Walmart's Alleged Fairness and Ethics Violations

Unit V Scholarly Activity
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Walmart’s Allegations
The United States (US) has several large companies, but Walmart surpasses them all. Walmart is a multinational retailing corporation that boasts grocery stores, departmental discount stores, and hypermarkets. It was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton and was incorporated in 1969 (Reich & Bearman, 2018). Walmart has a market capitalization of over three hundred and eighty-six billion dollars, making it the twelfth most valuable company in the world (Reich & Bearman, 2018). It poses a massive positive impact on the country’s economy. Further, it employs more than two million workers as a private entity and has over eleven thousand stores and clubs in different countries (Reich & Bearman, 2018).
Despite its prominence and size, Walmart has had numerous allegations of violating fairness and ethics. Some of the highlighted issues involve the compensation of workers, gender-based discrimination, and exploitation of workers. The company has been in the limelight for not allowing its employees to become part of labor unions (Martin, 2020). It makes it easy for them to compensate poorly since labor unions are not on their side. Several workers complain that they are underpaid, which is often met by the justification that the company is aiming to cut costs to meet the low and attractive costs they offer their customers (Martin, 2020). The company largely promotes men and demotivates women. On gender discrimination, it is recorded that several lawsuits were filed because women were not allowed to take managerial positions.
Other highlighted allegations include the hefty costs of the health insurance plan, making it difficult for several employees to afford it. Further, employees are usually forced to work overtime without proper compensation. These issues present serious business ethical issues that might have a lot to do with the company's policies and way of doing things (Martin, 2020). The last and most shocking allegation against Walmart is that the company allows immigrants who are illegally present to work in their different stores. Federal agents reported that several immigrants were employed by external contractors to clean the company’s different stores (Martin, 2020). Therefore, the company was accused of breaking immigration laws.
The concept of fairness in decision-making is that businesses must target to make and construct good decisions that promote and serve all business needs without harming anyone, be it employees or customers. Fairness does not mean that all people will like and appreciate the decisions. Some people will always see and conceive the decisions as unfair even when they serve all the business needs and cause no harm (Ferguson et al., 2020). Company managers and administrators must be abl...