Ok, I knew Wallmart was screwing us, but wait till you get to
the part about Wallmart hiring people to help their employees
apply for medicaid.
On top of that, the company is suffering bad word of mouth, and
weaker profits, because they are trying to evade Obamacare.
Looks like they may be backing off on that.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Forbes
9/25/2013 @ 9:45AM |47,081 views
Wal-Mart Returning To Full-Time Workers-Obamacare Not Such A Job
Killer After All?
Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, announced Monday that
35,000 part-time employees will soon be moved to /full-time
status/, entitling them to the full healthcare benefits that
were scheduled to be denied them as a result of Wal-Mart's
efforts to avoid the requirements of Obamacare.
While some analysts believe that the move comes as Wal-Mart is
attempting to deal with the negative view many Americans have
of its worker benefits program, a closer look reveals the real
reason for the shift -
Wal-Mart's business is going south due to the company's
penchant for putting politics and the squeeze on Wal-Mart
employees ahead of the kind of customer satisfaction that
produces prosperity over the long-term.
In fact, Wal-Mart's unwillingness to pay most of their workers
a livable wage, while avoiding enough full-time employees to
properly run a retail outlet, has led to the company placing
dead last among department and discount stores in the most
recent American Customer Satisfaction Index - a position that
should now be all too familiar to the nation's largest retailer
given that Wal-Mart has either held or shared the bottom spot on
the index for six years running.
For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales
have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company
has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers (those who must
reapply for a job every 180 days) to staff their stores while
cutting full-time employees' hours down to part-time status in
order to avoid providing workers with healthcare benefits.
The result?
Empty shelves, ridiculously long check-out lines, helpless
customers wandering through the electronics section and general
disorganization at Wal-Mart store locations.
This is hardly a recipe for success.
A recent description of a Wal-Mart store in Newark, New Jersey
published by Bloomberg, says it all - "Three days earlier, about
10 people waited in a customer service line at a Wal-Mart in
Secaucus, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, the
nation's largest city. Twelve of 30 registers were open and the
lines were about five deep. There were empty spaces on shelves
large enough for a grown man to lie down, and a woman wandered
around vainly seeking a frying pan."
The description pretty much sums up what you will find at the
typical Wal-Mart store in the United States these days.
While the company's trend toward temporary employees has
allowed the retailer to avoid its responsibilities under the
Affordable Care Act - a law that Wal-Mart publicly supported
only to turn around after passage and work to avoid providing
health care benefits to employees - they've managed to tank
their store sales in the process.
Who would have guessed that a well-staffed store filled with
competent and reasonably paid employees might actually have an
impact on the success of a company?
Home Depot - that's who.
According to Zeynep Ton, a retail researcher and associate
professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of
Management, in the early 2000s, Home Depot's CEO, Robert
Nardelli, moved to cut full-time staffing levels while
increasing part-time employees in an effort to boost profits by
trimming the expense that comes with employing full-time
workers. It worked for a short while. However, as Ton notes,
eventually customer service declined - and with it, customer
satisfaction - leading to a severe decline of same-store sales.
Wal-Mart's penny wise-pound foolish approach to its business was
further well documented inthe Bloomberg article referenced
earlier where they told the story of Margaret Hancock, a retired
accountant from Newark, Delaware, who has always viewed Wal-Mart
as her "one stop shopping destination".
While Ms. Hancock had, for years, been able to get everything
she needed at her local Wal-Mart store, recent visits resulted
in her failing to locate numerous items as the products were
simply were not out on the shelves and available for purchase.
As Hancock explained it, "If it's not on the shelf, I can't buy
it. You hate to see a company self-destruct, but there are other
places to go."
And go is exactly what Ms. Hancock did - no doubt to Wal-Mart's
competitor, Costco, a company that experienced a 19 percent
increase in profits in Q2 2013 while paying its employees 40
percent more on average (the average Costco wage is $21.96 per
hour) than what a Wal-Mart worker can earn. In that same
quarter, Wal-Mart numbers revealed the company is going nowhere
fast given its current state of operations.
So, where /is /all that product that once filled Wal-Mart
shelves?
Oh, the goods are in the store - either in the back room or in
the unopened boxes lining the aisles as they await the
availability of a store clerk to get to the rather critical job
of moving the merchandise from the box to the shelf where a
customer can actually purchase it. But when there are
insufficient numbers of store clerks available - due to
Wal-Mart's commitment to using temporary workers or busting its
full-time employees down to part-time so as to avoid worker
benefit - the products Wal-Mart sells stay off the shelves and
unavailable for customers to purchase.
Of course, Wal-Mart's efforts to keep its workers from earning
a decent living while achieving health care benefits has created
some full-time work for some.
The company now hires people to work with its employees to help
them sign up for Medicaid, the government program that makes
healthcare available to Americans who neither get coverage at
work or are able to afford it without public assistance.
What that means is that you and I are subsidizing Wal-Mart's
poor treatment of its employees as we pay for their workers
health care coverage with our tax dollars and all so Wal-Mart
can feather and mask its sinking profits by allowing you and I
to pay to pay for their responsibilities, whether we shop at
Wal-Mart or not.
The moral to the story?
Wal-Mart is finally learning what all American businesses who
seek to avoid their health care responsibilities to employees
will soon learn.
It may be a clever enough dodge to cut employees below the 30
hours per week in order to avoid the expectations of Obamacare,
but the move comes at a substantial price to be paid in lost
revenue and profits. Given that the entire point of business is
to show a profit, it is only a matter of time before employers
learn what Home Depot learned some years ago and what Wal-Mart
is slowly beginning to figure out - you get what you pay for.
Cut back on employees and you will, eventually, cut back on
your profits as the savings a business creates by cutting worker
hours leads to greatly decreased sales as customer satisfaction
disappears.
While there are no shortage of Americans who enjoy deriding the
Affordable Care Act as a ‘job killer', what will soon emerge
- and sooner than you may think - is an understanding that the
losses experienced by businesses that cut worker hours will far
exceed whatever is gained by avoiding giving employees the
healthcare benefits their families so badly require.
Don't believe it?
Just ask Wal-Mart.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/09/25/
wal-mart-returning-to-full-time-workers-obamacare-not-such-a-
job-killer-after-all/*
BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn
--- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
* Origin: Fidonet Since 1991 Join Us: www.DocsPlace.org (1:123/140)
|
