Before you read on, make a mental list of headlines you never, ever expect to see. Say, Mitch McConnell announces a single payer health plan, or something on a similar level of can’t never happen. Done? Now feast your eyes.
Walmart Will Raise Its Minimum Wage To $10 An Hour
…CEO Doug McMillion acknowledged some of the criticism that the company has sacrificed customer loyalty because of its pay practices.
I would have predicted the Spanish Inquisition in my kitchenette at work before I guessed Wal Mart would voluntarily hike its baseline wage. It seems like the exact opposite of how this current world works. Even among bad actors like Target or McDonald’s, Wal-Mart always stood out for its singleminded determination to minimize labor costs over and above just about any other consideration. Few retail outlets ever seemed nearly as willing as Bentonville to accept financial losses and a terrible customer experience in order to keep their stores under staffed with poorly trained, miserable employees making minimum wage with no benefits on short hours that changed unpredictably from week to week. George Packer covered it quite well in his recent book, or you can wait five minutes for the next story about wage theft and overtime abuse at a Wal Mart to pop up on your news feed.
Whatever moved Wal Mart to do this, I think it stands as pretty definitive evidence that class anxiety has become a defining issue of our present time. You simply cannot understate how tectonic the forces must be to motivate the most anti-labor company on earth to make (what sounds like) a real effort to get out from under the bad press about its labor practices. I think Hillary would do well to make her meetings with Elizabeth Warren a more regular thing.
Joey Maloney
What’s the catch? You know there’s a catch.
Betty Cracker
I heard a snippet of a report about this on NPR this morning and had a similarly gobsmacked reaction. The NPR report quoted some Walmart exec saying they were attempting to build a meritocracy, which caused the mister and me to roll our eyes and wonder aloud when the Walmart heirs would be distributing their inherited wealth to even the playing field — in their case, it really would since that handful of greedy fucks famously own assets equal to the bottom 40-some-odd percent of Americans. But cynicism aside, this is good news. If it took the distant sound of blade sharpening and tumbrel construction to set it into motion, we need to do more of that.
ET
Of course stories about how their own employees can’t afford to shop at Wal-Mart – WAL-MART – can’t be helping their image.
Judge Crater
How many Walmart workers will now be able to get off the public dole – food stamps, medicaid, etc. – thanks to this corporate largess? And, since many states have raised the minimum wage already, what is the real impact on Walmart’s bottom line?
Looks like pure PR to me.
Amir Khalid
From the Walmart story:
So, Walmart’s fulltime workers get a daily pay increase of a buck twenty. Yay Walmart.
Helmut Monotreme
In a year that’s all but starved for want of good news, I’ll take it. Half a million workers will get a slightly larger pittance. It’s still pretty far short of what it costs to live in a decent place and raise a family, but it’s a start.
Cervantes
From the article you cited:
JGabriel
Tim F.:
I think the .1% are beginning to realize the class war they’ve been waging against everyone else for the past 35 years has finally become obvious enough that they’re beginning to fear retaliation.
Violet
@Cervantes: Yeah. Essentially Wal-Mart wants credit for something that is happening anyway.
Sloegin
They’re implementing $10 now to stop the push for $15.
gvg
I have been noticing how sparely filled the shelfs of the local Walmarts are. Due to working along way from home, there are 3 different stores I hit from time to time. The further out in the country I am, the more Walmart is the only place to easily get many things but they are running out too often. Few lines open due to labor shortages etc. I think the cheapskate heirs may finally be seeing the inevitable problems with always thinking cheap and short term. Even the newest store looks like a place on the verge of bankruptcy. I know the corporation is huge with deep pockets but still they look very different from even 10 years ago and alot different than 20. I am old enough that I have seen a few huge big discount chains be everywhere and huge and then disappear or fade. Kmart was the big shot awhile back…and I think it was Millers before that….I’ve heard dollar General is eating some of Walmarts market in the sticks. They have built a lot of them in surprising places.
The economy has also picked up, people are finding jobs. Maybe they are leaving Walmart. I do wonder what on earth they were thinking when they went to irregular employee hours. Its like they were trying to make themselves impossible to work for even for the desperate. Maybe they thought there were enough workers who didn’t have kids.
The Moar You Know
Transparent manipulation of the media narrative in order to neutralize the only thing that Dems really have going for them at this point: income inequality.
Looks like all the rubes approve. Mission Accomplished, WalMart.
@Sloegin: oh yes they are. 10 bucks an hour is not a living wage in the United States. 15 bucks an hour is a grinding, poverty level existence, but doable if one were to be very, very careful and (most importantly) not get sick.
Tim F.
@Amir Khalid: Those numbers are misleading. Almost everyone on the floor at Wal Mart makes minimum wage. Managers make a lot more and work full time, making the averages wonky. Without even looking I would lay money down that the median wage of hourly Wal Mart employees is not very far from $7.25 and hour.
karen marie
@Amir Khalid: no, that would be a raise of 15 cents.
Also, too, I don’t believe this isn’t anything more than a PR stunt. Let’s not get excited till there is independent confirmation that all part-timers are in fact making $10/hour.
retr2327
From what I heard, they are raising the minimum starting wage to 9, not 10, per hour. That may have the effect of raising their average wage (or average part-time wage) to 10 per hour.
Still, it’s better than the Fed. minimum (7 and change).
monkeyfister
Wall Street is punishing Walmart good and hard right now, as a direct result of their announcement: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/wal-mart-posts-earnings-that-top-estimates-as-holiday-sales-gain
I really hate Banksters.
Violet
@Sloegin:
Yep. Because if people keep saying they want $15/hour, Wal-Mart will say, “We just raised wages” and it will be true.
The minimum wage is being increased in states around the country. Wal-Mart can see it’s happening, so want to take credit for it before it’s done to them and they also want to stop the $15/hour train.
If they can influence the income inequality argument by the Democrats, that’s also a win.
Iowa Old Lady
@Helmut Monotreme: I’ll take it too. As the abortion fight has shown us, no war is ever fully over, but you take the wins you get.
gvg
I have stopped at Walmart for 2 liters of Diet Coke and had them be out. Other normal items too. Their shelves are too bare. If they don’t have stock to sell that pack those shelves it means they are paying for too big a store. From what I have heard they managers instructions amount to don’t have very many employees on duty which happens to add up to nobody to stock shelves, unload trucks, fill out orders to even get stock, run cash registers to take in money for stock……potential buyers get in the habit of going elsewhere or leaving without buying. Its hard to measure sales not made but they are clearly killing their own business by years of firing/promoting managers based on just low wage bills without considering wages compared to sales profit. Its worth having 5 times the people if you have 10 times the sales. There is such a thing as too many employees standing around wasting money but Walmart went past the tipping point long ago over someones obsession with just one factor in the profit margin.
Amir Khalid
@karen marie:
And what is 15 cents an hour times an eight-hour day?
gratuitous
@Joey Maloney: My guess is the catch will be that workers get that bump to $9 after their 90 day probationary period expires. But darn the luck! So many of their workers will get to Day 89 and be terminated for a week, while the store re-tools or something. “Come back next Friday,” when another 90 day probationary period will begin.
NickM
This is great for the people who get a raise — they really deserve one.
The thing that concerns me is that these victories don’t seem to create or support institutions that can hold the big corporations’ feet to the fire. A raise like this can be quietly rescinded when Walmart decides the heat is off and starts hiring the next round of wage sla– I mean “associates”.
Quaker in a Basement
I really want to think positive thoughts about this, but just as Tim says, this is so contrary to the world we have come to know. I can’t help but wonder how and when the company will yank this back.
ThresherK
@gvg: I love it when Randites describe shopping at Wal-Mart as anything except a time-sink.
There is a bit of “in for a penny in for a pound” at work, I’ve always claimed: You don’t drive by one of these places and “drop in”. You pull off the road, work through a half mile of traffic to a parking space, walk to the door (if you’re smart, you park farther away since it’s quicker), then have only another 3/8s mile to go to get your stuff and get in line. Then you think “If I’m going to be in line, I might as well be in line for more than just my paper towels (or whatever).”
Ditto for the usually sorry, depressing experience itself. It’s pretty amazing to thinkg of every Libertarian who’s been “slumming” in a WM and to a man (no sic) they basically come away with “If you workers were any good you’d be making more somewhere else” and simultaneously “InvizabellHand, Baybee!”
SenyorDave
As Joe Biden, our ever so lovable touchy-feely VP once said, this is a BFD! This will actually improve the lives of many (dare I say hundreds of thousands) of families. If you are making $8.50 an hour at walmart, you just got a 17.6% raise. And if you are working at Walmart, you are probably low income so you will keeping a large portion of the increase. This could be an extra $2,000 a year for some families in net pay.
JustRuss
I hardly ever watch TV, but I’ve caught a few Walmart ads trumpeting how awesomely they treat there employees, who just love working there. This is pure PR, it will barely dent their profits but they’ll milk it like crazy to demonstrate that raising the minimum wage isn’t needed, because they’ll voluntarily do the right thing.
Kay
The UFCW did the organizing and funded the My Wal Mart campaign that went on for years.
Every worker who benefits from this is a free rider on a dues-paying union member who backed the campaign knowing full well that Wal Mart workers would never be union members.
The same is true of Fight For Fifteen.
ruemara
@Amir Khalid: my last pay increase was less than a buck. I worked for the local gov. This is America.
Kay
In fact, there wouldn’t have been a Fight For Fifteen without 20 million dollars from dues-paying union members.
Curt
It’s sad how little money it takes to improve most people’s lives in dramatic ways, but I guarantee you, anyone affected by this raise will feel the difference. Plus, any upward pressure on wages in the job market in general is fantastic news. Are there catches or self-serving angles? I’m sure. Still, getting this is better than not getting it.
Starfish
I think that by doing this they are attempting to stave off legislative efforts to keep employers from doing their just-in-time bullshit to prevent part time people from a) receiving employer health benefits and b) ever being able to find full time jobs.
Kay
Dues-paying union members paid to put organizers in 50 cities:
Trinity
F Walmart.
Shana
But, but, but, Occupy Wall Street had no leaders and a fuzzy message! How could they expect to get anything accomplished?
On a slight tangent, I seem to have gotten myself on a list for phone surveys for our local (statewide) power company, Dominion Virginia Power. Every six months or so I get a call from their pollster. I consistently answer their questions making sure that the person on the phone knows that I think the company is doing the bare minimum to expand into wind and solar power, inconsequential PR crap, and won’t do anything to improve unless made to by law.
gelfling545
@NickM:
I expect it’s meant to stop just that from occurring.
WaterGirl
@Sloegin: It took 10 comments for someone to say exactly what I wanted to say. thanks!
Kay
@WaterGirl:
That’s a victory all by itself though. The 15 dollar number was widely dismissed when it started as unrealistic unicorn and ponies.
People have grown to accept it :)
PurpleGirl
@Amir Khalid: The devil is in the detail of the use of the word ‘average’. Average doesn’t tell us what the range is; it could be from $7.25 to XXX.
(I have a friend who complained to me about making around $30,000 when the Average at Random House was something like $52,000; what she didn’t add was that the calculation included the CEO’s $1.3 million salary. (numbers are approximates from memory). Because I had friends at Random House, I knew that comparable editing positions paid about the same $30,00 she made.)
Citizen_X
What customer loyalty? You go to WarMart because there’s no place else to go, or no place you can afford. Who goes there because they like the experience?
brantl
@Joey Maloney: The catch is, WalMart knew it was going to be higher than $10 an hour, if they didn’t short-stop-bid it. That’s the money bet.
brantl
@Sloegin: DING! DING! DING! WE HAVE A WINNER!
Brendan in NC
The other catch is now that they’re paying everyone a minimum of $10/hr – they’ll cut their hours back further to make up for it…
? Martin
Guys, don’t rule out the role the west coast port strike is having on this discussion. You have a (perhaps overpowerful given their wages) union grinding trade to a dead stop. Walmart is incredibly dependent on those ports operating, and the truckers and rail getting the goods from those ports, etc. A few bucks an hour in wages is nothing compared to the cost of having nothing on the shelf to sell. If wage anxiety gets key unions involved in the fight, it’s going to be a really fucking expensive fight for many retailers and other industries.
Keep in mind that the ports union only has a few thousand people in it. It’s not much harder of a whip effort than the house of representatives, and that’s been made really goddamn clear again this week. There are 10s of billions of dollars sitting in steel boxes floating in the Pacific doing nothing. There’s produce rotting. There’s goods depreciating in value by the day. There are semis stacked up in Long Beach with nowhere to to. The oil workers are threatening to join the strike and extend it. This is as much about macro issues related to labor as to their specific job-related complaints.
Tim F.
@Citizen_X: Well, yes. The company chose to make its stores repellent so it could pay bottom dollar for labor. In other words they knowingly sacrificed customer experience and loyalty for the sake of something they value even more.
jame
@Joey Maloney: Walmart will probably “reduce the workforce” that qualifies for the raise.
Heliopause
Says something about our country that raising wages to the princely sum of $10/hr gets you good publicity.
Luthe
@PurpleGirl: When talking about wages/salary/wealth, always look for the median not the average. Outliers can complete frell up the average, but don’t make a very big dent in the median. In the case of your friend, it sounds like the median RH salary is around $30,000.
The question is, what’s the median Wal-Mart wage?
'Niques
I also think customers are starting to wake up to the Walmart process . . . I have friends who used to insist they could not afford to shop anywhere but Wally world. I pointed out the difference in product, and the varying price structure — not to mention the internet exposure of their horrible employment practices — and now see them avoiding WM as much as I do. It doesn’t cost any more to shop elsewhere . . . just takes a little bit of attention.
mattH
@Luthe: Median wage seems to be $10.50, so if true, this will raise the floor a bit, but it’s hard to figure out what degree this will actually increase the median without some paper to scribble on.
Tyro
@Betty Cracker: The NPR report quoted some Walmart exec saying they were attempting to build a meritocracy
That’s a fairly brazen admission that the company has not been anything resembling a meritocracy since its founding.
Elizabelle
@‘Niques: Yup.
I’m glad Walmart employees get a raise. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.
I do not and will not shop there, however. Predatory retail. Cheap stuff you can get elsewhere or go without.
TooManyJens
@‘Niques: The thing that would keep me from ever shopping at Wal-Mart even if their workers were treated OK is the knowledge that WM has ‘special’ cheaper, shittier versions of products made just for them. So you can think you’re getting a product that’s worked for you before if you bought it elsewhere, but if you get it from WM there’s a good chance it’s a cheap POS.
tones
@Judge Crater: totally, they know they are going to have to pay 10 bucks when minimum is raised so they think they can score points by doing it now.
Pathetic.
Ruckus
@Trinity:
In a meeting once when someone used a euphemism for the word fuck. The boss stated, we don’t use euphemisms here, you want to say the work fuck, say the word fuck. We all did from that minute forward. So…..
Fuck walmart.
The word has power and that is that it tells your true feelings about the subject. So…
Fuck walmart.
As in most PR campaigns the message is to disguise the real issue or to misdirect the reality of doing nothing when something real is required. That’s all this is, a PR campaign to hopefully stall the raising of the minimum wage. Walmart wants a wage hike like any one of us want to be diagnosed with herpes, HIV, lung cancer and a genital wart all on the same day.
squiregeek
When I started work in 1967 the minimum wage (adjusted for inflation) was $25.00/hour. Walmart still has a way to go.