Last month, the New York Times published an article headlined “Walmart Wants to Teach Store Managers Compassion.” The piece is about the company’s “Manager Academy,” a leadership-training program that began in July 2022; it features shockingly little discussion of the company’s infamously anti-worker practices.

I criticized the article’s manifold omissions at the time, pointing to some of the many problems with Walmart’s treatment of workers up and down its global supply chain that you didn’t learn much about in the Times’ coverage. The company employs an enormous workforce in its warehouses; Amazon’s warehouse workers have received the bulk of recent attention from those concerned with workers’ rights and safety, particularly with respect to worker-surveillance technology, of which Amazon is a pioneer. But a new report from Oxfam shows that Walmart’s warehouse workers endure the same problems as their counterparts.

“At Work and Under Watch: Surveillance and suffering at Amazon and Walmart warehouses” investigates both Amazon and Walmart. The latter is the largest private employer in the United States, with a domestic workforce of 1.6 million, while Amazon has 1.1 million workers (though that number doesn’t include its legions of drivers who are not classified as Amazon employees). Though much attention has been paid to the exploitation of workers at Walmart’s 4,616 stores, there is less coverage of the warehouse workers who remain crucial to its operations, and where surveillance fits into the Walmart model.