In Jessica’s last post, which I love, she included this point:

Some political philosophers have made this point explicitly (e.g. here and here). They argue that principles of justice apply to the content of our labor as well as the compensation we receive for it. If so, then some jobs could be unjust at any wage. Maybe something like this explains the resistance to Walmart, but if so then these distinctions tend to get lost in the policy debate. And if popular critics of Walmart and McDonald’s are concerned with the deskillng and hierarchical nature of some jobs, then they should focus on that and they should also be critical of high paying jobs with these properties.

Having written quite a bit about Walmart, I want to make one empirical observation here:  Walmart is actually far less hierarchical than its critics believe.

One of the things I learned in my research on Walmart’s heroic role in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is how much autonomy Walmart gives to its employees.  CEO Lee Scott gave his senior stafff a message to pass down through the organization, all the way to store managers:  “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.”   In fact, Walmart employees did take the initiative to help their communities, including an assistant manager who broke into her store’s pharmacy to get drugs for a local nursing home and an hourly worker who used a forklift to break open a Walmart warehouse to get water for a local retirement home.  Walmart’s Emergency Management Director praised these actions, calling them “good examples of autonomy.”

The other thing I’ve learned in writing about Walmart is the degree to which they allow even brand new employees access to their data systems.  Hourly workers carry barcode readers that allow them to track inventory on shelves and transmit that information directly to the company’s database and to interpret the information the database gives them, including the profit margins on those items, as documented by this blogger who took an entry level position there in 2009.

It may well be true that people think Walmart jobs are bad for reasons other than wages (disclosure:  I’ve encouraged my own kids to work there as I think it’s a comfortable working environment and a great first job, but both chose not to.)  However, if one of those reasons is that they perceive Walmart to be a place where workers have no autonomy and are subject to a lot of top-down, hierarchical order giving, they are under a misperception.  In fact, Walmart does empower both its store managers and its employees and supports them when they make autonomous decisions in a crisis.  Seems like a decent place to work to me.