BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS, USA - MARCH 16: (EUROPE OUT) Like all his colleagues in the company's 5,307 ... [+]
With unemployment at record lows, the retail industry is facing a talent shortage. And the persistent perception that retail is a “lousy job” based on the physicality of moving and standing for long periods, unpredictable hours, often lower pay, and lately, worker safety (both behind the scenes as well as front of the house) is pitting Walmart against Amazon once again, this time in the race for talent.
This week, we are taking a look at changes both Walmart and Amazon are making to become better corporate citizens when it comes to the workplace, whether it’s increasing wages or supporting education, paid family leave, workplace safety and more. It’s a head-to-head battle with both companies stepping up efforts to fill the gaps and even the playing field, and attract and retain workers.
Worth noting, Walmart is the largest employer in the country with 1.4 million people employed in the U.S., representing 1% of the nation’s working population. Amazon employs more than 200,000 people in the U.S., making it one of the larger private employers in the country. Amazon announced this month that it is looking to hire 15,000 new employees.
Wage Increases vs Opportunities for Advancement
First, the elephant in the room — minimum wage increases. Last year, Amazon announced it would increase minimum wage to $15 for all U.S. employees. While the news drew headlines, particularly as Bezos challenged others in the industry to do the same, it similarly drew criticism by employees. Amazon also announced it would be eliminating bonuses, which often added 8 percent a month to many employees’ earnings according to this Washington Post story. One full-time worker in the piece noted, “To me it seems like a publicity stunt on Bezos’ part. The big headline sounds nice, until you realize we are losing significant benefits.” Interestingly, the worker spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, as the company continues to maintain its image of firing people for speaking out against the company.
While Walmart has not taken Bezos’ bait and matched Amazon’s minimum wage hike, it did recently announce a more measured approach to wage increases through an initiative it calls “Great Workplace.” The idea is to empower employees by offering them more opportunities to be cross-trained in several functions to advance into a higher pay scale. The program, which is currently being tested in 500 stores, introduces two new roles with a higher starting salary than Walmart’s standard $11 an hour. The team associate role starts at $12 an hour, and team leads start at $18 an hour. According to the company, the strategy is meant to enable employees to develop broader retail expertise and in doing so, “have wider paths for advancement than if they had a narrower focus and skillset."
The setback here, however, is the perception by employees that this will eliminate jobs, including hourly supervisors and assistant store managers.
Expanding Parental Leave Policy
The U.S. still lags behind other countries when it comes to paid parental leave, giving retailers an ideal opportunity to gain recognition for being good corporate citizens, and Amazon and Walmart are both making changes.
In 2018, Walmart announced an expanded parental and maternity leave policy, with 10 paid weeks for birth moms and 6 weeks for other new parents (dads, non-birthing moms and adoptive parents), regardless of whether the employee is hourly or salaried.
The move was likely an attempt to level up a bit closer to Amazon, which in 2015 began offering up to 20 paid weeks of leave for birth mothers, the ability to share up to six weeks of paid leave with a spouse or partner, and a flexible return to work program. These benefits apply to all full-time hourly and salaried employees.
That said, neither company offers backup childcare options, and Amazon is once again in the headlines being called to task by its mom-employees, who cite the “child penalty” which, according to this article, is disproportionately affecting women, who are more frequently tasked with childcare. A group of more than 1,800 Amazon-employed women, who call themselves Momazonians, has been collecting anecdotal evidence about how the lack of day care support has held back or even derailed careers of women working at Amazon, according to a Bloomberg report.
Of note, Target workers will receive 20 days of backup child care or elder care, and Best Buy is already offering 10 backup care days each year for a $10 per day co-pay.
Retraining vs Investing in Future Leaders
Both Amazon and Walmart are initiating in-house training programs in order to retain their current workforce. Just this month, Amazon announced its plans to retrain 100,000 employees through its “Upskilling 2025” program. The goal is to help U.S. employees adapt to a workplace that is becoming “increasingly disrupted by automation and new technologies.” The initiative feels like a big undertaking, but actually compared to Walmart’s program for every employee, it’s a bit sparse.
Dating back to 2015, through its program Live Better U, Walmart employees have been able to get degrees in fields ranging from computer science to cybersecurity for the tuition tab of $1 a day, and earn free college credits and other educational perks. According to this piece in Forbes, Walmart’s “Dollar A Day College” offers all full-time, part-time and salaried Walmart U.S. store, supply chain, home office and Sam’s Club associates an opportunity to attend college for only $1 a day for the duration of their college program. Walmart covers the full cost - beyond financial aid - of tuition, fees and books. With this program, Walmart wants to ensure that its associates can earn a debt-free college degree.
Last summer, Walmart expanded its college plan and made it accessible to high school students to provide a “bridge to the workforce” in hopes of attracting and retaining more high school students to its workforce and training the next generation of leaders. Perks include flexible job scheduling, free ACT and SAT prep, up to seven hours of free college credit through Live Better U’s College Start program, graduation bonuses and a debt-free college degree (upon high school completion) in the fields of technology, business or supply chain management. The program is also aimed to attract younger workers, such as high school students, to work at Walmart.
Worker Safety vs Robots
Keeping employees safe is a chief concern for both Walmart and Amazon which have both been dragged through the headlines over workplace safety issues and worker complaints for years.
I found a story about Walmart from 2012 which covered workers walking a 50-mile “Walmarch” from Riverside, Calif., to Los Angeles in order to make shoppers aware of “the conditions they and 85,000 fellow warehouse workers face, and demanding Walmart take responsibility for the unsafe conditions under which they are working,” according to the piece. These include inadequate access to clean water, scorching heat that reaches well over 100 degrees, little access to health care, no regular breaks, and a lack of properly functioning equipment.
Some of these complaints sound surprisingly familiar to those voiced by present-day Amazon workers.
Since 2012, Walmart has worked to repair its workplace conditions, but is now facing another workplace safety priority - protecting its store workers from gun violence. Walmart has stated that nothing is more important to them than the safety of their associates, and they now require all employees to take computer-based active-shooter training every three months. The training focuses on three pillars of safety during an act of violence: avoid, deny, and defend. Walmart also took an active stance against gun violence after a mass shooter killed 22 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in August, and enacted a no-open-carry policy.
Amazon, by comparison, is consistently criticized for “speed over safety” resulting in injuries and deaths according to internal Amazon documents.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said about the company in a statement, “Amazon fulfillment workers were already facing speeds of 200 to 300 orders per hour in 12-hour shifts before the new policy. They were struggling to maintain that pace, even before the one-day shipping policy was announced.” He goes on to state, “Testing hundreds of thousands of workers’ physical limits as though they were trained triathletes is the wrong approach. Operating at these speeds for this duration means Amazon needs to hire more workers, under more sustainable speeds that don’t put workers’ lives in jeopardy. Amazon needs to understand that human beings are not robots.”
Amazon is also known to dodge workplace safety regulators and has drawn a dismal record for workplace safety that has caught the attention of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Workers have complained of being fired after a workplace injury occurred.
As Amazon and Walmart work to lure workers from a shrinking pool of candidates, as well as keep the ones they have, they need to meet and exceed candidate expectations on wages, education, paid family leave, and workplace safety at minimum. Both have made strides in certain areas, but have a way to go, particularly when it comes to ensuring employees feel valued and more like partners than workhorses. Well-paid, enriched, protected and supported employees will not only stay, but entice others to join. The talent war is on, and the best retailer may not only just “win” employees but drive industry change in a way that benefits workers, consumers and the industry alike.
