Wal-Mart Returning To Full-Time Workers

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-returning-to-full-time-workers-obamacare-not-such-a-job-killer-after-all/1/

by TheLegace • 13 years ago

43 41 13 years ago

forbes.com

TheLegace2• 13 years ago

Wal-Mart’s competitor, Costco, a company that experienced a 19 percent increase in profits in Q2 2013 while paying its employees 40 percent more on average (the average Costco wage is $21.96 per hour) than what a Wal-Mart worker can earn. In that same quarter, Wal-Mart numbers revealed the company is going nowhere fast given its current state of operations.
the availability of a store clerk to get to the rather critical job of moving the merchandise from the box to the shelf where a customer can actually purchase it. But when there are insufficient numbers of store clerks available—due to Wal-Mart’s commitment to using temporary workers or busting its full-time employees down to part-time so as to avoid worker benefit—the products Wal-Mart sells stay off the shelves and unavailable for customers to purchase.

jobu• 13 years ago

My favorite bit in the whole article:

"[Walmart] now hires people to work with its employees to help them sign up for Medicaid ..."

So Walmart cares about the health of it's employees, just not enough to provide them with a reasonable health care option.

pekk• 13 years ago

Whatever helps them pay less themselves.

derleth6• 13 years ago

So, if Walmart employees are on Socialized Medicine, does that make them Makers or Takers?

aaronbrethorst2• 13 years ago

Irrelevant. What does it make the CEO and board is the interesting question.

maratd2• 13 years ago

So Walmart cares about the health of it's employees, just not enough to provide them with a reasonable health care option.

Walmart is not a person. It does not care one way or another. Not because it's evil, but because it's not a person. It can't care. About anything.

This entire "don't be evil" crap has really got to stop.

Corporations respond to incentives, not moral arguments.

If we, as a society, have decided that we want employers to completely provide for the health of their employees, that's fine. We should make laws requiring them to do so, with penalties in tow for non-compliance.

But please stop the entire "they just don't care!" crap. They're not supposed to. They're corporations, not people.

And yes, I know people run those corporations. Those people have fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders, not to your moral compass. This is something resolved on a societal level, not on the corporate level.

shiftpgdn2• 13 years ago

Then shouldn't Costco cut all of its employees salaries by half? They are a publicly traded company as well you know...

panarky• 13 years ago

As someone famous once said, "Corporations are people, my friend."

But seriously, please stop with the "fiduciary responsibility to stockholders" crap, as if that's the only responsibility people have to each other.

Too many companies extract profit for themselves by imposing negative externalities on their employees, on taxpayers, and on the environment. We can't legislate all of this away, so there's a healthy role for shame, for protest, and for boycott.

By the way, it's possible to care for your employees AND make a profit. Costco treats their employees well and still makes a killing for their stockholders.

nikatwork3• 13 years ago

Those people have fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders, not to your moral compass. This is something resolved on a societal level, not on the corporate level.

This is the kind of ethical cop-out non-philosophy that's tearing then American environment apart.

A corporation can be a good global citizen, or a rapacious parasite. They are not obliged to rape the fuck out of everything in sight to turn a short-term profit for shareholders. Let alone lobby/bribe the government to open new loopholes so they can pillage harder and faster. Doing so is bad for the long-term prosperity of their country, and the shareholders.

No really - don't be evil.

michaelwww3• 13 years ago

I was surprised to see this in Forbes but the author says "I write from the left on politics and policy." and "I am a Senior Political Contributor at Forbes and the official 'token lefty,' as the title of the page suggests. However, writing from the 'left of center' should not be confused with writing for the left as I often annoy progressives just as much as I upset conservative thinkers."

I applaud Forbes for having opposing viewpoints and also applaud the author for defending himself vigorously in the comment section from the more conservative readers. A good time was had by all as far as I can tell.

revelation• 13 years ago

It's Forbes, they have thousands of "contributors" and their site is nothing but a shell of blogspam now.

Make no mistake, there is no editing going on.

eropple• 13 years ago

This isn't completely true. Rick Ungar is an actual published writer with a nontrivial history (most of it outside of politics--he was head of Marvel Productions for a while). He appears on Fox News--such as that is--programs as the token liberal.

michaelwww3• 13 years ago

Steve Forbes still weighs in on the Op/Ed link and I doubt very much he would agree with your characterization.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

I tend to be skeptical of columnists who make claims like that because of Camille Paglia ruining it for everybody with her concern-trolling.

bane• 13 years ago

Oh, you mean when I can't buy things because they aren't on the shelves because there's nobody available to move them from the loading dock to the shelf, and I don't want to shop there anyway because the entire store is in disarray because there aren't enough employees to clean up the products that sales might drop?

derleth6• 13 years ago

On the other side of the coin, there also aren't enough employees to stop shoplifters and it's policy that they can't really challenge them anyway.

tzs• 13 years ago

NOTE! The submitter linked to the second page of a two page story. For those who want to start at page 1, try this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/wal-mart-re...

TheLegace2• 13 years ago

Oh my gosh, I could have sworn I was on the first page.

Sorry about that.

gwright3• 13 years ago

The author claims that shelves weren't being stocked because the employee mix had been shifted towards part-time workers.

OK, accurate or not, it says nothing at all about the total number of available 'worker-hours' just that the full/part-time mix had changed. It simply doesn't follow logically that there would be a shortage of labor just because the mix changed.

nathos• 13 years ago

Is it possible that full-time workers would be more experienced and/or better motivated, resulting in increased productivity per worker?

runamok• 13 years ago

They treat employees like crap and pay them as little as possible. Thus they get exactly what they pay for; sullen workers who do the bare minimum not to get fired.

gwright3• 13 years ago

Sure that is possible but that is a different argument. The author should have made that point explicitly if that was indeed the situation (and provided evidence).

adventured2• 13 years ago

Some parts of this article may be correct, however this:

"For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers"

... is simply wrong. Sales (from the '13 annual report):

FY09: $401b | FY10: $405b | FY11: $419b | FY12: $444b | FY13: $466b

Sales are sinking dramatically at the retailer? At best that's ignorance, at worst a sensational lie.

michaelwww3• 13 years ago

Sales are up around the world. He is referring to U.S. stores that are affected by domestic health care law changes.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732354920...

FredDollen• 13 years ago

"In fact, Wal-Mart’s unwillingness to pay most of their workers a livable wage"

Wal-Mart is paying their workers what the market will bear. In fact, it can be argued they are paying MORE than the market can bear, since they have 25 applicants for every opening.

Wal-Mart Returning To Full-Time Workers

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