Nothing really surprises me anymore.

“Wal-Mart was only helping police and not endangering employees when it asked them to search for a possible bomb at one of the chain’s stores, a company spokesman said Tuesday.

The manager of the St-Jean-sur-Richelieu outlet was alerted to a bomb threat last Thursday, said Yanik Deschenes, who confirmed that 40 sales clerks were asked to help find the device.”

This completely ruins Wal-Mart’s defense. First of all you “asked” your employees to do something dangerous while being in a position of authority. These employees are already exploited enough, and they certainly do not want to lose their jobs so they will usually listen to what their boss says – after all they are the ones who give them their pay cheques (Figuratively). I know I’d be a little bit intimidated if my boss “asked” me to do something like this. All the employees were probably too scared to speak up.

I know from experience. I use to work at Zellers. Now at Zellers they have a system called “Code 9″ which I always found very interesting. On my first day at Zellers I was told what “Code 9″ meant. It meant that all male employees would have to leave there job stations and run to the location that was announced. So for example if “Code 9, Main Entrance” was announced over the intercom, I as a male employee, was supposed to run out to the main entrance. I was told this was to help loss prevention catch shop lifters. And I would have to chase after these shop lifters. Now I knew full well this was not legal and really doubted that this was official policy. I asked other employees if they were told this. They said yes and also shared that they had been involved in “Code 9’s” before and they confirmed that it was real. They said they did it because it was their job to do it. Well it sure wasn’t my job! I knew I wasn’t being paid $7/hour to put my life in danger.

Of course when I looked up “Code 9″ in any of the procedure manuals, all it would say is “Loss Prevention Assistance Needed.” Very vague, huh? So if anything were to happen, Zellers could just say it wasn’t there policy and the employee was acting on his/her own. All the employees would have is a “he/she said” type of case; they’d have to get a lot of witnesses to the verbal instruction. And even then, it’s hard to organize anything like this with the high staff turn around at these type of work places.

Another verbal instruction I received while working at Zellers was that during a fire alarm, I was to empty all the money from the cash register into my cash bag and then go to customer service to drop it into the safe. Of course this wasn’t written anywhere either.

So I’m quite sure that Wal-Mart does not have any policy written about assisting during bomb threats. So it was all verbal instructions. I’m also quite certain that the police would not be asking citizens to look for bombs (If so, that’s a completely different rant.) So I wonder how much of this asking for assistance to find the bomb was really demanding assistance to find the bomb?

And one more rant about this article:

“We will never put in jeopardy the security of our employees.” - You already do by paying them a wage well below the poverty line.