I started working at Walmart. I was still recovering from Carpel Tunnel surgery when I was hired. I told them I had to be careful and couldn’t do the pallet moving. One day, this pallet was leaning very badly. I brought up that it was leaning, and that I didn’t feel safe helping to move this pallet.
My team lead told me ‘too bad,’ I had to move the pallet.
So another worker and I started moving the pallet very slowly past customers to the dairy cooler. On the way there we fought to get it in because so much weight was leaning to the front on the pallet. As we started to push the worst happened, and the pallet fell on us. Thankfully, my co-worker wasn’t hurt but my wrist got messed up. I spoke to my team lead and told her that my wrist hurt from the pallet falling. She don’t worry about the pallet falling or us… It took a team lead from a different department to get me help. I still have issues.
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Now on February 19th, a couple months later after I was told that I needed to get off workmen’s comp, I was being forced to squeeze between pallets to get freight to work. I had asked if I could wait until I could safely get to the freight, but I was told ‘no, this is part of your job you will do it now, not later.’
On February 19 I tore my MCL. My knee hurt and I told 5 different team leads, but was ignored.
Finally, almost 6 days later, I was able to catch my coach [a salaried position at Walmart that deals with write-ups and job performance]. I started going to a primary care provider of their choice. The doctor gave me work restrictions. I gave the papers to management and told them verbally of my work restrictions. They ignored the papers and forced me to work on my knee longer than my doctor said I could. I was told to keep doing my job because they had no other place to put me, even though I told them I knew how to run a cash register.
Now I have lost almost all my Meniscus and have had to scrap my cartilage. I no longer have padding in that part of my knee. They forced me to work on my feet knowing I had a torn MCL until mid-May. At that point, the doctor had gotten sick of Walmart not following his restrictions, and I was taken out of work. And while dealing with all of that, they kept decreasing my hours so that I couldn’t afford to feed my children.
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Information posted here has been submitted directly by Walmart associates and was not created or developed by United for Respect. The opinions and statements in these stories are those of the authors.