8 years ago
2
'Poverty pay' leads Walmart employees to skip lunch – or steal it from coworkers
Walmart employees are so poor that they are skipping lunch, sharing it or, in some cases, stealing it from their coworkers, some of the company’s workers claimed on Thursday while announcing a fast in protest of the company’s wages. Starting Friday morning, over 100 Walmart associates who are members of Our Walmart, a workers organization, and about a 1,000 supporters will begin a fast to shine light on what they describe as Walmart’s “poverty pay”.
Continue Reading http://www.theguardian.com
Join the Discussion
Is $15 an hour an actual demand, or is it just a bargaining point?
If they're really doing this to get $15/hr, then they're doing it in vein. What their work is worth is up to Wal-Mart's discretion, and if managers are getting paid what everyone else is wanting, then there's no way that their value is anywhere near that much. In most jobs, if you asked to for pay equal to that of your manager, you'd probably get laughed at and told to get back to work. The problem with their protest is that they're in a position within the company that essentially holds no power.
I'm not trying to be a "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps," person, but none of these workers are going to get what they want. It sucks, but that's just the reality of working for close to minimum wage: any work that would be considered "skillful" and hard to replace would pay more, and there's a lot of unskilled people willing to work for basically nothing. If someone ends up quitting in protest, they'd be quickly and easily replaced by someone that not only is willing to work for $9/hr - but is happy to do so, because it's better than the either nothing, or $7.25/hr, that they were getting before. In that situation, there's really nothing anyone can do, except maybe hope that there's enough backlash from the media where they'll throw some cash out to get people to shut up. It really comes down to a decision between working somewhere that pays better, which is hard to do, or just deal with it until a miracle happens.
It really sucks, but that's just the nature of the position.
This kind of battle’s been fought and won before.