Wal-Mart is an unadorned eyesore surrounded by a parking lot, even its logo aggressively devoid of flourish. Proving that looks don’t matter, however, the retail giant has a way with women: Four out of ten American women visit one of Wal-Mart’s stores weekly. They like the low prices, convenience and overall ease of the shopping experience. Even snobbish elites are discovering its delights: A few months ago, New York Times fashion writer Cathy Horyn revealed, to the astonishment of fellow urban fashionistas, that much of her wardrobe comes from Wal-Mart (“Marc Jacobs?” “No, it’s Wal-Mart”). Retail consultant Wendy Liebmann ecstatically dubs Wal-Mart the “benchmark by which American women rate all shopping.”

Would that $15 runway knockoffs were Wal-Mart’s primary contribution to women’s lives. But Wal-Mart is not only America’s favorite shopping destination; it’s also the nation’s largest private employer. The majority of Wal-Mart’s “associates” (the company’s treacly euphemism for employees) are women. Their average wage is $7.50 an hour, out of which they must pay for their own health insurance, which is so costly that only two in five workers buy it.

Yet Wal-Mart is not only a horrifyingly stingy employer: Many workers say it is also a sexist one. From the Third World factories in which its cheap products are made, to the floor of your local Wal-Mart, where they’re displayed and sold, it is women who bear the brunt of the company’s relentless cost-cutting. Ellen Rosen, a resident scholar in Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Program, recently observed that around the world, Wal-Mart’s business practices “may be leading to a new kind of globally sanctioned gender discrimination.”

Gretchen Adams worked for Wal-Mart for ten years, in five different states. As a co-manager, she opened twenty-seven “Supercenters” (gargantuan, twenty-four-hour grocery/general merchandise hybrids). “There were so many inequities,” she sighs with amazement, reflecting on her time at Wal-Mart. She saw men with little to no relevant experience earning starting salaries of $3,500 a year more than her own. “I had the title but not the pay,” she says. “They take us for idiots.”

Adams is now a witness in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, in which seven California women–current and former Wal-Mart employees–are charging the company with systematic sex discrimination in promotions, assignments, training and pay. Betty Dukes, for whom the suit is named, is a 52-year-old African-American woman who still works at Wal-Mart. First hired by the company in 1994 as a part-time cashier in Pittsburg, California, she was an eager employee with a sincere admiration for founder Sam Walton’s “visionary spirit.” A year later, with excellent performance reviews, she was given a merit pay raise and a full-time job. Two years later, after being promoted to the position of customer service manager, she began encountering harsh discrimination from her superiors; she says she was denied the training she needed in order to advance further, while that same training was given to male employees. She was also denied the opportunity to work in “male” departments like hardware, and was made to sell baby clothes instead. “I can mix a can of paint,” she told reporters just after filing the suit. “I want the chance to do it.”

When Dukes complained about the discrimination, managers got back at her by writing her up for minor offenses like returning late from breaks, offenses routinely committed by her white and male co-workers, who were never punished, she says. When she kept complaining, she was denied a promotion and finally demoted back to her cashier job. She went to the Wal-Mart district office to complain, but the company did nothing. Being demoted was not just humiliating: It deprived Dukes of other promotions, and her cashier job offered fewer hours and a lower hourly wage. When she was once again eligible for promotion, four new management positions, none of which had even been posted, were filled by men.

Along with more than seventy witnesses, the other named plaintiffs in Dukes v. Wal-Mart tell similar stories:

§ In August 1997, Patricia Surgeson, then a single mother of two, began working evenings as a part-time cashier in a Wal-Mart tire and lube department while attending community college. Within two weeks, while she was stocking shelves, she says, a male co-worker began grabbing and propositioning her. He was allowed to remain in his job, while she was transferred to the health and beauty aids department. Over the next four years, Surgeson held more responsible jobs at Wal-Mart, but these promotions weren’t accompanied by raises. Many of her male co-workers were paid better than she was, she charges, even though they had less responsibility and were newer to the company.

§ Hired to work in the returns department in the Livermore, California, store in fall 1998, Cleo Page, who had already worked in two other Wal-Mart stores, was quickly promoted to a customer service manager position. Interviewing a little over a year later for a promotion, she charges, she was told that it was a man’s world, and that men controlled management positions at Wal-Mart. She was repeatedly passed over for promotions, which were given to male employees, and to white women. (Page, who is African-American, also has a race discrimination claim against Wal-Mart, as does Betty Dukes, but these charges are not part of the class-action suit.) At one point, her store manager discouraged her from applying for the sporting-goods department manager position, she says, because “customers would feel comfortable” buying sporting goods from a man. She heard male co-workers complain that “women were taking over” the store, and she heard them ask each other if they knew other men who would be interested in working at Wal-Mart.

§ Christine Kwapnoski, who is still employed in a Concord, California, Sam’s Club (a division of Wal-Mart), has worked for the company since 1986. She charges that management positions were never posted, though when she heard one was opening up she’d tell supervisors she was interested. Still, the jobs were given to men less qualified than herself, whom she then had to train. A store manager suggested that she “needed to blow the cobwebs off” her makeup and “doll up.” She says she saw men getting paid at higher rates than she was, and getting raises more often; in one instance, Kwapnoski, a divorced mother of two, questioned a male co-worker’s raise, and was told he had a family to support.

§ After thirty years of retail experience, Deborah Gunter began working at a Riverside, California, Wal-Mart in 1996 as a photo lab clerk. She says she applied for management positions and was passed over for less experienced men. She requested further training and never got it. When she was transferred to the Tire Lube Express department, she did the work of a support manager but never got the title or the pay. Her supervisor sexually harassed her, and when she complained, her hours were reduced, she says. After she trained a man to fill the support manager job, he got the title and salary, and her hours were reduced. When she complained about her reduced hours and requested a meeting with the district manager to protest the discriminatory treatment, she was fired.

And on and on. Women make up 72 percent of Wal-Mart’s sales work force but only 33 percent of its managers. A study conducted for the Dukes plaintiffs by economist Marc Bendick found such discrepancies to be far less pronounced among Wal-Mart’s competitors, which could boast of more than 50 percent female management. Even more striking, comparing Wal-Mart stores to competitors in the same location, Bendick’s study found little geographic variation in these ratios, and little change over time. In fact, the percentage of women among Wal-Mart’s 1999 management lagged behind that of its competitors in 1975. (Wal-Mart spokesman Bill Wertz says it’s “too soon” to say how the company will defend itself against these charges.)

Depending on the outcome of a class-certification hearing next July before a San Francisco federal judge, Dukes v. Wal-Mart could be the largest civil rights class-action suit in history, affecting more than 700,000 women. Though a California judge ruled recently that the case must be limited to California plaintiffs, discovery is nationwide, as is the proposed class. If the plaintiffs have their way, any woman employed by the company from 1999 on would win damages. But even more important, says Brad Seligman, Betty Dukes’s lawyer, “The idea is to change Wal-Mart. We will not have done our job unless we transform the personnel system at Wal-Mart and make sure there are additional opportunities for women.”

Dukes is the culmination of a long history of individual sex-discrimination suits–including sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination–against Wal-Mart, going back at least to 1981. Courts have often, though of course not always, ruled for the plaintiffs in these cases; in several sexual-harassment suits juries have awarded employees millions of dollars in punitive damages. Wal-Mart recently settled an EEOC sexual-harassment suit on behalf of a group of Wal-Mart employees in Mobile, Alabama, and several women unconnected to Dukes have discrimination suits under way.

Some of the lawsuits against Wal-Mart reflect common grievances cited by working women, inequities hardly unique to Wal-Mart, but that women’s advocates rightly find particularly outrageous in the world’s largest corporation. For example, a suit filed in Georgia by Lisa Smith Mauldin, a Wal-Mart customer service manager and a 22-year-old divorced mother of two, charges the company with sex discrimination because its health plan does not cover prescription contraceptives (it does cover other prescription drugs, but as the complaint spells out in painstaking legalese, only women get pregnant). Mauldin works thirty-two hours a week and makes $12.14 an hour, so the $30 monthly cost of the Pill is a significant burden for her (and certainly a prohibitive one for many fellow employees, who earn significantly lower wages). In September Mauldin’s suit was certified as a class action, demanding reimbursement for all female Wal-Mart employees who have been paying for birth control out of pocket since March 2001, and demanding that Wal-Mart’s insurance cover FDA-approved prescription contraceptives in the future.

Wal-Mart is also criticized for indifference to the workers, mostly young women, who make the products sold in its stores. While most major-clothing stores traffic in sweated labor, Wal-Mart’s record on this issue is unusually bad. Much of the clothing sold at Wal-Mart is made in China, where workers have no freedom of association. Unlike many companies, Wal-Mart has adamantly refused to tell labor rights advocates where its factories are, rejecting even the pretense of transparency. Last year, Wal-Mart was removed from the Domini 400 Social Index, an influential socially responsible investment fund, for its failure to make sufficient efforts to uphold labor rights and for its “unresponsiveness to calls for change.” Other than Nike, Wal-Mart is the only company that has been booted from the fund for this reason.

Last June, citing all of the above issues, the National Organization for Women named Wal-Mart its fifth “Merchant of Shame” and launched a public education campaign against the retailer. “It’s part of our emphasis on economic justice. We don’t think Wal-Mart is a woman-friendly workplace,” says Olga Vives, NOW’s vice president for action. NOW has asked Wal-Mart for a meeting to discuss its complaints, but since the company has not responded, Vives says, “we are getting their attention in other ways.” On September 28, 600 NOW chapters demonstrated at Wal-Mart stores across the country, from Tallahassee to Salt Lake City.

NOW has been cooperating closely with the United Food and Commercial Workers, who have been trying for several years to organize Wal-Mart workers [see John Dicker, “Union Blues at Wal-Mart,” July 8], an effort ruthlessly resisted by the company. Gretchen Adams, who quit Wal-Mart in December 2001, now works as an organizer with the UFCW. She’s angry, not only about the way she was treated, but also about the plight of the hourly workers she supervised. “They were not paid enough to live on. There were a whole lot of single mothers,” she says. “They would come in crying because they had hard decisions: whether to take their child to the doctor or pay their rent.” Many hourly workers were on public assistance because their pay was so low, she recalls.

Not a single Wal-Mart store is unionized yet, but there’s substantial evidence that many of the problems suffered by Wal-Mart’s female employees would be alleviated by a union. A study on women in the retail food industry, published in February by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and funded by the UFCW, found that women workers in unions faced smaller gender and racial wage gaps, and earned 31 percent higher wages than women who were not in unions. In addition, the study showed that two-thirds of women in unionized retail jobs had health insurance, while only one-third of their nonunion counterparts did. Such advantages were even more dramatic for part-time workers, who are even more likely to be women.

At a November 18 press conference in Washington, DC, to announce a UFCW-initiated National Day of Action on November 21–rallies were held in more than 100 cities and towns, supported by a broad coalition of religious, environmental, student and labor groups–NOW president Kim Gandy said Wal-Mart should know that “continuing their greedy, abusive ways will cost them the business of thinking consumers.” This seems unlikely, though it’s probably important to make the threat. In any case, the UFCW is not calling for a nationwide Wal-Mart boycott. “We are calling for a boycott in Las Vegas,” says Doug Dority, president of the UFCW. In Las Vegas, where a vigorous organizing campaign is under way, Wal-Mart has committed numerous violations of the right to organize. Las Vegas is also the most heavily unionized city in the United States. Elsewhere, however, the UFCW is not ready to take that step. “It’s hard to boycott and organize at the same time,” says Dority. “Because Wal-Mart uses that against you: ‘Hey, the union is trying to take away your job.'”

Still, it makes sense for activists to appeal to the possible solidarity between Wal-Mart’s female customers and its female work force. UFCW vice president Susan Phillips said in a recent speech, “As women, we have tremendous power. We control both sides of the cash register. We are the cashiers on one side and we are the customers on the other side. If we join hands across the cash register, we can change the economic future for women in America.” Far from telling consumers not to shop at the “Big Box,” on the November 21 Day of Action many UFCW locals dramatized consumer power through “shop-ins,” urging protesters to go into the store, buy something while wearing a T-shirt with the UFCW’s phone number on it, and tell employees they supported their right to join a union. In Seekonk, Massachusetts, a UFCW local even gave each November 21 protester a $20 bill to spend at Wal-Mart, donating the purchases to a nearby women’s shelter.

In fact, Wal-Mart customers and workers have much in common: They are increasingly likely to be anybody in America. The working poor are even more likely than other Americans to shop at Wal-Mart, not necessarily because they find it a shopper’s paradise–though of course some do–but because they need the discounts, or live in a remote area with few other options. (Many Wal-Mart workers say they began working at their local Wal-Mart because they shopped there; when they needed a job, they filled out its application, because Wal-Mart was already such a familiar part of their lives.) Through shoppers and “associates” alike, Wal-Mart is making billions from female poverty.

In addition to court mandates and worker organizing, changing Wal-Mart is going to take massive pressure from many constituencies; union locals will need an approach to coalition-building that is highly community-specific, yet networked nationwide, similar to that used by the progressive labor organization Jobs With Justice. The range of groups that turned out on November 21 was promising, and they have vowed to stay committed to a “People’s Campaign for Justice at Wal-Mart.”

Asked how long it will take to unionize Wal-Mart, Gretchen Adams, who is 56, answers without hesitation: “The rest of my life.” But she’s determined. As a manager opening a new store in Las Vegas, Adams says, “I was not allowed to hire any experienced help, because they might be union.” Now, she deadpans, “I’m trying to get Wal-Mart the help it needs.”