A Death at Walmart | The New Republic

OSHA’s inspection reports from Arkansas do not provide much
insight into Walmart’s worker safety practices there. From 2012 to 2022, OSHA
launched just eight Walmart inspections in Arkansas. In response to a Freedom
of Information Act request, the agency provided records for just three of these
cases, explaining that the others had been destroyed per government retention
policies. (At least two of the cases, both out of Bentonville, were new enough
to mandate preservation, but OSHA officials could not explain why they were
destroyed.)

Jessica Martinez, co–executive director of the National Council for
Occupational Safety and Health National, said OSHA is underfunded and
overwhelmed, making it nearly impossible to effectively oversee Walmart’s
behavior. 

She added that, in Janikka’s case, it seemed to her like “there was an almost intentional cycle to hide the truth.”

Walmart did not respond to
questions about Martinez’s characterization.

Since its founding, Walmart has successfully formed a sphere
of influence, creating what one former company official described to me as “the
bubble of Bentonville.” It is a regime that leaves lawmakers and low-wage workers alike especially
afraid to challenge company policies. 

One former Arkansas lawmaker said policymakers assumed that if they “went against
Walmart … there would be some consequences,” speaking about the atmosphere during their time in office in the 2010s.  

Through their respective foundations, Walmart and the
Waltons have also poured millions into a dizzying array of private and public institutions
across the state, from a downtown café and cocktail bar and well-trafficked
library in Bentonville to a slew of municipal police departments and the state
Department of Education. While there’s
significant evidence that elsewhere in the country, a
community’s earnings and employment dips when
Walmart comes to town, wages and employment
are up in Bentonville—with the important exception of the town’s hourly
associates, many of whom continue to work for low wages.

With Walmart’s latest construction project, the gulf between
Bentonville’s corporate class and the company’s low-wage workers in the city
and beyond has never been wider. In 2019, the company started building a
350-acre campus in Bentonville that will feature 12 big buildings, two large
lakes, a network of hiking and biking trails, and a hotel. The project was
seamlessly incorporated into Bentonville’s master development plan, a document
that was partially funded with a $200,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation
and co-authored by a senior town planner who was subsequently hired by the
company. (The foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Walmart
did not comment on its communication and relationship with the town planner.)

The headquarters is Walmart’s most conspicuous move in its
broader fight for the future. The company has begun competing directly with
Amazon through Walmart+, a delivery service that includes Paramount Plus
streaming access, a nod to Prime. It’s also pioneering automated warehouses and investing in a slew of
tech firms. In 2022, two members of the Walton family co-hosted a conference in Bentonville on “the future of
mobility” that was described in the press as “Burning Man meets TED meets
Davos.”

I visited Bentonville 60 years
after Walton founded Walmart and 30 years after he died, to speak with workers
and explore the company’s home-state advantages. Walton remains ever present,
his weathered face plastered on a big banner hanging in the airport, his name
memorialized in the “Sam’s Club” stores that dot the pastoral landscape. Walmart’s
65-acre home office, abutting Sam Walton
Boulevard, is adjacent to the cemetery where Walton is buried.

In recent years, Walmart has poached several Bentonville officials, including
police officers, an energy
specialist, and an I.T. expert. There’s also the city councillor who
moonlighted as a Walmart executive, and the former Walmart lawyer and ethics officer who is married to a powerful Benton
County official who presides over several essential county functions. Even
stranger, Bentonville Mayor
Stephanie Orman has often hosted her “Monday Morning Community Leadership”
meetings through Walmart’s Zoom account, according to calendars obtained
through records requests. (When asked why this happens, a town lawyer
responded, “I don’t have any idea.”) 

Across the street from the home
office is one of Bentonville’s upscale Walmart outlets. There, I spotted
two new forms of mobility: a “drone hub” delivery system and a robotic vending
machine that
puttered around the parking lot. Inside, the aisles were overflowing
with fresh produce, made-to-order sushi, and kombucha, as well as reverent
photos of Walton plastered on walls and coolers. Over the P.A. system, a
manager graciously thanked the store’s Associate of the Day.

But a few nights later, I came across a frustrated
associate, close to retirement age, at another high-end Bentonville supercenter
a few miles away. He was collecting carts and declined to give his name. At age
8, he said, he first stocked shelves in a small grocery store owned by his aunt
and uncle. His relatives had met Walton at a retail convention and felt he was
a man “looking out for the people,” he said.

Some employees are nostalgic for Walton’s few
worker-friendly policies, including giving employees time and a half on Sundays
and his popular profit-sharing program. Most of those practices no longer
exist.

Instead, Walmart’s policy changes in recent decades have
left countless associates stuck in poverty. A 2020
government analysis of 15 government agencies in 11 states,
including Arkansas, revealed that Walmart has the greatest number of employees
subsisting on food stamps and Medicaid. Despite its exceptional poverty rate,
Arkansas holds stringent work requirements for food stamp and Medicaid
recipients and stopped issuing
pandemic-related food stamp aid in June 2021, creating more pressure for
people like the cart-collecting employee to stay on the job.

He came out of retirement and took this overnight shift to
pay mounting bills, like rent, which had just gone up, and serious medical
treatments for his wife. He appreciated his paycheck but said it barely kept
him afloat. Walmart raised its national minimum wage to $14 an hour in January last year,
then, in September, cut starting pay for several positions by about $1. The
worker said his own meager pay raises have failed to keep up with inflation.
“My wife and I do struggle,” he said.

As he spoke, his walkie-talkie crackled with work requests.
The store needed a deep clean, a tractor trailer needed to be unloaded, and
dozens of tubs of pumpkins needed to be emptied out so that the tubs could be
used for trash. Many of these tasks, including cart duty, weren’t part of his
job description, but the store, he said, was always understaffed. “People won’t
come to a place where they don’t feel appreciated,” he explained. 

Walmart declined to comment on his experience.

In the absence of the kind of workplace safety support that OSHA
provides, Walmart employees have very few avenues for pushing back against
company policies and culture, in part because their employer has staunchly countered union efforts in the last 20 years.

A decade ago, unions were aggressively targeting the
company, with employees staging walkouts and protesting in Walmart parking
lots. In response, Walmart contracted with Lockheed
Martin for surveillance help. According to a 2015 Bloomberg investigation, officials at the
defense company monitored activists in Bentonville for
Walmart’s 2013 shareholder meeting, among other things. That same year, Walmart began securing
permanent injunctions in a few states, including Arkansas in 2015, that ban
organizers from store grounds.

“Walmart was able to handcuff us,” said Bianca Agustin, a
co-director of United for Respect. “We can’t go into stores, we can’t go in
parking lots. How do you organize workers under those restrictions?” 

Nonunionized workplaces like Walmart are far less likely
than organized shops to raise wage and safety concerns, mostly due to worries about
retaliation, and matters are made worse by Arkansas’s “at-will” employment
policy.

“Everybody up here is scared to death because Walmart is the
main employer in my community,” one former store manager in Mountain View
explained.  

Walmart did not comment on its history of union opposition
and the injunctions.

This leaves Walmart workers with scant institutional
support, especially in Arkansas. Despite the state’s hostile-to-labor
environment, frustrated associates and organizers periodically gather in
Bentonville at Walmart’s annual shareholder meetings to protest their working
conditions and demand better treatment. In 2022, after Janikka died, organizers
first proposed the PERRY Policy, to “make sure no
other family has to grieve like we’re grieving,” said Janikka’s sister Nicoshe. 

Some workers have become angry or emotional after getting to
Bentonville for these protests, struck by the perfect town that’s been built on
their backs. Others can’t help but be awed by Bentonville’s glamor and Sam’s
rags-to-riches story. Johnson, the former associate in Little Rock and West
Helena, felt underpaid and routinely mistreated by Walmart but was nonetheless
overcome during a trip to Bentonville. “It was just a beautiful feeling,” she
recalled. “I felt like I was a part of something.” 

Nicoshe herself holds an enduring, if complicated, belief in
the Tao of Sam. Last summer, she ventured to Bentonville for a shareholder
meeting, where she secured a speaking slot. After the event introduction, CEO
Doug McMillon gave a presentation. He congratulated the company on a 9 percent
sales jump over the previous year. (McMillon himself made $25.3 million that fiscal year.) 

A few minutes later, a recording that Nicoshe had made for
the meeting was played. She described Janikka as “the type of person Sam Walton
would have wanted to hear from, because she knew the ins and outs of her store
better than anybody.” And she demanded implementation of the PERRY Policy. 

“No one should have to work too sick to function and too
scared to call out,” Nicoshe said.

Her words momentarily pierced the bubble of Bentonville, but
they ultimately failed to burst it. The proposal failed, along the way allowing
for Bentonville’s many pleasant myths to persist. 

On the 16th of most months, she and other family members
gather at Janikka’s grave, lay roses on the ground, and pray. Then they drive
to the North Little Rock supercenter, where Janikka worked, and gather near its
signature blue sign, chanting, sometimes through tears, for change. 

Nicoshe remains intent on passing the PERRY Policy but
understands it could take a lifetime. 

“I didn’t realize how much power Walmart had until my sister
passed,” she told me. “They got it sewed up from here to Bentonville.”