Wal-Mart
milhayser | December 11, 2013On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse confronts the challenge of basic math education: “we need to find a balance between hammering the basic skills, while also making it clear that there is so much more to mathematics than arithmetic.” Rosenhouse rejects the approach of New Math, “teaching grade-schoolers about set theory and the axiomatic method,” instituted briefly in the U.S. after the Soviets launched a giant ball bearing named Sputnik into orbit. Rosenhouse goes on to question whether teachers should emphasize experimental mathematics, wherein the brute force of computation is used to…
egrossman | December 4, 2013On the shopping day known as “Black Friday,” activists held protests at Walmart stores across the country to protest the company’s low wages. In one of the eight press releases the company issued in the 24 hours between Thanksgiving Day and the close of the November 29 “Black Friday,” shopping day, Walmart corporate communications vice president David Tovar stated:
“For our part, we want to be absolutely clear about our jobs, the pay and benefits we offer our associates, and the role retail jobs play in the U.S. economy. Walmart provides wages on the higher end of the retail average with full…
cmonforton | August 9, 2013Federal OSHA announced this week a settlement agreement with Wal-Mart for serious safety violations found at its store on Chili Avenue in Rochester, NY. Lots of companies sign settlement agreements with OSHA, but few of them involve making safety corrections at multiple worksites controlled by the same firm. This settlement agreement will apply to 2,857 of Wal-Mart's 4,600 retail establishments in the U.S. The 2,857 stores are all of the stores located in States where federal OSHA has enforcement jurisdiction.
How will OSHA monitor Wal-Mart's compliance with the settlement agreement? In…
lborkowski | April 1, 2011On Black Friday 2008 at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, Long Island, 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour was killed by a stampede of shoppers. In a New Yorker article on crowd disasters, Jon Seabrook reports that the official cause of death was asphyxiation, as it often the case in crowd-related deaths. The crowd's force pushed the store's sliding glass doors from their frames; one of them apparently fell on top of Damour, and his co-workers didn't see what happened after that. Damour had been working at the store for about a week, and none of his training addressed security or crowd…