Up Against Walmart Karen Olsson Analysis

The essays “Up Against Wal-Mart” by Karen Olsson and “Progressive Wal-Mart. Really” by Sebastian Mallaby portray Wal-Mart to two completely different lights. Olsson shames Wal-Mart for its poor health benefits, the meager pay Wal-Mart employees receive, and the managers who purposely fail to schedule enough workers. Mallaby, on the other hand, commends Wal-Mart on how much money the franchise saves customers.
Olsson’s essay begins with a depiction of a hectic day in the life of Wal-Mart staff member, Jennifer McLaughlin. The essay described the multitude of different tasks McLaughlin was expected to perform each day, such as, “man a register, hop on a mechanical lift to retrieve something from a high shelf, catch fish from a tank, run over to another department to help locate an item, restock the shelves, dust off the bike racks, or field questions about potting soil and lawn mowers” (607). McLaughlin comments on how stressful this can be,
Two of the biggest topics Olsson touches on are the issue of managers not paying employees for overtime and the meager employee wages. Olsson included an account of a widowed mother/Wal-Mart employee, Judy Danneman. According to the essay, Judy, “quickly realized that she would have to climb the management ladder in order to survive- because, as she puts it, ‘my kids had this bad habit of eating’. The only way to do that, she says, was to work off the clock: ‘Working unpaid overtime equaled saving your job’”. Another big topic addressed this this essay is health insurance. In the words of Jennifer McLaughlin, “[Wal-Mart is] on top of the Fortune 500, and I can’t get health insurance for my kid”. It is actually stated in Mallaby’s essay that 5% of Wal-Mart’s workers are on Medicaid. This is due to the large amount of money Wal-Mart takes out of the scanty paychecks of employees for health