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Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

bloomberg.com

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Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#11
post #4

I can easily see how walmart managers would blackmail^Wencourage employees into doing this.

I mean, Walmart managers "encourage" injured workers not to seek medical attention so it doesn't ding their safety numbers. Paying extra money to drop off a package seems pretty minor considering.

Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#12
FTA: "Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home"

This sounds like a really good strategy - Walmart has thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of people driving home form those locations. If they can leverage that into some efficiencies in the delivery chain, for either faster or cheaper delivery, that'd be awesome for them and their e-commerce customers.

Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#14
post #9

> Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven, more money for people who want it). I wouldn't mind dropping a few things off on my way h…

Yeah, huge difference between "deliver this on your way home or your fired" and "if you want some extra money, deliver this on your way home." Not much difference between this and, say, LaserShip, aside from it being a small part of the overall job.

Well, where the rubber meets the road here is in whether or not there is an unspoken expectation that you need to do this, compensation or not. "Official" policy doesn't always reflect what gets implemented, and is sometimes just used as a way to legally CYA so that you can have your cake and eat it too.

Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#16
post #9

> Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven, more money for people who want it). I wouldn't mind dropping a few things off on my way h…

Yeah, huge difference between "deliver this on your way home or your fired" and "if you want some extra money, deliver this on your way home." Not much difference between this and, say, LaserShip, aside from it being a small part of the overall job.

Depends to what degree they're asking, or telling.

Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#17

> Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven, more money for people who want it). I wouldn't mind dropping a few things off on my way h…

Incentive: their hourly wages. Routes are selected to minimize extra time on commute. Up to 10 packages per person. Will get a navigational app.

Source:https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...

Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#18

> Workers can opt in to earn extra money by making deliveries using their own cars. They’re assigned packages based on where they live so the route aligns with their commute home The headline makes it sound coercive but that actually sounds like an efficient use of time and energy (less big trucks on the road, less miles driven, more money for people who want it). I wouldn't mind dropping a few things off on my way h…

Agreed. I have the privilege to consider employee conditions very important. An honest "opt in" is not detrimental to that, but there's definitely potential for this to make it into the company's culture as a new job expectation. We should be looking out for that.

On the whole, if employees are offered better options than the ones they have now, isn't that progress?

Re: Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

#19
post #4

I can easily see how walmart managers would blackmail^Wencourage employees into doing this.

There's a pretty well-defined precedent in law to counter this. If an "optional" task is used in performance reviews or to define base pay, it then becomes non-optional and the company is very likely in breach of employment law. Hopefully Wal-Mart tells their managers to tread very carefully.
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