Walmart managers couldn't be happier.
The company's CEO, John Furner, announced last February that he will increase their salaries, and will include subsidy models comparable to those of large investment banks.
His positions will become one of the highest paid in the country and will be remunerated with company shares.
These conditions draw attention around the world and raise hopes of receiving a good salary without studies - the job does not require a university degree - but they also hide a problem that has long become a plague in the corporation: the enormous gap salary between its managers and its base workers.
Starting in April, the base salary of supercenter managers
,
the chain's largest type of store, will rise to $128,000 annually, 9% more than last year.
In addition to the new income, they will obtain 20 thousand dollars in company shares each year, and may be awarded with bonuses of up to 200%.
Adding all these figures, they will be able to earn up to $404,000 annually, which would place them in the 5% of the best paid workers in the country.
Managers of smaller stores will receive between 15 and 10 thousand dollars in stock per year and will also enjoy a raise in their salaries.
Their new salaries will be equivalent to approximately 31 thousand euros per month, while their Spanish counterparts from other companies (Walmart is not present in Spain), receive between 21,000 and 43,000 per year, according to the employment platform Glassdoor.
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While the increase in the payment of its intermediary managers is celebrated, the network's base workers receive between 14 and 19 dollars per hour worked.
Although this salary exceeds the federal minimum defined by law in the United States, which is $7.25 per hour, the base remuneration is not enough to earn a decent living.
The MIT Living Wage Calculator project, which calculates reference values for compensation throughout the country, places the average living wage at $22.13 per hour, as long as you consider a family with a single working adult and without any son, which means the least possible expense.
Walmart's salary would only allow a decent living in the state of West Virginia, whose decent value is $18.94 per hour, assuming the worker received the upper limit of the salary range defined by the company.
The lower limit of the salary range does not reach the minimum wage of 15 states.
The low pay of its frontline workers is one of the pillars of Walmart's strategy, mainly to maintain the low prices for which it became famous.
In his 1992 autobiography, Sam Walton, the supermarket chain's founder, wrote that “in retail, payroll is one of the most crucial things you have to fight to maintain your profit margin.”
According to Nelson Lichtenstein, author of the book
The Retail Revolution: How
Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
, the founder used to say: “I pay low wages, I can take advantage of this.
We are going to be successful, but the basis is an employment model with very low wages.”
Walmart is the company that most employs people enrolled in low-income US government subsidy programs, such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food aid.
The company managed to maintain this tactic over the years by developing highly efficient processes for training and hiring new employees, which causes a very high turnover of new workers, but requires very little or no training of its new hires for effective performance. of its functions.
In addition, it focuses on establishing a large part of its contracts as partial, which exempts it from paying taxes and other government obligations.
However, he always emphasized remunerating positions considered strategic for the company.
Sam Walton was famous for “poaching” managers from competing stores, even when he had already consolidated his empire.
In announcing the new salaries, CEO John Furner stated: “We asked our managers to act like owners and now they literally will be,” he declared.
“Walmart is not subject to market forces because it is creating them”
Charles Fishman, author of The Walmart Effect
The strategy turned the company into arguably the most successful supermarket chain in the world, but also established it as a pariah in the labor market.
The corporation has a long history of anti-union stances, including training videos critical of these organizations.
In January of this year, Walmart was accused of using illegal measures to prevent workers from associating at a California store.
According to the labor agency National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the store's management threatened workers who distributed pro-union material, which would violate the country's laws.
Despite decades of attempts by unions, almost none of Walmart's approximately 4,700 U.S. stores have unionized.
The retail giant currently faces at least 21 other complaints from workers or unions to the NLRB for alleged labor law violations, such as threats and interrogations of workers and unequal enforcement of labor rules against union supporters.
Only in 2012 was it possible to create a labor organization dedicated to the company's workers.
The United Food and Commercial Workers union, one of the largest in the United States, created a specific division for the retail network, called OUR Walmart (a play on words with “our Walmart” and the acronym United for Respect Walmart Organization).
The company is the only one among its competitors that has not exceeded the salary limit of $15 minimum payments per hour.
Target and Costco achieved it in 2020 and 2021, respectively, and even Amazon, which also does not have a good reputation for treating its workers, has paid it since 2018.
The great benefit that low salaries provide is the very low prices for which the company offers its products.
Guided by the first part of its mission, which is “helping people save money so they can live better,” Walmart has gained so much economic strength that there is a reduction in inflation rates everywhere it is located, mainly for food products.
The influence generated by its commercial activity led to the creation of the term
Walmart
Effect, which includes both good consequences, such as increased employment (Walmart is the largest employer in the world, with more than 2.3 million workers), as bad (its installation usually causes the closure of small businesses around it).
Charles Fishman, author of the book that brought the term to fame, writes that the corporation “is not subject to market forces because it is creating them.”
The large payroll that it will pay its managers is the latest creation of this enormous company that influences so many markets.
This super salary will not be far from others that have gone viral in the United States, such as that of the gas station manager of the Buccee's network (which reached $275,000) and also that of the NBA mascots (Rocky, the mountain lion of the Denver Nuggets, charges 625,000 a year).
With its more than 3,500
supercenters
, Walmart will give many people access to an exclusive salary pantheon, but also sustained by the low payments of frontline workers.
Perhaps it would be good for the company to extend the second part of its mission to these workers, but its principles make it clear to whom its competencies are directed: "We help
our clients
take advantage of their salary and support their families."
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