Business is highly complex, and the success of a company in any industry depends on a variety of factors. One such factor is the ability of the venture to establish good relationships with the customers and society as a whole. Thus, the field of business ethics works toward building trust between a business and its stakeholders and establishing a reputation based on the pattern of ethical or unethical behavior (“Investopedia”). The paper will discuss Walmart and examine whether the company has any ethical violations.
Walmart is a large retail corporation operating a variety of hypermarkets and department stores. Headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, the company aims to provide its customers with a seamless offline and online shopping experience. Walmart has an extensive ethics and compliance program that guides the company’s decision-making process and ensures that its employees across multiple stores act in accordance with its ideals (“Walmart”). The core values of the company include acting with integrity, respecting individual employees, providing customers with a superior experience, and striving for excellence at work (“Walmart”). It should be noted that Walmart’s performance is somewhat dependent on its ability to act in an ethical manner.
Despite an extensive ethics program established at the company, Walmart has been at the center of several scandals concerning ethical violations. The latest ethical violation of the company is its involvement in the fraud. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) states that the money transfer services offered at Walmart stores were not secure and allowed falsified transactions and the company’s customers being defrauded of millions of dollars (“Federal Trade Commission”). It is noted that Walmart failed in its responsibility to train employees on the money transfer system as well as warn customers of the potential activity of scammers (“Federal Trade Commission”). Furthermore, the venture profited from the fees of these financial transactions. Although the failure to prevent fraud at the stores cannot be viewed as unethical, the fact that the company profited from it while allegedly knowing of the transgressions makes Walmart’s behavior highly unethical.
Furthermore, despite the company’s promise to act with integrity and honesty toward its customers and employees, a pattern of disreputable behavior was noted concerning Walmart staff. For example, the corporation wrongly singled out managers as a group of personnel not eligible for overtime pay (Jewett). By refusing to pay managerial staff for overtime work, the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, among other legislations (Jewett). The company is often accused of mistreating employees and exploiting them in order to generate profit. From its conception, Walmart refused to allow its staff to unionize, preventing them from being able to demand better working conditions and pay without fear of retaliation. The company was accused of intimidating workers to prevent unionization and employed anti-union specialists not to allow labor unions (Mattera). In addition, the corporation is accused of paying extremely low wages, failing to provide employees with good benefits, and discrimination in the workplace, particularly gender discrimination (Mattera). Thus, the known behavior of the company towards its employees is highly unethical.
In summary, Walmart is one of the largest retail corporations in the world. However, it fails to set the standard of practice regarding ethical and socially responsible behavior. Walmart allowed its money transfer system to be abused by scammers while profiting from illegal activity. Moreover, the company showed a pattern of unethical behavior toward employees in failing to compensate them fairly and actively preventing unionization.
Works Cited
“FTC Sues Walmart for Facilitating Money Transfer Fraud That Fleeced Customers Out of Hundreds of Millions.” Federal Trade Commission, 2022. Web.
“How Do Business Ethics Differ Among Countries?” Investopedia, 2022. Web.
Jewett, Abraham. “Walmart Lawsuit Alleges Overtime, Equal Pay, FMLA Violations.” Top Class Actions. 2023. Web.
Mattera, Philip. “Wal-Mart: Corporate Rap Sheet.” Corporate Research Project. 2020. Web.
“Ethics & Compliance.” Walmart, 2022. Web.