized and many don't want to turn their employers into their enemies. I think the way to go is to emphasize making the country a better place for everyone, even people who have to work at Wal-Mart, through things like better public transportation, better health care, better early childhood education, and a steadily rising minimum wage.

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