In November I will have been with Walmart for three years. I began at a neighborhood market where I began as a customer host and then moved to a cashier and self-checkout host. Last year, I moved to a supercenter where I transferred to the electronics department.
My normal schedule was from 8 AM to 5 PM but after I changed departments they changed my schedule to 3 PM to 12 AM. I have epilepsy and take medication that makes me drowsy. While in electronics I had a seizure and hit my head very badly, the only other person back there was the TROC [technology assistance] associate who had epilepsy herself that I didn’t know about. She helped me. However, nearly every night I was there alone, and if I had another seizure it would not end well because of all the hazards there, which I have pictures of [shown below]. I asked to be moved back to the front end, and the store manager made me go through Sedgwick just to be moved to a different department and have my schedule changed when she could have done that herself.
Photo of the electronics department Peter worked in. Disorganization, hard objects, and sharp edges are hazards during a seizure.
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Then, when I got the decision from Sedgwick, they wanted to put me on a three month unpaid leave while they figure things out. That’s when I contacted the market manager, and all the way up to Doug [McMillan, the CEO] after the store manager and the people lead both told me it was out of their hands and there was nothing they could do. After I sent the email, the next day I got a call from the store manager to fix the problem that took less than five minutes, when she could have done that form the beginning.
Because of the schedule they put me on, I missed dinner every night and got very little sleep, and my stress level was very high. Stress is the trigger for my seizures. Management did nothing to keep me safe even after I had a seizure, there was no protocol for this in place, and if I had another seizure back there it would have been worse than before, but management didn’t care.
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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.