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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

#301

Post by phamilton »

knightofmars wrote: post #228
phamilton wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly in a place like Boise, ID. That's $800/month, $704 after tax. Rent with roommates will run around $300/month. Food is $150/month ($5/day). That leaves $250/month for misc expenditures. It would absolutely be tight, but people can and do live on that much.

What if you have a family?

It raises some interesting questions. Should every job pay a sufficient wage to raise a family? How big of a family? Should we require employers to pay a teenager as much as someone supporting a family of 8?

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

#302

Post by notfromhere »

ythn wrote: post #166
vkou wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, if only there was some sort of way to force Wal-mart to answer these kinds of questions. Maybe... A union of employees, who want to understand their relationship with their employer better, and to push back on unfair parts of said relationship.

If you don't understand why businesses don't like unions, you've never owned a business. Also, historically, unions in the USA for whatever reason a lot of times end up becoming mafioso (not sure if it's the same in other countries).

businesses don't like unions because with a union they cant treat their employees like expendable cogs.

The Union/Mafia problems stems from unions getting suppressed by corporate-hired goons, forcing unions get their own goons to fight back. said goons tended to be the local mafioso

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

#303

Post by dllthomas »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #279
dragonwriter wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on how big the available labor force with no better offers is, and what the rate is at which people from outside that group move into it; potentially indefinitely, under the right (or very wrong, depending on your perspective) conditions.

I'd be interested in any examples you have.

Unpaid internships?

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

#304

Post by xienze »

anigbrowl wrote: post #298
xienze wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to hear it from HN readers, they're the lucky ones: they won't be exploited like their car-driving brethren.

A specious mischaracterization of the arguments on display.

Is it? The arguments boil down to:

* I bet this isn't really "optional"

* I bet they're not going to get paid enough to make it worthwhile

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

#305

Post by Consultant32452 »

__jal wrote: post #299
Consultant32452 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you honestly believe an employer can sustain a business providing wages insufficient to purchase food to provide the calories necessary to complete the work?

You are attempting to recast the question to looking at median subsistence-rates worldwide. The Walmart workers we are discussing work in communities in the U.S. Certainly, some folks in the world survive on $1/day. That doesn't work in the U.S. We know that Walmart wages are insufficient alone, because workers there tell us that they need, for instance, SNAP to feed their kids. Thus SNAP is, in part, now a subsidy t…

The point of this discussion is to shine a light on how ignorant the OP's question was. The original question was whether a person could live off $40/day. But that's not what OP really meant was it? What they meant to ask was whether or not a person could live OP's approximate standard of living on $40/day. And the answer to that is obviously not. If you make more than $34k/yr you're in the global 1%. Virtually no one on the planet lives at the OP's standard of living. The question only shows the OP's hubris.

SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase. Every dollar not spent on food is another dollar someone might collect in rent, or cell phone service, or clothing. Wal-Mart may benefit greatly from SNAP, but it benefits far more from its customers having more income that they don't have to spend on subsistence than it benefits from its employees being able to accept a lower wage. And of course Wal-Mart accepts SNAP payments from its customers because Wal-Mart sells groceries.

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

#306

Post by basseq »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #245
sabujp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? so if the # of (optional) interviews i conduct on behalf of the employer is a factor in performance reviews then the company is in breach of employment law?

Any specific interview you conduct might be optional, but conducting interviews in general might very well be in your overall job spec and may not be optional.

Indeed. Optional to include "outside of working hours".

I am still trying to find the suit. I think it was Target. Many managers were in the habit of staying after they clocked out and/or coming in on their days off to make sure their department was tidy. One manager did not, and was either fired or passed over for promotion because her department was not as tidy as others. She sued, and won, alleging that by holding her performance against her peers "optional" activities was against fair labor laws and amounted to forced overtime.

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

#307

Post by Glyptodon »

rectang wrote: post #132
Glyptodon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Walmart's going to have to carry car insurance for deliveries. It doesn't seem like there's any reasonable way they'd be able to "contractor loophole" it.

Per the TechCrunch article, workers need to submit proof-of-insurance to participate. The wear-and-tear is going on employee vehicles rather than company vehicles, the additional distance they travel will increase their personal insurance rates, and as with rideshare they will need to pay additional riders on their policies. (If they don't have the riders their policies will be canceled as soon as they make a claim!)…

Where I work we need to submit proof of insurance to drive our own vehicles to job locations/for work purposes, but we are still covered under an employer policy when driving for said business purposes. They just don't want to deal with drivers whose vehicles aren't already personally insured (which seems sane). My understanding is that this is pretty normal, though I'm not 100% sure if it's an outgrowth of liability concerns or legal obligation. Either way, I can't imagine that Walmart wouldn't have a similar practice in place.

Not that I disagree that Walmart's cutting out hypothetical fleet maintenance costs with what they're doing. I'm sure there are a variety of advantages for them however they're structuring it.

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

#308

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

basseq wrote: post #306
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any specific interview you conduct might be optional, but conducting interviews in general might very well be in your overall job spec and may not be optional.

Indeed. Optional to include "outside of working hours". I am still trying to find the suit. I think it was Target. Many managers were in the habit of staying after they clocked out and/or coming in on their days off to make sure their department was tidy. One manager did not, and was either fired or passed over for promotion because her department was not as tidy as others. She sued, and won, alleging that by holding…

Don't know the details but I'd imagine that keeping your dept tidy would be part of your job req and if other managers want to slack off and then use their weekends to do that work, that's on them?

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

#309

Post by ericd »

TillE wrote: post #174
xienze wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both assuming that this must necessarily be exploitative. It might actually be a good program for Walmart workers.

Any situation where you do not receive the full value of your labor is exploitation, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus...

Is this sarcasm? "Of course" makes it sound like it is, because it's certainly not obvious, but you know, Poe's law, and you linked to it.

If it's not, I'm curious why this theory holds so much sway for some people, given its glaring flaws. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what it's saying, but just because an engineer can add $1M in marginal revenue to Google's bottom line absolutely does not mean they deserve $1M in salary, because they can only do that using the construct that was created by the other engineers at Google in order to make that much money for Google. If they couldn't make that $1M on their own without the rest of Google's help - the existing brand, infrastructure, and ideas when they join - they're not being "exploited", especially if they're also shareholders. And the longer you spend there, the larger a shareholder you become (unless you choose to sell your share to someone else, which many do).

And to say that the value of a product can be based on how much labor it took to make is completely insane - mud piles can take tons of labor to make, but they're usually also completely useless. The amount of effort expended did not imbue those mud piles with any sort of value to anyone.

This isn't to say that I think the current ownership structures of companies is ideal and can't be improved upon, I don't think that. But I find what you linked to be filled with such flawed reasoning that I'm curious what people see in it. Or maybe it requires operating under different axioms.

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

#310

Post by LyndsySimon »

Glyptodon wrote: post #101
jonlucc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's another problem with this. I recently was rear-ended while I was stopped at an intersection, and the second question my insurance company asked me is if the car was being used for commercial (ride-sharing) services then or at any time. I wasn't, but I assume this kind of delivery would be commercial use, and the cost to add this to your insurance would be way too expensive to make it worth it for the…

I assume Walmart's going to have to carry car insurance for deliveries. It doesn't seem like there's any reasonable way they'd be able to "contractor loophole" it.

Walmart's scale is such that they could easily self-insure.
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