Walmart cuts starting hourly pay for some workers

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to News@lemmy.world – 197 points – Walmart cuts starting hourly pay for some workers
detroitnews.com

The retailer says the change will create consistency in starting hourly pay across individual stores.

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“Consistent starting pay results in consistent staffing and better customer service while also creating new opportunities for associates to gain new skills from experience across the store and lay the groundwork for their career regardless of where they start,”

Ok miss PR person. Please explain your rationale cause that shit makes no sense.

I worked somewhere that was killing off their QA department and in a company wide meeting explained it by saying “when you go to a store a pick up a part, you expect it to have gone through QA” Lots of head scratching that day. They still don’t QA their products. They just ship them and let the customers complain if something is wrong.

I work in software dev. My old job laid off our entire QA team at once and presented it as an opportunity to learn doing testing as a developer.

Bugs are cheaper to just deal with as they pop up….until they aren’t.

I've seen this happen too. It's sort of a double edged sword - devs need to take testing seriously and have coverage metrics. However, this doesn't negate the need for QA particularly in software that has a human experience associated with it. Writing code and having it work correctly doesn't mean that the user experience itself will be correct. For whatever reason, executives don't understand this and software gets shipped with more bugs than ever because there's little to no QA.

Yeah. We wrote unit tests and integration tests, but we needed ui tests, which none of us were strong in at the time. One bug I remember fondly, it was possible to abuse debounce basically to submit bad info by switching an input after hitting submit. This happened more than you would expect. Took us forever to figure it out till we were able to get a UI tester from another team to figure it out. The human element is super useful in testing

Not for my old app that had to be audited 6 times a year lol. Any data defect had to be explained in a one page summary. Now imagine you regularly have ~30k concurrent users. The wrong bug means tons of paperwork that brings us all out of development mode to write and support.

Reminds me when we had three companies merging at the same time and the bosses brought everyone in to tell the grunts and sales people that no one will be losing jobs. I ask, "You know when you move in with someone and you have to get rid of a set of dishes. Do you think you need three sets of dishes?" Yeah, so there were tons of lay offs.

Why even lie about it. Anyone smart enough to be worth something at the company is also smart enough to know better. You’ll lose everyone you can’t afford to lose.

probably went something like this: someone at a low paying store complained about the store 4 miles down the road paying more. so they're addressing that 'issue'.

meanwhile, record profits and unprecedented wealth for one family

Weird how that consistency can't be created by raising wages.

When you didn't think they could be more evil:

Oh quit being so obtuse. They only generated 143 billion dollars in profit last year. How can they be expected to pay their employees a living wage like that??

After all, if they took 140 of that billion and divided it among their 2.1 million global retail employees, that'd only be 66,666 each with a 1.4 million left over. Hardly worth doing, obviously. After all, what will the shareholders say??

So they could increase all wages at or below of $10 to $43 and still get bonuses.

God don't you love America?

Yeah plus they have over 2 million associates per their website. Even if they COULD give everybody a raise, that's only like $70,000 per person.

The only cutting that Walmart needs is senior executives' necks. With a guillotine.

Then insurance company execs

don't forget those at the top at giant huge telcos and internet providers.

Let's just do it to all the rich and their cronies

I'm not saying you aren't right, but maybe we should just financially decapitate them? That way we aren't killing people wholesale and then we can send a message as well as distribute some wealth with sanity bereft of toxic capitalism.

Maybe a flat tax rate with no deductions for business or corporate income, no personal income tax, top paid income tied to the lowest paid, and 90% of backend profits distributed to employees based on a percentage of payroll expense for the fiscal year?

I mean it might take a falling blade to get there, but the best omelettes need a few broken eggs.

I'm actually surprised they were paying what they pay. My nephew got hired to move carts around for $19 an hour. Sure, it's part-time, but that's a crazy starting wage for a big box store in Indiana.

Edit: Before you think I'm pro-Walmart, fuck Walmart. I hope every store closes down and the Waltons go bankrupt.

Edit 2: Also, minimum wage should be $21 an hour everywhere, so it's only a crazy starting wage because Indiana is a fucked up red state.

I haven’t shopped at Walmart in years. Their stores are truly shit.

Best deals around.

I personally think there's not much variation in grocery stores if they have the products I want.

I'm surprised they had room to cut without going below minimum wage.

Remember, they're not anti-union, but they're not neutral either.

EDIT: Since people seem to be missing the joke here, this is a common line in anti-union propaganda training videos.

They literally got rid of the deli meats counter because they voted to unionize. They are completely anti union

For anyone who doesn't know, I was quoting their union-busting videos.

Amazon and Lowe's use that same line.

Anyone who thinks they're not anti union isn't paying attention.

the in-store butchers and bakery, too, iirc.

I worked for a Wal-Mart once. They literally have anti union propaganda in their training material

Also Ross. They're a gross company that treats their workers like shit. When you start working there they give you pamphlets on how to sign up for social services like food stamps. They also have one of those employee funds, where everyone pays into it every month and if someone has an emergency they can use money from it. Maybe if they paid their employees a livable wage they wouldn't need makeshift insurance funded by their impoverished workers. So fucked up.

I once listened to someone who managed a walmart-esque store complain how to get their cashiers who earned slightly above minimum wage to go above and beyond their required duties