Usa, condizioni lavoro, commercio, Walmart
Nyt 061002
Wal-Mart vuole aggiungere tetti salariali e tempi
parziali
STEVEN GREENHOUSE e MICHAEL BARBARO
Wal-Mart, con 1,3 mn. di addetti il maggior datore di lavoro
privato degli USA, sta cercando di creare una forza lavoro meno costosa con
l’introduzione di tetti salariali e più flessibile con l’aumento dal 20%
(scorso ottobre) al 40% dei lavoratori a tempo parziale, e un maggior numero di
lavoratori notturni e per i fine settimana.
Wal-Mart ha introdotto pagamenti una tantum di $200-400 per
i lavoratori la cui retribuzione è vicina o superiore ai tetti salariali
introdotti. Il salario di un lavoratore con 6 anni di anzianità è di $11,18/h,
o $23 000 l’anno. [Con i tetti salariali non vengono più riconosciuti in
sostanza gli aumenti di anzianità, che dovevano servire ad incentivare la
permanenza dei lavoratori con maggiore anzianità, e questo deriva dalla forte offerta
di manod’opera rispetto alla domanda 7/1]
Anche altre grandi catene, con o senza sindacato, hanno
iniziato ad introdurre le misure sopra elencate, ma le scelte di Wal-Mart avranno una maggiore
risonanza sulle pratiche contrattuali del settore, data la sua dimensione:
il suo fatturato 2005 è stato di $312 MD, superando il
totale dei 5 seguenti maggiori gruppi di distribuzione.
Su un totale di 4000 grandi magazzini, Wal-Mart ne possiede
1900, di cui moti aperti 24 ore su 24.
Gia ora i tempi parziali sarebbero il 25-30% del totale.
Un memorandum 2005 dell’Ufficio risorse umane del gruppo
rileva che il costo di un lavoratore con 7 anni di anzianità è superiore del
55% a quello di uno con 1 anno di anzianità, anche se non è maggiormente produttivo; si consigliava di assumere
lavoratori più sani e a tempo parziale perchè è meno facile che utilizzino la
previdenza aziendale.
Il gruppo presenta l’introduzione dei tetti salariali come
tentativo di mantenere livelli salariali interni equi.
Il
sindacato che ha nel passato cercato di organizzare i lavoratori di Wal-Mart è
l’United Food and Commercial Workers, ed ha creato il gruppo WakeUpWalMart.com
[ndr – Wal-Mart è sempre riuscita respingere i tentativi di
organizzazione sindacale dei propri dipendenti]
Nonostante le nuove condizioni di lavoro e salariali, negli
scorsi tre mesi Wal-Mart avrebbe ricevuto 7 domande di assunzione per ogni
nuovo posto di lavoro creato.
In alcuni
centri Wal-Mart chiede la disponibilità dei suoi lavoratori 24 ore su 24, e
taglia l’orario di chi protesta.
Nyt 061002
Wal-Mart
to Add Wage Caps and Part-Timers
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and MICHAEL BARBARO
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.
To some extent, Wal-Mart is simply doing what
business strategists recommend: deploying workers more effectively to meet the
peaks and valleys of business in their stores. Wall Street, which has put
pressure on Wal-Mart to raise its stock price, has endorsed the strategy, with
analysts praising the new approach to managing its workers. In the last three
years, the stock price has fallen about 10 percent, closing at $49.32 a share
on Friday.
“They need to be doing some of this,” said
Charles Grom, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Chase who covers Wal-Mart. It lets the
company schedule employees “when they are generating most of their sales — at
lunch, in the evening on the weekends.”
But Sally Wright, 67, an $11-an-hour greeter
at the Wal-Mart in Ponca City,
Okla., said she quit in August after 22 years with the company
when managers pressed her to make herself available to work any time, day or
night. She requested staying on the day shift, but her manager reduced her
schedule from 32 hours a week to 8 and refused her pleas for more hours,
she said.
“They were trying to get rid of me,” Ms.
Wright said. “I think it was to save on health insurance and on the wages.”
Wal-Mart vigorously denies it is pushing out
longtime or full-time employees and says its moves will ensure its
competitiveness. The company says it gives employees three weeks’ notice of
their schedules and takes their preferences into account, but that description
differs from those of many workers interviewed. Workers said that their preferences
were often ignored and that they were often given only a few days’ notice of
scheduling changes.
These moves have been unfolding in the year
since Wal-Mart’s top human
resources official sent the company’s board a confidential memo stating, with
evident concern, that experienced employees were paid considerably more than
workers with just one year on the job, while being no more productive.
The memo, disclosed by The New York Times in October 2005, also recommended
hiring healthier workers and more part-time workers because they were less
likely to enroll in Wal-Mart’s health plan.
– Other big retailers, with or without unions, have begun using more
part-time workers, adopted wage caps and instituted more demanding work
schedules in one form or another. But because Wal-Mart is such a giant — its $312 billion in sales last
year exceeded the sales of the next five biggest retailers combined —
its new labor practices may well influence policies more broadly.
And Wal-Mart’s tougher scheduling demands
could be especially taxing on workers because, unlike its competitors, the
chain has many stores — more than 1,900 out of 4,000 — that are open 24 hours.
Human resources experts have long said that
companies benefit most from having experienced workers. Yet Wal-Mart officials
say the efficiencies they gain will outweigh the effects of having what labor
experts say would be a less experienced, less stable, lower-paid work force.
Sarah Clark, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the
company viewed the changes as “a productivity improvement through which we will
improve the shopping experience for our customers and make Wal-Mart a better
place to work for our associates,” as Wal-Mart refers to its employees.
But some workplace experts point to the
downside of the policies. Susan J. Lambert, a professor of social sciences at
the University of
Chicago who has written
several research papers on retail workers, called it a burden for employees to
cope with constant schedule changes.
“You have to set up child care for every day
just in case you have to work,” she said, “and this makes it hard to establish
routines like reading to your kids at night or having dinner together as a
family.”
The adoption of wage caps has also been
difficult for many workers to swallow. Workers will never receive annual raises
if their pay is at or above the cap, unless they move to a higher-paying job
category. Wal-Mart says the caps will encourage workers to seek higher-paying
jobs with more responsibility.
– To compensate for lost future wages under the new system, Wal-Mart
made one-time payments of $200 to $400 to workers whose pay was near or over
the caps. Several workers described that as “hush money.”
Ramiro Gonzalez, who works in the produce
department of a Wal-Mart in El Paso,
said that many longtime workers were fuming about the caps.
No matter how hard people work, “we won’t get
anything else out of it,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who earns $11.18 an hour, or about $23,000 a year, after
six years with Wal-Mart. “The message is, if I don’t like it, there is
the door. They are trying to hit people who have the most experience so they
can leave.”
In the confidential memo sent to Wal-Mart’s
board last year, M. Susan Chambers, who was recently promoted to be Wal-Mart’s
executive vice president in charge of human resources, questioned whether it
was cost-efficient to employ longtime workers. “Given the impact of tenure on
wages and benefits,” she wrote, “the cost of an associate with 7 years of tenure is almost 55 percent
more than the cost of an associate with 1 year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or
her productivity.”
The memo said, “the shift to more part-time
associates will lower Wal-Mart’s health-care enrollment” even though Wal-Mart
was reducing the amount of time to one year, from two, that part-time workers
would have to wait to qualify for health insurance.
Workers say there is some evidence that the
goals outlined in Ms. Chambers’ memo are being put into practice. At several
stores in Florida,
employees said, managers have suddenly barred older employees with back or leg
problems from sitting on stools after using them for years while working as
cashiers, store greeters or fitting-room attendants. Wal-Mart said it had no
companywide policy on stool use and did not have enough information to comment.
In August, Wal-Mart sent all store managers a
confidential document called “Facility Manager Toolkit.” It instructed them to
tell workers that the new pay system helped “establish pay levels that are
competitive in the local job market, helping us to attain and retain the talent
we need.”
If a worker asked whether the wage caps were “one more
attempt to get rid of long-service Wal-Mart workers,” the manager was to
respond that this was “not an attempt to ‘get rid’ of long term associates,”
but was “consistent with
our objective to maintain internally equitable pay levels,” according to the
document. The memo was supplied to The New York Times by WakeUpWalMart.com, a group funded by the
United Food and Commercial Workers, which has tried to organize Wal-Mart
workers in the past.
Though
some workers have quit in response to the pay caps and scheduling policies,
Wal-Mart says it has received an average of seven applications for every job
opening at a new store in the last three months.
Wal-Mart generally prohibits reporters from
interviewing workers in its stores. The Times contacted employees through
union-backed groups, Wal-Mart, employment lawyers and referrals from current
and former workers.
– A big area of discrepancy between what Wal-Mart says and what the
workers say is whether the company has a policy of “open availability,” requiring
employees to make themselves available around the clock. Ms. Clark, the
Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company had no such a policy, adding, “Our main
goal is to match the ratio of associates to customers shopping in our stores resulting
in better customer service hour by hour.” Wal-Mart says it pays higher wages to
night-shift workers.
– But in March, workers from a Wal-Mart in Nitro, W.Va.,
held a small protest rally in the center of town after Wal-Mart managers
demanded 24-hour availability and cut the hours of workers who balked. And workers from other stores around the country said in
interviews that similar demands had been made on them.
Houston Turcott, the former overnight stocking
manager at the Wal-Mart in Yakima,
Wash., said that managers had
told workers, “Either they
had full, open availability so we can schedule them when we would like or we
would cut their hours.”
Tracie Sandin, who worked in the Yakima store’s
over-the-counter drug department until last February, said, “They said, if you don’t have
open availability, you’re put on the bottom of the list for hours.”
Ms. Sandin said that many Wal-Mart employees
disliked the tougher scheduling demands, which typically did not take seniority
into account. “It makes it hard,” she said. “If you have a function with your
child or you want to go to church on Sunday, you don’t want to miss those
things.”
Tim Hahn, who oversees three workers as
manager of the housewares department of a Wal-Mart in Lake St. Louis, Mo., said
that two of his subordinates had left their schedules open, but one did not for
family reasons. Mr. Hahn said “it helps a lot” to have two workers who have
agreed to work during the day or night.
“Sometimes they work two nights a week and two
days a week,” he said. “If there is an issue with a schedule, they can approach
me. It’s something we will work to solve. If they need this day off, I am happy
to give it to them.”
New York Times