Jojoba wrote:
Thought Steve Sailor has an interesting summation of Wal-Mart and discrimination court case.
"Walmart discriminates against women because its male managers work really hard"
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/06/walm ... women.html Excerpt:
Quote:
In an op-ed in the NYT, UCSB historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains that the sex discrimination lawsuit against Walmart was intended to rectify the injustice that ambitious young men tend to work harder and make more sacrifices for the job than family-oriented middle-aged women:
Walmart's Authoritarian Culture
There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.
Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.
For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.
The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.
So, it's sex discrimination if you hire harder-working people to be managers and more of them turn out to be men? Sounds like that proposition has four votes on the Supreme Court.
As a middle aged woman who has not budged an inch in my position at work since my daughter was born, I nevertheless have to side with Walmart on this one (uurrgghhh- hate to do that). I missed out on a possible promotion because I could not/would not do overnight business trips or more than ocasional overtime. The promotion went instead to my co-worker, a single woman with no kids. She can and does work the longer hours and make the trips. I don't begrudge her this because it would have been insane for me to be promoted instead of her given that I had no intention of ever going on any over-nighter trips or working those hours. If she were a man, the promotion would have been just as fair.
Justice Ginsburg, in her dissent, says that Walmart is acting on the discriminatory assumption that women who were promoted wouldn't agree to those conditions (relocation) because of their families. Is this actually a discriminatory assumption? In many cases, women
wouldn't. I wouldn't. Maybe that's why it's a better idea for individual women to sue. A woman who had every intention and ability to relocate and work those hours would have a valid case if she was passed over for a man. Separate suits separates those women from the women who would not be able to relocate or work long hours and are calling those practices sexist (which I don't think they are).
Mommy tracking is real and I volunteered for that track at my job. I don't want to work long hours, relocate or do business trips. That freezes me in place. It would also freeze a man in place. I discovered in my middle age (when my dad was willing to talk about his own work history) that he voluntarily daddy-tracked himself when I was young, turning down opportunities that would have taken him away from little me for long stretches. Because of my knowledge if this (and he wasn;t the only dad who did that) I don't think this is inherently sexist. It's just that if the sacrifices the company expects aren't too extreme, fathers can more easily make them because of their mommy tracked wives.
Of course most companies don't make relocation such an inherent part of being a manager. It's far more common for situations like with my co-worker: suddenly your co-worker is a manager in that or a same-building department. This practice of drastic relocation in order to make sure that managers aren't too chummy with subordinates so that they can enforce Walmart's (apparently draconian) policies sounds like an actual problem. But it doesn't sound like a problem of sexism. It sounds like a problem of making sure managers have a distant relationship with subordinates purely so that they won't balk at horrid policies they are helping to inflict on old friends they got promoted past.
23 Jun 2011, 12:48 pm
