Walmart Asks Customers To Donate Food To Its Needy Employees

[alexd]

A Cleveland Walmart store is holding a food drive - for its own employees.
"Please donate food items so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner," reads a sign accompanied by several plastic bins.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer first reported on the food drive, which has sparked outrage in the area.

"That Walmart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers - to me, it is a moral outrage," Norma Mills, a customer at the store, told the Plain Dealer.

A company spokesman defended the food drive, telling the Plain Dealer that it is evidence that employees care about each other.

Wal-Mart has been criticized for paying low wages to its 2.2 million employees.

Last week, 50 people were arrested after protesting the retailer's pay at a store in Los Angeles.

Wal-Mart turned a profit of $15.7 billion last year.


from Business Insider
Walmart Asks Customers To Donate Food To Its Needy Employees | Business Insider India

Cleveland.com original story:
Is Walmart's request of associates to help provide Thanksgiving dinner for co-workers proof of low wages? | cleveland.com

 

[ndrwrld]

just as good as the McDonalds site telling employees...
Stress Management
2 vacations a year reduces chance of heart attack by 50%.
Singing lowers your blood pressure.
Quit complaining, stress hormone levels rise by 15% after 10 minutes of complaining.
Food Management
Break up your food into smaller pieces results in eating less and still feeling full.
Debt Management
Consider selling stuff on Ebay or Craigslist.
Return Christmas gifts for cash.

Then there's the Debit Card choice for your earnings, which costs you every month, and for every deposit, and withdrawl, yet McDonalds reaps in billions for this from the Banks.

 

[Sal De Ban]

What's all the fuss? I lent Don Geiss my 7-series when his Bentley was stolen. It's the same thing.

 

[kerouacdude]

I'm reading George Packer's The Unwinding right now. Chapter on Sam Walton:

“six of the surviving Waltons would have as much money as the bottom 30 per cent of Americans”

I'm sure I've read that or something similar before but it's just so stark it never loses impact.

 

[praktik]

Unions have too much power - down with unions! SOciety has evolved past the point where they are needed!

---

Hey - we have all these working people who can't afford to eat!

<cognitive dissonance at its finest>

we made this bed

 

[lucky1]

not even sure what I want to say here- erosion of workers rights (to a far wage, to enough hours to be considered "full time" thus covered under employment law, for health and other benefits) continues. The Walmart store should just host a thanksgiving dinner for staff who cant afford one using their own food products, as the cost to walmart would be small.

 

[swenard]

My question is... Why do people work for wal-mart?
Get a job somewhere you're valued and treated correctly.

 

[janiecakes]

It's so simple! How could these people not have seen this solution to their problems before you came along to tell them to get another job?

 

[Phat Buddha]

not even sure what I want to say here- erosion of workers rights (to a far wage, to enough hours to be considered "full time" thus covered under employment law, for health and other benefits) continues.

I'm confused, should walmart fire half the staff so that the other half can get more hours? At the end of the day.. walmart is a business, not their care giver... everyone seems to forget that

 

[WestsideWax]

Wal-Mart could pay every U.S. employee $14.89 just by not buying its own stock

Wal-Mart could afford to hike every U.S. employee’s hourly wage to at least $14.89 an hour just by not repurchasing its own stock, according to a new report from the progressive think tank Demos.

“We find that if Walmart redirected the $7.6 billion it spends annually on repurchases of its own company stock, these funds could be used to give Walmart’s low-paid workers a raise of $5.83 an hour, more than enough to ensure that all Walmart workers are paid a wage equivalent to at least $25,000 a year for full-time work,” authors Catherine Ruetschlin and Amy Traub write in the Demos paper, “A Higher Wage Is Possible: How Walmart Can Invest in Its Workforce Without Costing Customers a Dime.” Demos, whose funders include unions, is releasing the paper Tuesday morning.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an emailed statement yesterday, the company announced that it had “surprised more than 350 associates today with on-the-spot promotions during multi-city, town hall meetings” it called “one way the retailer is listening to, learning from and thanking associates for the hard work they do every day.” That statement did not address the news, announced by labor activists Monday afternoon and confirmed that night by the National Labor Relations Board, that the federal agency was prepared to issue a complaint against the retailer for alleged violations of workers’ legal right to organize and strike.

Wal-Mart announced $15 billion in additional stock repurchases at its June annual shareholder meeting, which was attended by thousands of workers flown in from around the world by Wal-Mart, as well as dozens of striking Wal-Mart worker-activists from the labor group OUR Walmart. Also noting a Bloomberg estimate that Wal-Mart repurchased roughly $36 billion in stock in the four prior fiscal years, Ruetschlin and Traub write that the purchases “further consolidated ownership of the company in the hands of the heirs to company founder Sam Walton,” securing the Walton family a bare majority stake in the company, and “increased the value of ownership among the Waltons and the other remaining shareholders.” But they contend the buybacks “did nothing to boost Walmart’s productivity or bottom line and had no direct benefit for Walmart’s customers or frontline employees.”

In contrast, argue Ruetschlin and Traub, a hefty raise for Wal-Mart employees would aid customers by increasing productivity and decreasing turnover; and benefit the broader public by improving consumer demand (including for Wal-Mart goods) and thus hastening economic recovery. Ruetschlin is the author of a prior Demos report arguing that Wal-Mart and its fellow top retailers should implement a wage floor equaling $25,000 annually for full-time employees; she told me last year that her research showed “that low wages are a business choice, and they’re not the right business choice.”

As I’ve reported, how much Wal-Mart currently pays U.S. employees is a contentious question. The company pegs its average hourly wage at $12.78, but that figure includes managers and excludes workers who aren’t full-time. Drawing on 2011 IBISworld data and GlassDoor.com surveys, OUR Walmart activists have pegged the wage at less than $9 per hour. Like Demos, they’ve called for a wage floor of $25,000 a year. OUR Walmart is closely tied to the United Food & Commercial Workers union. After Wal-Mart’s U.S. CEO said in a Goldman Sachs presentation that over 425,000 employees make more than $25,000 annually, OUR Walmart seized on the comment as an implicit admission that the majority make less. Workers have mounted a series of short-term work stoppages in several cities over the past month in the lead-up to a planned “Black Friday” day of strikes and protests next week.

 

[Blysspluss]

Unions have too much power - down with unions! SOciety has evolved past the point where they are needed!

---

Hey - we have all these working people who can't afford to eat!

<cognitive dissonance at its finest>

we made this bed

Yup...the low-wage types at Walmart should organize. It is their right to do so.

And for all the bluster about unions, at least people can expect to live on Union wages...even if they are just starting out in a Union gig.

 

[Blysspluss]

I'm confused, should walmart fire half the staff so that the other half can get more hours? At the end of the day.. walmart is a business, not their care giver... everyone seems to forget that

It reflects poorly on a company when they do not take care of their people and pay them a living wage. Especially when they have huge profits.

And sure, they are a business, but so is a sweatshop. And for all of our bluster about sweatshops and poor conditions in Bangladesh...is the Walmart scenario terribly different when their staff can't even afford to eat a decent meal either?

 

[Boss Hog]

You tell people to get a job, then they get a job, then they can't even afford to eat.

I mean come on. This shit needs to change.

 

[NemIsis]

i'm confused, should walmart fire half the staff so that the other half can get more hours? At the end of the day.. Walmart is a business, not their care giver... Everyone seems to forget that

Huh?? :O

 

[Phat Buddha]

Huh?? :O

let's say there are 120 working hours to give, they can hire 6 people to work 20 hours each.. but if they are forced to staff full time hours to prevent the 'erosion of workers rights', the number of working hours stay the same...but number of staff reduce. walmart will only need 3 staff working 40 hours ...laying off 50% of the staff.

 

[Blysspluss]

let's say there are 120 working hours to give, they can hire 6 people to work 20 hours each.. but if they are forced to staff full time hours to prevent the 'erosion of workers rights', the number of working hours stay the same...but number of staff reduce. walmart will only need 3 staff working 40 hours ...laying off 50% of the staff.

The converse of this logic is also true: why hire 6 part time workers instead of 3 FTE?

I think we know the answer given the previous posts....Bennies. A cheap way to avoid the employer obligation.

Maximize the ole profits at the expense of the people who help make it happen.

 

[Phat Buddha]

You tell people to get a job, then they get a job, then they can't even afford to eat.

I mean come on. This shit needs to change.

fair enough, the example from the article claimed the employee was doing fine until she lost the $500 a month in child support when the father of her four children went to jail. so because the father went to jail, walmart needs to take care of her four kids and start paying her more?

in the us, the poverty line for an individual is $11,720.....a family of two is 14,937...that number increases to 27,827. should walmart pay based on personal circumstances to make sure everyone 'can eat'? i'm all for paying a fair wage, but for retail workers, what is that?

 

[Boss Hog]

I think it was Kids in the Hall who once said "Minimum wage... hmmm minimum wage... do I want to work for as little money is as legally possible?"

That's the bottom line. Paying your employees the minimal amount legally required to.

We'd pay you less if we could, but it's the law. That's the message.

Minimal wage is the US is a huge issue. Not necessarily Wal-Mart's problem, but it's recognized that people cannot live on minimum wage.

It's not just the rate of pay. It's the way they do their business. Keeping employees at one hour short of being considered full-time to circumvent having to do more for them, or finding ways to replace them with younger workers etc when they become liabilities. There's a thousand anecdotes and accounts of the way the company treats their employees. This latest thing is really is just a symptom of the cause.

Look the bottom line is if you're a ridiculously wealthy company partly because of the people who got you there, reward those people with something more than barely-living wages. It's about decency. I know a company like Wal-mart's bottom line isn't obliged to this, but at the same time, they preach "American values" and all kinds of other shit that gets proven completely hypocritical at times like this.

Their employees are hungry so the right thing to do is ask customers to shop at their store to charitably feed them? lol come on, it's like something out of a dystopian comedy.

 

[ndrwrld]

and when the workers can't sustain themselves and their families, they lose their residences, jobs, and become homeless.
and then, they have to deal with this.
One Lawmaker Is Literally Smashing The Belongings Of The Homeless With A Sledgehammer

 

[praktik]

Fact is if walmart paid their workers more it would be a pretty big stimulus to the economy.

Cost wouldn't even be equal to the wage increase as these low-wage workers would be spending more @ Wal Mart if they got paid more.

Most analyses of minimum wage show that its a bit of a wash - some businesses end up cutting back on staff but the increased spending drives growth and more hires.

So then it becomes a moral question: if raising wages for minimum wage workers is a "wash", isn't the moral answer to raise these wages, suffer neutral economic impact and get gains in economic security for individuals?

 

[Blysspluss]

So then it becomes a moral question: if raising wages for minimum wage workers is a "wash", isn't the moral answer to raise these wages, suffer neutral economic impact and get gains in economic security for individuals?

Depends who you ask. The 1% response would likely be something along this line: "what are morals, and why does my business need them?"

 

[Boss Hog]

Because unless you're chronically myopic, they're good for business.

 

[Sal De Ban]

My question is... Why do people work for wal-mart?
Get a job somewhere you're valued and treated correctly.

It's so simple! How could these people not have seen this solution to their problems before you came along to tell them to get another job?

I'm confused, should walmart fire half the staff so that the other half can get more hours? At the end of the day.. walmart is a business, not their care giver... everyone seems to forget that

Huh?? :O

Huh?? :O

Huh?? :O

this. ^

 

[lucky1]

I'm confused, should walmart fire half the staff so that the other half can get more hours? At the end of the day.. walmart is a business, not their care giver... everyone seems to forget that

You should perhaps read up more about the unfair labour tactics Walmart uses.

Walmart is notorious for hiring "part time" workers and then making them work 35 hours a week, which is about 1 hour or so short of what is considered "full time" and thus what would qualify for benefits and other protection. If workers refuse to work that many "part time" hours they get fired.

at the end of the day walmart is making millions of dollars by treating their employees like shit. You think that is acceptable because it is a "business"?

 

[praktik]

Hey "the door is always open"

I hate hate hate that attitude. One of the worst managerial styles I've come across in my professional life. Doesn't sell me on what you're trying to convince me of - just makes me feel hopeless.