Canadian newspapers reported yesterday that many store workers were indeed traumatised by having to stay behind, searching for a bomb, together with police, rather than leaving their workplace together with the evacuated customers. The store manager's comments that any worker who wanted could have left is a poor defence. Who would really have dared to do this in Wal-Mart, with its track record of brutal employer behaviour?
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Wal-Mart
sends employees to search for bomb rather than evacuating them Wal-Mart has scored new low points when it sent some forty Canadian employees to look for a bomb in a store instead of evacuating the premises. This followed a bomb threat received at a Wal-Mart store some 60 km from Montreal, in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu.
According to
the Canada.com network, the story came out
as a young employee, shaken by the incident,
told her mother about it. She then
complained both to Wal-Mart, and to the
media.
This latest incident is of course incredible, but not really surprising. We remember how Wal-Mart used to lock in workers in their store overnight, in an apparent attempt to make sure that merchandise is not lost. Also here, the Bentonville multinational acted differently: Normally, a retailer gives absolute priority to the safety of its workers, not to defending its property. Luckily, there was no bomb in the Canadian Wal-Mart store. But there could have been one. |