On a chilly Sunday afternoon exactly two years ago today, Janikka Perry arrived for her bakery shift at a Walmart supercenter in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Once she began working, she started to feel unusually faint. As the hours wore on, she told her co-workers she wasn’t feeling well, and retreated to a bathroom for rest. But the store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to “pull herself together.”
Janikka had heart problems and diabetes—conditions management was aware of—and had worked through ailments before, because that’s the norm at Walmart.
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Hours later, as night set in and Janikka’s shift neared its end, she withdrew to a stall in one of Walmart’s white-tiled restrooms for the second time in as many hours. Eighty-seven minutes later, at 11:21 p.m., she dialed 911 from the bathroom.
“I’m having difficulty breathing,” she told a dispatcher between coughs. “I feel like I’m about to pass out.”
When an ambulance arrived, nine minutes after Janikka called, medics found her unconscious. They later rushed her to St. Vincent North Hospital, where she was pronounced dead of a heart attack. She was 38.
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The veneer of a humane and pleasant work atmosphere is reflected in government data, especially in the company’s home state: Complaints to the National Labor Relations Board from Arkansas Walmarts are scant, and data compiled by OSHA, the federal agency responsible for enforcing workplace safety standards, suggests that Walmart has an abnormally high percentage of stores in Arkansas that record zero injuries, illnesses, and deaths compared to its stores in other states.
But the reality in Arkansas falls far short of the P.R. image. An investigation from Type Investigations and The New Republic reveals that this lack of damning injury data—which, crucially, is self-reported—does not capture employees’ experiences in stores. Many workers are pressured to work while ill, in pain, or through other extenuating circumstances, according to workers and labor organizers. Several injury and illness cases that should have been reported to OSHA weren’t, according to government data, court records, and interviews with associates, suggesting that Walmart’s recording practices in Arkansas coincide with unreported issues and unrealized investigations. Failure to properly report to OSHA and failure to keep accurate annual records are violations and can result in fines. One former OSHA official said that given the injury rates at retail stores nationally, a Walmart recording zero injuries “should set off some red flags.”
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When a company fails to properly report, not only is the agency’s regulatory power diluted, but it also leaves workers and families like Janikka’s with little evidence to aid them in this type of policy reform or in private litigation and workers’ compensation claims, cases in which the odds are already stacked severely against workers. It’s a situation that Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, describes as an uphill battle.
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Read the full article at newrepublic.com.
