Walmart has instituted a new mandatory dress code for employees. Last month, Walmart HR executive Barbara Simone took to the internal website to explain the new dress code rules to employees, in an extremely cheery fashion. One Walmart employee was nice enough to send us Barbara’s dress code posts, which are below. You’ll notice that Walmart employees—who are notoriously low-paid, even though they work for the richest family in America—are required to purchase their own new uniforms.
For inexplicable reasons, Walmart employees are allowed to leave anonymous comments [correction: not anonymous on the WM site, but the names have been removed here] on internal postings like these. Below is a small sampling of a couple of days worth of employee comments on the dress code posts. They provide a good window into the opinions of workers who are mostly kept silent. The Walmart employee who sent us this information told us, “I believe Walmart is placing yet another financial burden upon the workers who have to now purchase a new wardrobe on our poverty wages. I do hope that media attention will cause the company to either set up a hardship fund to help us pay for this, or even better, do away with it all together. I believe these comments will give you and your readers great insight into the problems with this corporation.”
WM Associate 29 Aug 2014
I sent an email to our wonderful new CEO because he said he was “listening” and wanted feedback well guess what? No one is listening to the associates or the customers for that matter not even him. Lets face it wal-mart is not a family anymore and they are not customer center. They don’t care as song as they are collecting their paychecks and bonuses. We, the ones that do the physical work, will be the ones to continue to suffer and our poor customers. I used to absolutely love my job and now I pray every night that I can find another one and leave this one. I work 2 jobs Walmart is my part time job but I work these 2 jobs for a reason, to take care of my family. It is pretty bad that my full time job is a administrative assistant in a law office and I can wear jeans there, but I can’t wear jeans in a grocery store. This whole mess is just non-sense.
