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September 17, 2014

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Walmart workers sacked for 鈥榬ule breach鈥

By Ding Yining | September 17, 2014, Wednesday | Print Edition

FOUR employees at a Walmart Shenzhen store were recently dismissed after they reported wrongdoings at the store such as using outdated raw materials and using cooking oil repeatedly.

A month after raising their concerns with the local food safety authorities, the four people received notices saying they had broken company rules and caused major damage, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.

The incident dated back to last month, when two whistle-blowers, surnamed Hu and Wu, reported to the Luohu branch of the Shenzhen Food and Drug Administration that they suspected wrongdoings at Walmarts’s Honghu Store in Shenzhen.

One of the videos submitted by an employee in the store’s ready-made food department showed that some employees were using the same batch of cooking oil for more than a month, according to a report by Guangzhou Daily last month.

Wu said he was ordered by his supervisor to use some of the outdated meat as raw material for prepared lunch boxes or deli packages as they hoped to “reduce losses.”

The Shenzhen FDA later carried out spot checks at the Walmart store but didn’t find any irregularities, according to Guangzhou Daily.

As the videos provided by the whistleblowers were shot more than a year ago, no punishments were handed out to Walmart.

Government authorities have been encouraging whistleblowers to offer tips concerning corruption cases and food safety scandals using their real identities.

Another whistle-blower using the pseudonym Li Xin was dismissed in 2010 after he reported a tax official at Huai’an City in Jiangsu Province for abuse of power, Xinhua said yesterday.

Hohai University Law School’s vice president Wang Jianwen said food safety wrongdoings are usually very hard to discover by regulatory authorities and therefore it’s very important to encourage whistleblowers to report them.

Sun Binyuan, a spokesperson for the Anhui Food and Drug Administration, told Xinhua that whistleblowers could face a lot of pressure.

Chai Ruijuan, a lecturer at the Law School of Shandong University, suggested that more rewards should be given to whistleblowers.

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