10% grocery discount
In further news of holiday cheer, Walmart doesn’t pay overtime for those very same holidays.
Walmart is one of several big-box retailers who are open on Thanksgiving Day and will start its Black Friday sale at 6pm.
Walmart is also one of the few big companies that does not offer employees increased hourly wages for working shifts on a holiday. At Target and Amazon, workers are paid time and a half for each hour worked.
“Walmart doesn’t offer holiday pay. They have a discount you have to work certain days to receive and one discount only lasts two days,” said a Walmart worker in Idaho who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. They are re scheduled to work full-time shifts on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday this year.
Walmart sent ever such a nice note to explain exactly how many minutes you have to use the discount and exactly what you can’t buy with it, although the “etc” at the end could mean…well, everything else, so not so much exact as a trap. What nice trillionaires they must be.
Mighty white of them.
The exclusions, including the “etc.”, seem to be out of their hands (local laws), so I don’t fault them for that. The 10% discount on groceries for more than a month during the holiday season is actually pretty nice.
But not paying time and a half holiday pay is a disgrace. Offering a 2-day extra 15% discount instead is pathetic. Shame on them.
I am just floored that this is considered optional.
1. They put so many restrictions on the use that probably few, if any, employees will qualify.
2. 10% employee discount on goods in the store has long been standard practice for most stores (including WalMart in the past; I wonder what happened to it?)
3. WalMart’s typical response to employee requests for raises has been to hand them food stamp forms.
3a. Which won’t do them much good when Trump gets through gutting the program.
4. WalMart has been sued in the past for requiring employees to clock out at their scheduled time and continue working (off the clock).
5..WalMart tends to keep its employees one hour a week under the amount of hours that would kick in the insurance option – which the employee has to pay a premium for, anyway.
Conclusion: WalMart is a shitty employer. This is not ‘pretty nice’, it’s just plain old corporate greed masquerading as doing something ‘pretty nice’ for employees.
Quoting https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com/leave-laws/federal-state-holidays/:
The federal government and all state governments have passed laws designating certain days each year as public holidays. Although there are several days each year that are recognized by the federal government and all state government as holidays, each state recognizes additional days each year that may or may not be recognized by other states.
Although the federal government and state governments have established public holidays, it does not necessarily mean that all employers are required to give employees these days off work or pay employees premium pay for working on the designated holidays. In fact, except for private employers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, no other states or the federal government require private employers to grant employees time off for any state-designated holidays or pay them extra when they do.
On the other hand, most states and the federal government have laws that require public employers to grant employees leave on some or all public holidays or provide employees extra compensation when they do. However, in a minority of states the law is either silent regarding holiday leave for public employees or specifically delegates the decision regarding holiday leave to a particular state agency.
As a public employee, I get the holidays off, without any reduction in my pay. What my boss does do, however, is set up deadlines that will mean I have to work over the holidays. They don’t tell me to work over the holidays, they do not require work over the holidays officially, so they do not have to pay me extra. But when you announce a deadline of something that must be done by the beginning of the day on the first day back, and you announced that deadline three days before the last day of work, knowing employees have a full three days of work (plus the meetings you require in those last days before the holiday just to make sure the employees don’t cut an run a little early), it means you have to work over the holidays or miss your deadline. Which leads to reprimands. Which go in your personnel file, and are never removed, even when SOP requires they be removed after a certain period of time.
That’s still a lot better than what WalMart does to their employees.