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Ascension, North Carolina — Utilizing a most unique ploy to attain humane treatment in her workplace, and thereby exposing the hypocrisy of American morality, a Wal-Mart cashier seeks to have herself legally considered as a member of the animal kingdom. Agnes Oxley, a 35-year-old, four-year employee, figures she would then have protection from abusive Wal-Mart managers under laws preventing cruelty to animals, such as the laws cited in prosecuting cases brought by the ASPCA. It's an end-run on Wal-Mart's hostility to unions.
She said, "The idea came to me out of complete exhaustion. I had just gotten to our apartment" — Agnes shares an apartment with two friends — "after working some off-the-clock overtime I dared not complain about, and my feet were killing me and my back hurt from having to stand up for so long. I was in real pain." Her roommate was watching Animal Planet, in particular a reality-based series called Animal Cops. The program is very similar in style and production values to Fox's Cops, but instead of the video crew chronicling the heavily armed men in blue as they harass and arrest dangerous marijuana users, solicitors of prostitutes, prostitutes, drunks, and crossdressers, the cameras for Animal Cops capture the heavily armed ASPCA police in Detroit and New York as they harass people guilty of animal neglect or cruelty.
"Humans are animals, too," Oxley stated flatly. "It's not like I'm coming down from the mountain top with the tablets of wisdom on this. But we've lost sight of the fact of our basic animality. We're literally animals. So besides investigating the cruelty to dogs, cats, and ferrets, shouldn't the ASPCA concern themselves with human beings, too" Agnes asked rhetorically. She added, "If not the ASPCA, then someone should."
It's a good point in this writer's estimation, and high time someone made it. As all cashiers are required to do, Miss Oxley stands in a single spot, maintaining a smooth flow of transactions, nonstop except for the two too-brief breaks, workload permitting. She was startled at first by the working conditions. Prior to her cashier position at Wal-Mart, she had been an accounting clerk for a fast-food chain. The data entry was sometimes tedious, especially on Mondays, but overall the workload allowed for a stroll to the coffee pot or the bathroom. The freedom of movement mitigated the tedium. Chitchat around the water cooler helped, too. She worked there for twelve years. Her good fortune was not to last. She, like so many in today's economy, was laid off from a job with good working conditions and good benefits, to find herself hired earning a less than livable wage. "When I got here," she said mournfully, "I was stunned to discover that you could legally treat people the way Wal-Mart does. It was extremely trying, physically and emotionally."

Agnes Oxley, in the Wal-Mart stockroom, wearing the ubiquitous Wal-Mart coveralls and name tag, says animals are luckier than humans, in that laws protect them from cruel treatment. "Work is a hostile environment for most Americans.," she observed.

When Miss Oxley asked her supervisor if she could bring in a stool to put behind the checkout counter, the reply was a peremptory no. Oxley didn't push the issue.
On one occasion, Oxley put in a ten-hour shift, getting off at 12 midnight, then was asked to return to work the next day at 6 o'clock in the morning. Subtracting from her time off the drive home, getting ready for bed, awakening and grooming herself according to sensible standards of hygiene, and then the drive back in, Oxley was permitted approximately four hours of sleep before directed to perform another grueling eight-hour shift.
"After that second day," she said with vexation, "I was numb. Luckily, I had the next day off. But it wasn't an act of compassion, let me tell you. They had to give me the next day off, or I'd fall into a new employment category, and Wal-Mart would have to provide me with full-time benefits, such as health insurance." It was this lack of health care benefits that caused her to take notice of the difference between the way humans and dogs were treated. The episode of Animal Cops leading to her epiphany dealt with the rescue by the ASPCA police of a dog with a tumor. The owner of the dog hadn't provided the necessary health care for his animal. He was charged with animal neglect. Another story on the same episode concerned a man who kept a horse confined in a tiny stall.
"I was puzzled," Oxley said, "by this concern over animals while so many human beings live such precarious material existences. Not that I believe animals should be treated cruelly or that mistreatment should go unpunished. But when I hear that President Bush recently reminded the states in budgetary crisis that hospitals don't have to accept poor people in emergency rooms, reminding them that it's not a federal law, it just makes you wonder. On Animal Cops, a man was arrested because he didn't take his pet in for treatment. But it's all right for hospitals to turn poor people away."

She said social consciousness needs some altering. With rueful sagacity, she said, "Maybe by acknowledging my animality I'll get others to acknowledge my humanity. As it is now, work is a hostile environment for most Americans."
For her work, Oxley earns $6.50 an hour, earnings which Wal-Mart tout as "competitive wages."
"Competitive with whom?" Oxley asks with bemusement. "Dissidents in a Russian gulag? Prison labor in North Korea? Child labor in Indochina? Competitive with whom? Please tell me."
Establishing herself as an animal is a legal quagmire. "But it is a noble endeavor, and daringly original," says Leland Fairway, the ACLU attorney who has agreed to take Oxley's case. "First we'll argue that human beings are indeed considered animals in every field of study, except perhaps in a few fundamentalist theologies." Once the legal definition of the term "animal" has been successfully established as covering human beings too, Fairway will then move from this point to his second: the animals covered by the cruelty prevention laws are never specified, thereby permitting interpretation of the law as currently written as covering cruelty to human beings, too.
Labor leaders are very interested in the case. Terry Barnett, president of the AFL-CIO, praises the audacity of the tactic. "I'm a bit embarrassed we didn't think of it ourselves," he confessed. "Win or lose, an important point will be made."
Wal-Mart representatives claim confusion at the woman's accusation of cruel treatment. Tilda Orson from Wal-Mart public relations stated that "Wal-Mart doesn't allow people to work off the clock. We are an American company with American values. We are one of the United States' largest employers, and we've been presented with the Freedom Award by President George H. Bush for distinguished accomplishments while demonstrating the finest in American business values, and we've just received the Ron Brown Award for business excellence under the current Bush Administration. Accolades from such esteemed men account for far more than the accusations of some minimum wage worker."