(NYT) Bare-Knuckle Enforcement for Wal-Mart’s Rules

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29walmart.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

The investigator flew to Guatemala in April 2002 with a delicate mission: trail a Wal-Mart manager around the country to prove he was sleeping with a lower-level employee, a violation of company policy.

The apparent smoking gun? “Moans and sighs” heard as the investigator, a Wal-Mart employee, pressed his ear against a hotel room door inside a Holiday Inn, according to legal documents. Soon after, the company fired the manager for what it said was improper fraternization with a subordinate.

Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules.


Kenneth H. Senser in the emergency operations center of Wal-Mart Stores in Bentonville, Ark. Mr. Senser, who runs the company’s security department, formerly worked in internal security for the C.I.A. and F.B.I.


Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter’s telephone calls.

The investigators — whose résumés evoke Langley, Va., more than Bentonville, Ark. — serve as a rapid-response team that aggressively polices the nation’s largest private employer, enforcing Wal-Mart’s modest by-the-books culture among its army of 1.8 million employees.

Wal-Mart is certainly not the only company, or even the first, to investigate its employees, a practice used widely in corporate America to guard against fraud and protect trade secrets. But despite the retailer’s folksy Arkansas image, few companies are as prickly — or unforgiving — about its employees’ wayward behavior, a legacy of its frugal founder, Sam Walton, who equated misconduct with inefficiency that would cost customers money.

FULL 2 page story at link.

[woodsprite]

1. Hmmmm. Do they investigate the illegal aliens too? Just asking... n/t

[truebrit71]

2. Nope.Them they lock in the stores at night....

...I FUCKING HATE WAL-MART....

[napi21]

3. Do they also investigate the illegal demands of their managers

who force employees to work off the clock, lock them inside the store after hours, and use discrimatory employment practices...or are none of those things part of the WM ironclad ethics rules?