I’ve never been a big fan of Wal-Mart—despite the aggressively low prices, I have always found the stores to be crowded and cheap, with marginal customer service—but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire it as a smart business.
Setting aside my personal feelings about shopping there, I have always marveled at Wal-Mart’s ability to manage itself profitably with ruthless efficiency.
And that’s why this holiday announcement from the world’s largest retailer shouldn’t come as any great surprise: Wal-Mart announced this week that it has agreed “to pay up to $640 million to settle 63 suits alleging it routinely underpaid employees around the country, ending years of embarrassing legal battles over its treatment of workers,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“The workers and their lawyers will receive at least $352 million, and the payments could reach $640 million, depending on how many claims affected workers submit,” according to The New York Times.
“Union critics of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, saw the settlement as proof of their view that the company achieves its low prices in part by cheating workers,” the Times added. “But the company rejected that characterization, saying it had already corrected wage practices that it has long attributed to local managers acting without authority.”
As I’ve noted before, Wal-Mart management has an uncanny ability to know when to fold its tent and get in front of a negative issue, as the company did last year when it came to criticism over not providing adequate health care to its workers. Still, the company’s actions on health care, I noted at the time, were disingenuous and little more than PR spin given that Wal-Mart touted that “92.7 percent” of employees were covered by a health plan—any health plan—when in fact only 50 percent were being covered by an actual Wal-Mart health plan.
In other words, there is ALWAYS something else behind the scenes that Wal-Mart is trying to accomplish when it offers up a settlement like this. The company doesn’t do it because it feels it is the right and honest thing to do for workers; no, Wal-Mart only gives in when there is some bigger issue at stake.
And, here’s what is behind this settlement, according to The Wall Street Journal’s law blog: “Wal-Mart wanted to settle the lawsuits not just to avoid potentially more costly defeats in the courtroom, but to resolve issues that might be used to argue for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The legislation, expected to be considered by Congress next year, is fiercely opposed by Wal-Mart because the company worries it will make it easier for workers to unionize,” according to Paul Secunda, an associate professor at the Marquette University Law School.
Secunda told the Journal’s law blog: “This is part of their overall strategy to get their labor house in order, and compared to what unionization might cost them, I think they probably realized it was a small price to pay.” In other words, this settlement by Wal-Mart is less about doing the right thing by workers and more about posturing for a long-term strategy to fight the Employee Free Choice Act.
I’ve said here before that I think the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act pushes the frighteningly wrongheaded notion that the secret ballot, a pillar of our democracy, is somehow good for electing presidents but flawed when it comes to union organizing. It’s a bad idea that is going to make for even more divisive labor-management relations, in my view.
But, a disingenuous Wal-Mart “settlement” as a hedge against the Employee Free Choice Act, if that’s what the company is doing, doesn’t help matters either. It’s just the beginning of the PR spin and posturing we’ll undoubtedly be bombarded with from both sides as the battle over this terrible piece of legislation heats up in the new year.
So, Merry Christmas and happy holidays from Wal-Mart. Ho, ho, ho indeed.
Everyone knows it’s a tough job market right now, and there are lots of job seekers looking for their next paying gig, but does that totally explain the fact that “more than 330,000 people have applied for top jobs in the Obama administration so far, in an unprecedented outpouring of interest spurred by excitement surrounding Barack Obama’s election,” according to a story in USA Today?
Here’s what is amazing about this number: “At this point in President Bush’s 2000-01 transition, there were 44,000 applicants; in President Bill Clinton’s 1992-93 transition, there were nearly 135,000,” according to Max Stier, president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. His group, according to USA Today, “promotes effective government.”
Why so many applicants? The newspaper points out some obvious reasons, including the desire to help the country during an economic crisis and “the pent-up energy of Democrats waiting on the sidelines through eight years of a Republican White House.” But it also points out a more pragmatic reason that recruiters can certainly identify with—”the ease with which applicants can apply online at www.change.gov.” Clearly, it is a lot easier to apply for government work now than it was in late 2000 and early 2001 when George Bush took office.
Still, people who are applying for a spot on Obama’s team need to take a pragmatic approach and not get their hopes too set on this being their next paying gig, because as the story also notes, “only about one in 100 applicants will get jobs.”
In other words, you need to keep looking for a job no matter where you may have applied, either in the Obama administration or elsewhere. Normally, I tell people that the holidays are a terrible time to be looking for work, at least based on my past experience in both recruiting and job searching at this time of year. But this year is different.
When will things get better? Who knows? One thing is certain, though: A job in the new Obama administration is probably NOT something you should be counting on finding in your Christmas (or nondenominational, all-purpose holiday) stocking this year.
I get a fair amount of reader feedback to this blog—and I thank you all for that—but some of the things I write seem to resonate more deeply than others. I’m not always sure just why people want to comment on certain topics or what gets them riled up, but I’m grateful for all the feedback nonetheless.
1. Verbal Abuse as a Workforce Strategy (March 7). Reader comment: “Among employment attorneys, there is often talk of the so-called ‘equal opportunity jerk.’ No one is defending a manager or management style like this. It’s just that the company’s legal team doubtless looked at a tough fact situation and determined that the best strategy was to point out that the plaintiff was not singled out for bad treatment—everyone suffered more or less the same. Rest assured—eventually the company will have to reform its work environment, or else the turnover, morale and productivity problems will drag it down.”
2. Bosses Behaving Badly (January 18). Reader comment: “What is amazing to me about these crazy bosses is that we the citizens of this planet allow them to continue their bad behavior and go to great extremes to win their favor.”
3. Good Manners Never Go Out of Style (December 2). Reader comment: “Thank-you notes are a sign of class in a world where reality shows spew foul-language bleeps more often than dialogue. Thank-you notes are a sign of consideration in a world where people are shot for looking the wrong way at the wrong time. Thank-you notes are a message of respect in a world that values a bargain more than a human life.”
4. From the Editor: Why We’re Writing About SHRM (February 3). Reader comment: “SHRM has a purpose and serves a mission, just not the one that they put in writing. Where SHRM goes wrong is when they indicate that they represent a profession. The reality is they represent a large group of people that may or may not be HR professionals, but that do work in or with some HR functions.”
5. Is There Ever a Good Time to Fire Someone?(June 17). Reader comment: “Why does everyone assume that whenever anyone is fired they will either: a) go postal, shoot all their workmates and then take the server down (so don’t fire them early in the week); or b) go home, drink their drink cabinet dry and then start in on the medicine cabinet (so don’t fire them on Friday). Honestly, how many times has this really happened?”
There should be no surprise that Solis is a hard-core supporter of organized labor, and by extension, the Employee Free Choice Act. According to Politico.com, “Solis came to Congress in 2000 in part thanks to organized labor. With financial and organizational support from unions, she knocked off a Democratic incumbent who had supported ‘fast-track’ trade authority in a heavily liberal Los Angeles-area district. An ally of her fellow Californian House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Solis serves on the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee. She rates a 97 percent lifetime AFL-CIO voting record.”
And as Mark Schoeff Jr. has written in his Workforce Washington blog, “In an Obama administration, the Department of Labor, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, ‘will be emboldened (and further funded with bigger budgets) to pursue aggressive investigations against employers for wage and hour violations, unfair labor practice charges and charges of unlawful discrimination,’ ” according to Gerald L. Maatman Jr., a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago.
Who better to lead the charge in an aggressive, employer-hostile Labor Department than someone like Solis, a woman who “sits on the board of American Rights at Work, an organization backed by a broad swath of unions that pushes workplace issues, especially legislation to ease union organizing,” according to the Journal. It’s difficult to think of anyone worse for the job.
What fascinates me about the Solis choice for the Labor Department is that she is virtually invisible here in Southern California, where the Workforce Management world headquarters is located.
Although you can make the case that many members of the House aren’t all that prominent, particularly compared with U.S. senators, Solis is someone who even flies below the radar with well-informed Californians who live in her general geographic area.
It will be interesting to see how that lack of name recognition plays out in Washington. But really, I wish that Obama had named someone with a little higher political profile as labor secretary instead of the little-known Solis. After eight years of the do-nothing, empty-suit reign of Elaine Chao at the Labor Department, it would have been nice to have gotten a bigger player in this key Cabinet post, even if it wasn’t someone I don’t particularly agree with politically.
As much as I detest the Employee Free Choice Act and its frighteningly wrongheaded notion that the secret ballot, a pillar of our democracy, is somehow good for electing presidents but flawed when it comes to union organizing, I’m willing to give Hilda Solis a chance. After all, can she be any worse than Chao, a woman who can’t point to a single accomplishment except serving in Bush’s Cabinet longer than anyone else?
For my money, Chao is the worst secretary of labor since the department was split off from the Commerce Department in 1913. And, both she and Solis pale in comparison to some of people who have held the post in the past—such as Francis Perkins, George Shultz, Robert Reich and Elizabeth Dole.
So vaya con dios, Hilda Solis. I’m praying that, somehow, you will find a way not to do the obvious and will instead surprise the hell out of me at the Labor Department.
I get a lot of e-mails from the Society for Human Resource Management, but there are only two that I really look forward to each year: one in the summer when SHRM touts the top-selling HR books at the SHRM store during the annual conference, and another in December when they list the best-sellers “based on customer sales throughout the year, online and at SHRM store conference events.”
Those silly (some might say petty) changes made the summer list a whole lot less meaningful, informative and fun. After all, does listing the top accessories sold make much sense? It doesn’t to me, although I much confess that I get a kick out of the fact that the “I Love HR” T-shirt, coffee mug and key chain are among the “Great 8 Accessories” sold by SHRM this year. Make of THAT what you will.
The SHRM marketing folks have also monkeyed around with the annual book list and aren’t ranking any of the best-selling books anymore. They also throw in a couple of multimedia items. So here is what SHRM is touting as “The Great 8 of 2008” best-selling titles. My question from previous years still applies: There’s some kind of message here. Can you figure it out?
= Member Only
