Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is currently entangled in a legal battle that will decide if the company has engaged willfully in gender-based discrimination. Underlying causes, organizational culture and ethical issues will be examined in determining how the largest private employer in the United States could have fallen prey to unfair labor practices. "In 1999, women constituted 72% of Wal-Mart's hourly employees, but only 33% of its managerial employees" (Bhatnagar, 2004). This fact and many others are the reasons many people allege that Wal-Mart has unfair labor practices. The Dukes v. Wal-Mart case challenged the hiring, promotion and pay practices of Wal-Mart. The case was filed in June 2001. When the case reached class certification …show more content…

Also, women are paid a lot less than their male counterparts. "A female full-time hourly employee, working at least a 45 hours/week at Wal-Mart, made about $1,150 less per year than men in similar jobs" (Bhatnagar 2004).
One of the root causes of problems with Wal-Mart is that they try to minimize costs to raise their profits. They try to buy goods cheap from suppliers so they can sell the same product for less than the competitors. Wal-Mart puts financial strain on the suppliers to give them what they want, when they want. Wal-Mart can suffocate a business into giving them what they want at the price they want it at. The main reason Wal-Mart can do this is because they have a large number of stores in the United States as well as Mexico and Canada. Wal-Mart is the largest retail store in the United States. In 2005, Wal-Mart had a workforce of more than 1.2 million workers. Wal-Mart's total revenue in 2004 was $258.7 billion.
Management has many responsibilities. Many of those responsibilities have to do with keeping the company profitable and its costs low. Wal-Mart is the same as any other company yet they have the added pressure of making sure that they offer their customers everyday low prices. In order to maintain this promise to their customers, leadership had to find ways to offset expenses. Company management receives handbooks upon joining the company and part of the handbook guides managers in ways to pick and choose