Wal-Mart to Add More Part-Timers and Wage Caps

[Herman Munster]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/business/02walmart.html?hp&ex=1159761600&en=ff931b5bdf8cc0b8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, is pushing to create a cheaper, more flexible work force by capping wages, using more part-time workers and scheduling more workers on nights and weekends.

Wal-Mart executives say they have embraced new policies for a large number of their 1.3 million workers to better serve their customers, especially at busy shopping times — and point out that competitors like Sears and Target have made some of these moves, too.

But some Wal-Mart workers say the changes are further reducing their already modest incomes and putting a serious strain on their child-rearing and personal lives. Current and former Wal-Mart workers say some managers have insisted that they make themselves available around the clock, and assert that the company is making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make way for lower-wage part-time employees.

Investment analysts and store managers say Wal-Mart executives have told them the company wants to transform its work force to 40 percent part-time from 20 percent. Wal-Mart denies it has a goal of 40 percent part-time workers, although company officials say that part-timers now make up 25 percent to 30 percent of workers, up from 20 percent last October.

[NMMNG]

1. Can't have anybody making a living wage now, can they?

:eyes:

[SheWhoMustBeObeyed]

2. To cut insurance costs

They may not have to insure part-timers.

Twenty-four hour availability can be used in punitive scheduling by managers who want to drive out higher-paid employees. They can schedule double shifts, or shifts separated by several hours that don't allow employees time to drive home and back, much less rest. As mentioned in the article, scheduling employees for two days and two nights a week can disrupt family life; but it can also completely fuck with people's arcadian rhythms, leaving them vulnerable to accident, injury and death.

Wal-Mart. Always looking for new ways to destroy America. Always.

[DaveJ]

4. Like someone I know....

At another bug box store, she is scheduled to start at 5:30 three days a week in the morning because she is one of the few workers dedicated enough to start that early.

At 9:00 am after the other employees drag their lazy asses in then she is sent home.

What a way to reward work ethic.

[spinbaby]

6. They have to be available 24 hours a day?

Who would do that for a part-time job that pays next to nothing if there weren't rampant unemployement and underemployment?

:mad:

[DaveJ]

3. As if it wasn't bad enough...

Here it comes... closer to home at every turn. Instead of positively responding to all the bad PR they've decided to do the opposite -- become even more disgusting and vile behemoths destroying communities at every turn.

Families often depend on the second income that a job like this might provide. But these big box stores have no interest in family or community, only their shareholders. The wages their employees made were already bad enough, now they're making it worse. Destroying families and communities is nothing but a joke to them.

I'm sure wal-mart board of directors are SO proud that they are turning the U.S. into a Banana Republic. They won’t be happy until everyone in America has to literally wipe their asses just to feed their children. I can't believe America has accepted this wretched form of economic cannibalism.

[liberaldemocrat7]

5. High Tech slavery and high tech colonialism

brought to you by the supporters of the GOP.