Behind the Scenes of Big Companies

by Leighton T. & Ania L.
Published March 22, 2024

You may not know what happens behind the scenes, but many popular worldwide companies don’t pay and treat their employees fairly like Target, Walmart, and even Starbucks. Did you know that more than 2 billion of the world's working population are unsatisfied with dangerous working conditions, pay wages, and equal rights? Many loyal employees all over the world are being underpaid, working in bad conditions, and being mistreated for the work that they do to support themselves or their family.

One of the many world wide companies that mistreat their workers is Shien. The employees can work up to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week and with one free day a month. In fact, Shein employees get paid less than minimum wage, for just 2 cents per item and roughly $556 per month. Many reports say that people see employees having to wash their hair during breaks because of the little free time they have. There are also many hazards in the workplace, like no emergency exit, boarded up windows, and disgusting conditions like trash on the floor. Shein also verbally and physically abused their workers. Recently the Shein CEO has admitted to breaking the labor laws of no more than 40 hours of work a week and eight hours of working a day. You may think that shein is a trustworthy store with amazing deals on clothes, but with low prices comes higher work for employees.

Believe it or not, Walmart is also being held accountable for mistreatment of employees. Walmart’s points-based absence policy goes against the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by punishing employees for taking legally-protected time off work due to their own serious health requirements. In the article from A Better Balance it describes a loyal employee's experience with Walmart, “Ernest Paschal II, a 44-year-old father, was a dedicated Walmart employee who took pride in his work as an Asset Protection Door Host. During the summer of 2022, Ernest began to suffer from debilitating symptoms, later revealed to be caused by life-threatening sepsis. Despite following Walmart’s call out procedure for each of his absences and informing his supervisors of his illness, Ernest was assigned punitive points for every one of his sepsis-related absences. And although Ernest repeatedly asked his supervisors to waive these points and carefully followed his supervisors’ instructions to apply for protected leave, he was deemed ineligible for leave and fired while his accommodation request was still pending. Walmart’s callous actions devastated Ernest emotionally and financially.” Sadly, this is just one of Walmart’s problems with employee treatment, and this is just one worker’s experiences with this problem. There are many other large areas of improvement that need to be worked on and fixed.

The Starbucks many know and love is not as great as they think. Starbucks employees say that stores are being understaffed and have a ton of work to do. Also many Starbucks workers say their pay is still too low for what has become more intense work and affordability to live. A Starbucks shift supervisor said, “I’m not compensated enough for the amount of work that I do, because I’m still struggling to pay my bills, pay my rent, and buy groceries. I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck and it’s really hard to save money. I give so much of my time and energy to this job and the compensation doesn’t measure up to the amount of work that we have to do.”  This shows that Starbucks does not pay their employees the amount of money they deserve and need.

Many employees are being mistreated, underpaid, and forced to work in bad conditions by their companies. Popular workplaces around the world shouldn’t treat loyal committed employees badly.