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Why Walmart pays its truck drivers 6 figures

• datadrivenangel 3y ago
  "A senior vice president at Walmart told Yahoo! Finance at the time it was because of a “shortage” of truck drivers. (Those who study the trucking industry dispute that such a shortage exists, concluding that drivers leave the industry for jobs with better pay and hours.)" It turns out that good truck drivers could also be doing other useful work, and want to be well compensated and taken care of for their labor.
  • jvanderbot 3y ago
    > drivers leave the industry is basically the same thing as > there's a shortage If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright - I think the answer is something like remote operation, level 3-4 autonomy for highways, and nice comfy air conditioned driver hubs in cities so nobody has to be away from home for days at a time. Boom - all the drivers come back and get paid decent wages to drive trucks. Ideally the per-truck subscription fee for the service is an add-on to the cost of doing driver business.
    • wil421 3y ago
      How realistic are the trucking sims? Do you actually get gas and unload? Highway stuff and regular driving sounds good but backing a trailer up to Walmart video game style sounds frightening.
      • jvanderbot 3y ago
        We can do that scary bit autonomously already: https://www.outrider.ai/ https://www.outrider.ai/ I'm not referring to "sim", I'm referring to remote piloting. Real time sensor and controls feedback from a truck that is only autonomous when it makes sense to be. We can pilot drones over 100s of yards in real time without a hitch. We just need a bit more range (few kms) via, say, the internet, and you can do this fairly easily. I don't see a research problem, I see a funding problem and an aversion to autonomous trucking b/c people think it's either completely infeasible, or completely solved by Aurora. I'm not sure of either.
        • SoftTalker 3y ago
          And what does the driverless truck do when it loses its internet connection at 70mph on a freeway?
          • jvanderbot 3y ago
            The use case does not include operating remotely at 70mph on freeways, esp because internet connectivity is hard over most the USA. That bit is mostly lvl 3/4, and is something that is addressed well by other companies. It's the long tail between lvl3/4 and all the scenarios that remain in which a remote driver solves the problem. Esp in logistics yards, which are chaotic, fast paced, and driven by voice communication.
      • ikari_pl 3y ago
        OTOH we dock manned spaceships to the ISS video game style
        • foxyv 3y ago
          That is a much easier problem than backing a truck up to a loading bay. Even landing an airplane is a lot easier if you have an ILS. Space and the air are mostly empty. A warehouse loading area is cluttered with other trucks, debris, and cargo. Although I could totally see this being done remotely with VR and a ton of cameras.
          • jvanderbot 3y ago
            Agree with you. Just to add spice the convo: Backing into a loading bay is quite easy, autonomously. Once you stage the truck you can push a button and just watch it go. See: https://outrider.ai https://outrider.ai (which is where I work, and we do all the staging _also_, but I'm actually interested in "everything else" as well). There's a lot of very human-ish problems to get to that state, that I think remote operators can really help with.
      • bluGill 3y ago
        Pretty good for the expensive ones. They are not video games though, and so they are not making the shortcuts games do to make them fun. I've driven a few (snow plow, excavator) and they are very hard to control - then I see someone who drives that machine professionally get on: they get a near perfect score and comment about how real it feels. Note that part of the sim is the controls: they take the cab from a real machine and replace the windshield with a screen (for version 1, often version 2 starts to take away parts, but everything you touch including the seat is the real thing). I've long thought that to renew your drivers license you should have to spend a day every few months in a simulator to prove you can drive safely. Do you maintain a safe following distance? Can you maintain the speed limit? Do you stop for pedestrians? Do you zipper merge correctly? Here is a situation where someone else screwed up and you will crash, can you choose the best crash? Here is an icy road, can you control the car? there is a lot that modern simulators can do but few people have used them.
        • gooseyman 3y ago
          I agree with you on the DL renewal based on a sim. Interestingly: The base CDL is a one and done skill test. There are no CPEs like with other regulated industries (nurses/teachers/investment advisors) - but there is a health and fitness check.
      • AlwaysRock 3y ago
        The difficult part is actually the last mile/few miles in trucking. Open highway driving is a significantly less complicated problem than navigating down side streets then backing into a warehouse to complete a delivery. Freight tech companies have been talking about automating every BUT the last mile/last few miles for years. Have a stable of drivers who you have on hand to take over the last hour of a delivery. Automate everything else.
        • Yujf 3y ago
          The nice thing about this is also that truckers would be able to go home everynight which would make the job more attractive
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • nradov 3y ago
      Remote operation on public highways is a dead end. There is no wireless data network with the latency and reliability guarantees necessary for safety. Particularly when it comes to tunnels, canyons, and heavy precipitation. And let's not have any ridiculous claims about how in case of a network connection failure the truck can just autonomously pull over and stop; that's not going to work safely for descending I-70 in a snowstorm. There may be some limited use cases for remote operation on specific local routes where sufficient network access points can be provisioned.
      • newsclues 3y ago
        It’s not a dead end, it’s a solvable problem but the issue is that no one wants to pay for infrastructure.
      • jvanderbot 3y ago
        You can't do it with autonomy, and you can't do it with remote piloting, but you can do it with a mix of both. That's my assertion. Spending 20 hours looking at Nebraska / Illinois farm fields is not the use case for remote operation - and as you say, you lack the infra for that anyway. And navigating traffic or interacting with distribution center logistics is not the case for autonomous operation - it's an infra nightmare to get a autonomous vehicle to integrate with all that radio-voice-comms madness. Even OTR drivers just want to get that part of the journey over with and get back to the hotel. Having a pod with local drivers near major hubs, for example, means the drivers take over when the trucks get close enough for it to matter. It wont' work for delivery to, say grocery stores (which can be local driving anyway), but it will work for center-to-center transport ala between Walmart hubs. It's the long haul OTR trucking that has high attrition / people shortages, because you're away from family for so long. That little bit can be somewhat autonomous, with handoff of remote operators only near hubs. Think air-traffic-control for trucks and hubs, except probably more hands on than just telling it what to do.
        • datadrivenangel 3y ago
          Like harbor pilots for ships, where someone comes out to join the ship to help navigate through potentially dangerous waters.
    • LiquidSky 3y ago
      "> drivers leave the industry is basically the same thing as > there's a shortage" No, it's not. It means the drivers are not being paid enough to stay, as they explicitly say is the reason they're leaving. >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me Sure, here's the solution: pay the drivers more. Problem solved.
      • jvanderbot 3y ago
        > drivers are not being paid enough to stay therefore > drivers leave the industry therefore > there's a shortage ... at the going wage I don't see how we can argue over the problem statement. We can argue over the solutions, of which there are infinite, but at least two: 1. increase wages 2. decrease shittiness of the job via ideas like mine Or why not both? The only dichotomy here is a false one you've introduced.
        • LiquidSky 3y ago
          Because there's no problem. There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough to attract them. >We can argue over the solutions No, we can't, because there's no solution needed to this non-problem artificially created by employers unwilling to pay enough to attract and retain employees. Your ideas aren't needed except by the employers trying to perpetuate their false self-made "shortage", all to avoid just paying employees more. The only actual problem is uncritically accepting the narrative of the employers as you are doing here.
          • jvanderbot 3y ago
            > There's not "shortage", it's not that there just aren't enough people to be drivers. There are plenty, employers just don't want to pay enough to attract them. OK, well, let's not mince definitions. For the purposes of my thought process, a shortage is defined as "Number of people we want to do a job" minus "Number of people who do that job". The semantic difference between that and what you said is so small as to be negligible to me and doesn't preclude "increase wages" as a solution. I think that's fine for you to have a preferred solution or even a different preferred definition.
    • QuarterReptile 3y ago
      >If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright In the US, we un-solved this problem decades ago when we abandoned railroads for subsidized auto development.
  • gadders 3y ago
    Like any other "good", there is only ever a shortage of a particular employee category at a particular salary rate (obviously there may be a lag between supply and demand).
    • randomdata 3y ago
      A shortage, as it pertains to other "goods", is defined as a situation where an external mechanism prevents price from rising. A common example of a shortage is where price gouging laws are in effect. When a shortage occurs, a non-price based mechanism must be used to distribute "goods" instead, such as first-come, first served, a lottery, needs-based selection, etc. Only labour gets the special shortage definition seen here. Seemingly because shortage was originally used with respect to healthcare practitioners, where true shortages are possible with price ceilings often imposed by government in order to allow equal healthcare access to all citizens regardless of how much they can afford to spend, and then misconstrued onto other fields.
      • DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough of something. In this case, available drivers willing to work for the compensation they're willing to pay?
        • randomdata 3y ago
          > Can we not simply say a shortage is when there's not enough of something. More or less, but "how much is needed" is dependent on price. You need an infinite number of truck drivers if they are driving for free. And you need no truck drivers if they are driving for $100,000,000,000 per day. In a functioning market, price will rise until you have exactly the right number of truck drivers. Remember that the dreamers not willing to pay the price are simply not in the market. You don't have a shortage of Ferraris when 10 year old boys with Ferrari posters on their walls can't have the real thing. However, if something stops the price from rising – such the government stepping in and saying: "It is now illegal to pay truck drivers more than $30,000 per year" – then you have a disconnect. The market wants more drivers and are willing to pay more to get them, but are not allowed to pay them more. That disconnect is what the shortage defines.
  • stavros 3y ago
    What does "a shortage" mean in supply and demand? I don't understand, because it seems to mean "we want to pay less but then we won't find any people". Well, in that case, there's a shortage of Ferraris, because the ones I can find are too expensive.
    • andy99 3y ago
      And if you were a big business, you'd hire lobbyists to petition the government for Ferrari subsidies and buy news articles talking about the Ferrari shortage, and tell all your friends that the only reason you don't drive a Ferrari is purely because of the shortage and has no relationship to your finances or priorities.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      Technically, it means that there is some external mechanism that prevents price from rising. Typically that means government intervention. Healthcare often sees the government set a price ceiling on services to ensure that poor citizens are not priced out of receiving healthcare, so a shortage of medical doctors is quite possible. A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely. Under colloquial usage, as it is being used here, the term is meaningless. Under that definition, everything is always in "shortage". It is simply used as an attention grabbing mechanism to express some kind of emotion towards the subject.
      • thfuran 3y ago
        >A shortage of truck drivers is unlikely. Surely a transient shortage is possible due to licensing requirements. You could offer ten million dollars a year, but there are only so many people with a current CDL and finite capacity exists to grant new licenses.
        • randomdata 3y ago
          The cool thing is that if we really did see ten million dollar per year offers, then most people wouldn't want to use the services of truckers anymore (too expensive), so you'd still have the right number of truckers, if not too many, among those currently able to drive, without the need for more. No need to wait on anyone else getting licensed. You have done well to highlight why a technical shortage is defined the way it is.
  • mixdup 3y ago
    Walmart paying drivers above the typical trucker's wage is not new, driving for Walmart has always been a "prestige" job in trucking that paid well and that drivers wanted to drive for. The standards are high, though, and drivers are held to account so the penalties for not living up to them can be severe
• softwaredoug 3y ago
  This is pretty grueling work requiring you to operate heavy machinery, be away from your family for days, and drive mundane hour after hour. Why wouldn’t it be highly paid?
  • ecf 3y ago
    Because it’s a task that teenagers are expected to do safely? Driving as a profession does not require skill.
    • imgabe 3y ago
      Teenagers are not expected to drive 18-wheelers for 12 hours a day.
      • selimthegrim 3y ago
        My dad drove coal trucks from Cleveland to Toledo at 16 in the 70s so yes, some are. Was it fully legal? I doubt it.
        • imgabe 3y ago
          If it’s illegal, then it’s not something that’s expected of them.
          • selimthegrim 3y ago
            You live a charmed life.
            • imgabe 3y ago
              I think we're talking past each other. I took "expected" to mean "expected by society in general". Teenagers are generally expected to get regular driver's licenses and learn how to drive a car (although many of them don't even do that anymore). It is not common for people to expect a teenager to have a commercial driver's license and know how to operate an 18-wheeler. Now, is it possible that in the 1970s your dad had an unhinged boss who expected a 16 year old to reliably operate commercial trucks without any training? Is it possible your dad is an exceptional driver who managed to do this? Sure, both of those things are possible. Is it a reasonable thing to expect from any randomly selected teenager? No.
• BurningFrog 3y ago
  Without reading the article, I'm pretty sure it's because that's what they have to pay to get decent drivers.
  • marcosdumay 3y ago
    An article with that title is supposed to talk about how hiring decent drivers is more profitable than random cheap ones. This one seems to have missed the memo, and only gets there briefly once or twice, but the title does not in any way imply an information-free article.
    • bluGill 3y ago
      I doubt their drivers are any better than anyone else's. Drivers are carefully trained and there are strict laws around driving trucks (much stricter than cars). They may do a bit more training than required, but there are other trucking companies that do the same.
      • chmod600 3y ago
        That leaves the question of why they pay 2x more, then? Maybe fewer road incidents, reducing liability? Like, maybe people who can provide for and spend time with their family have 11.3% fewer crashes? (Edit: number was made up, hypothesis purely speculative.)
        • bluGill 3y ago
          Because as others have mentioned, WalMart cannot afford logistic problems. A driver who knows they cannot find a better job will not bother looking for one. Thus that driver won't quit and have to be replaced on short notice. Hiring new drivers is difficult even if there isn't a shortage.
      • UncleEntity 3y ago
        I'd venture they are one of the safest[0] fleets out there which is a direct reflection on the quality of their drivers. Hell, I'd happily say their yearly average is better than the monthly stats from the last company I drove for. The biggest determining factor on a driver is their safety record and if you can manage to not hit anything (you're not aiming for) over a long enough time period it is quite possible to get the good jobs. [0] https://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/query.asp?searchtype=ANY&query_type=queryCarrierSnapshot&query_param=USDOT&query_string=63585 https://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/query.asp?searchtype=ANY&query_t...
• avidphantasm 3y ago
  Because they are professionals who do work that can be dangerous to them and the general public?
  • kome 3y ago
    Eh, it doesn't work like this unfortunately; pay is never a mirror of the dangerousness, the utility, or the dirtiness of the job. I would say that usually it's the contrary: the more essential a job is, the less it is paid.
    • FredPret 3y ago
      It's all supply and demand. Dirty and dangerous work attracts fewer workers. High-utility work is worth more to the employer so there will be more job offers. When you see dirty, dangerous, high-utility work that pays poorly, it's because there's a ton of people who are willing to do it.
    • Infinity315 3y ago
      No, pay corresponds with the skillset and how replaceable you are (moreso how replaceable). Walmart truck drivers are highly compensated because trucking is a lonely and relatively uninteresting job to do. Doing that for many hours requires a certain type of person and would mentally wear down most people. Walmart requires a consistent level of output which they hope can be maintained by keeping truck drivers happy with high pay. Other trucking companies can afford to have some drivers leaves and thus pay them less because they have some leniency for delays which Walmart cannot/will not tolerate
  • bdcravens 3y ago
    True, but that begs the question of why every trucking company doesn't pay as much as Walmart.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      Because they operate under a different business model that is willing/able to risk hiring amateurs. Not dissimilar to why FAANG will pay a software developer many hundreds of thousands of dollars each year all while Mom & Pop are hiring some kid to develop their software for $10 per hour.
• hyperpape 3y ago
  Already, several comments saying how being a truck driver is a tough job (it is!) or "that's what they have to pay to get decent drivers". But whether the job is hard, isn't the question, and the second comment is sort of vaguely accurate, but just ignores the interesting part. From the article: > One of the best jobs you can get in trucking is at Walmart. The uber-retailer says truck drivers can make up to $110,000 in their first year at the company. That’s twice the nationwide median pay of a truck driver The interesting question is: why does Walmart pay so much more than is typical? Unfortunately, the article gives a pretty superficial analysis. Edit: to forestall helpful comments, I am aware that businesses often make an effort to do things based on a kind of sophisticated analysis where they compare the upside of doing the thing ("benefits") to the downsides ("costs"), and then do the thing if the upsides seem to exceed the downsides. The question is, why is it that this significantly above market rate is what Walmart thinks maximizes its benefits compared to costs?
  • eschneider 3y ago
    The cost of not having a reliable supply chain is much more than they're paying their drivers. It's just good economics to pay more to reduce driver turnover.
    • manicennui 3y ago
      Probably takes away a lot of drivers from their competitors too.
    • savanaly 3y ago
      Why is it not good economics for their competitors to do so as well?
      • hanniabu 3y ago
        Less scale, easier to fill gaps, less impact
      • adventured 3y ago
        Walmart has basically always been superior to its competitors at logistics. It has been one of their key competitive advantages for many decades. They have been a data monster heavily focused on logistics for most of their existence (I've been reading about their various logistics advantages for 30 years now). Even if doing a thing is good for a competitor, that obviously doesn't mean that competitor will do said logical thing. Companies fail all the time because they're incompetent in one form or another (or many forms).
• Ekaros 3y ago
  I also think part of equation is retention. You want to keep the drivers as them leaving might disturb deliveries. Specially if they are JIT. Inventory not at store does not sell.
• kotaKat 3y ago
  Walmart is one of the few trucking companies IIRC that slipseats (shares) their sleeper cabs, which means you're continually going to be changing the truck you drive and live in weekly. That kinda sucks.
  • bonestamp2 3y ago
    I agree the alternative would be nice, but for years I lived out of a different hotel room every week (for work). I didn't mind it. I assume it's similar in that you pack light, and only bring what fits in your luggage so you can pack up and move on quickly at the end of the week.
    • 1letterunixname 3y ago
      Username checks out. Jack Reacher spotted.
    • brnt 3y ago
      Everybody knows trucks come with room service and daily housekeeping.
      • bonestamp2 3y ago
        Although I never used either of those services, that is still a good point -- my point is completely irrelevant since the situations aren't exactly the same.
  • UncleEntity 3y ago
    I had a gig for a while where we slip-seated the trucks and, yes, it did kind of suck. Mostly because nobody cared about the trucks and they got tore up pretty fast. Plus, you always have that one person who does stuff like leaving trash all over the cab -- the chicken bones all over were my final straw on that one, we had words...
    • gooseyman 3y ago
      Wait - there isn’t maid service between stays?!
• sct202 3y ago
  A lot of people aren't factoring in that truckers can work 60 hours a week and are exempted from overtime pay and a lot of companies paying the big bucks in trucking are paying that much because they are maximizing the hours to minimize driver count (health insurance, benefits costs don't scale by hour).
  • pavlov 3y ago
    Another example of how the American healthcare system is working against society’s best interests. You don’t want all truck drivers putting in the maximum hours humanly possible. It’s a safety hazard. But having to pay for health insurance makes corporations try to optimize for this at the expense of human lives.
    • nonethewiser 3y ago
      > You don’t want all truck drivers putting in the maximum hours humanly possible. It’s a safety hazard. But having to pay for health insurance makes corporations try to optimize for this at the expense of human lives. ... what? First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance means they are trying to get the most hours out of their employees. I guess you could say thats somewhat true for literally every overhead cost including social security payroll taxes, training, heating buildings, etc. At best, it seems a little true in a very indirect way so why the laser focus on health insurance? Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes employers from doing it.
      • EForEndeavour 3y ago
        > First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance means they are trying to get the most hours out of their employees I'm not OP, but my take: the health insurance cost of hiring a driver is fixed, regardless of how many hours per week they drive. Therefore, the more hours they drive, the more the employer's "bang for their buck". > Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes employers from doing it. Health and safety regulations are written in blood, and exist precisely because employers need to be forced by law to maintain safe working conditions for their employees.
• bena 3y ago
  Because WalMart knows it is primarily a logistics company. They know that if they get the goods to stores efficiently, everything else will follow.
  • sumtechguy 3y ago
    also they have union that knows that.
    • mixdup 3y ago
      Walmart drivers are not unionized
      • silenced_trope 3y ago
        This makes sense. If they're paid higher than average, then how could a union fight to get them higher wages when they aren't doing it for the unionized competitors that have lower? And also per another comment here, they require an unblemished driving record. So if the worst concern of unions came true, that they can make it hard to fire bad performers and require hiring "their guys", then drivers with blemished records can make it in and stick around. That means the good drivers currently employed may see their value drop comparatively and likewise their ability to demand better pay. As it stands it seems like the current drivers then have the benefit of being considered best in industry and may prefer to gate-keep and not unionize as a result in order to protect themselves. I wonder if other companies that want to fight unionization should do similar: hire top performers and pay them well :)
        • mixdup 3y ago
          >I wonder if other companies that want to fight unionization should do similar: hire top performers and pay them well :) I mean this also applies to the rest of Walmart, or at least it did In high schoool and college (98 through early 00s) at age 16 I initially worked at a local grocery store chain that was unionized making minimum wage. They went out on strike for a month and came back to just a ten cent raise. Not long after that I went to work at Walmart making about 40% more, with a 10% discount on anything I wanted to buy in the store Working conditions between the two were not much different, both were pretty transparent on scheduling, job duties, and the like Now, I'm pretty left wing and I support the right to organize without any restriction, but I probably would've voted against a union if the UFCW had come to my Walmart store asking for signatures based on my prior experience with them Does that mean unions have a place? Absolutely. We would not have the meager protections we have today without unions, and they serve a deterrent against employers running amok, but yeah treating your employees somewhat decently is plenty to keep them at bay
• asimpleusecase 3y ago
  Here is the money quote that makes the most sense to me: “They wanted to pay them good money because it was the absolute core of their, of their business — to get this stuff from the distribution center to the store at precisely the right time with no screw-ups,” Lichtenstein said. “That was crucial.” I am sure that WalMart demands full compliance with all regulations and is very exacting in pick up and delivery times. Likely drives are doing the same routes all the time. A lot of drivers would find that boring.
  • lupire 3y ago
    Do drivers care about route variety? I don't think it's like flying where you can get a little mini vacation on your route.
    • bluGill 3y ago
      Most drivers are running a fixed route. You (or often you company) has contracts to make regular deliveries. Most companies that ship something ship the same thing every day to the same customers. that said, there are a lot of deliveries that are not the same thing to the same place. while they are a minority overall, there are still a lot. If you work for a big national shipping company (WalMart is not this even though they are national) you can ask for a delivery to anywhere - they always have a single delivery to some random location. Though if you want to go to rural states - many other drivers grew up on a farm and truck driver is one of the few well paying jobs they can get without a degree on so there is a lot of others wanting that. (If you want to go to a big city there are plenty of delivers and less drivers with reason to want them)
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      Many drivers like driving a familar route because they know what to expect. They know where the low bridges are, they know which roads are designated truck routes, where there are difficult turns, they know which exits have fuel/good food/shopping/parking or are a safe place to stop to get out and take a walk, etc.
      • 3y ago
• didgetmaster 3y ago
  Isn't 6 figures the new 'living wage' in many areas?
  • replwoacause 3y ago
    Yes
  • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    Only in the wealthiest cities and neighborhoods, which is a very small share of the total. There's almost 20,000 cities in the USA and only about six of them have an average living wage above $100K.
    • jklinger410 3y ago
      And debt is at its highest ratio in modern history, along with all cost of living metrics. Most of those sub-$100k zips are dying.
      • refurb 3y ago
        Believe it or not but there is a whole world beyond San Francisco and NYC. And those cities are thriving.
        • jklinger410 3y ago
          Believe it or not i'm from one of these cities and they are most certainly not.
          • refurb 3y ago
            You're from ONE of those cities, but claiming all cities outside of SF and NYC are not thriving?
    • s1artibartfast 3y ago
      what is the actual median wage? living wage is an aspirational goal. it doesnt tell you much about if 100k is a huge step up or down from typical jobs.
• elzbardico 3y ago
  All things considered, Wallmart is a pretty decent company, at least for workers, and even more if you compare with Jeff Bezo's slave driving operation.
  • maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    No, it most definitely is not. Walmart (one 'l') is consistently in one of the top employers with employees on SNAP. So, if you live and work in the US, you're subsidizing Walmart's employees.
    • efields 3y ago
      Maybe that's because they employ so many people, law of large numbers etc.
      • unethical_ban 3y ago
        The idea is that multi hundred billion dollar corporations shouldn't be employing a single person who needs SNAP.
        • Fernicia 3y ago
          Online discourse proving once again the worst thing a company can do for PR is employ poor people.
          • Dylan16807 3y ago
            SNAP is based on income, so anyone that's properly employed should be making too much money to qualify. So is this purely a communication problem, or is there a real a wage/hours problem? If they're offering enough hours and the employee is choosing to be far under full time, then we should phrase things more specifically than "employed". But if anyone that wants to be full time, or is full time, doesn't meet the income threshold, that sounds like Walmart taking advantage of insufficient worker protection.
• zackmorris 3y ago
  Because Walmart is what happens when we value productivity over dignity. The most important things in life are our time, our relationships, our health, our self-determination, basically all subjective and individual experience. Western ethos substitutes those intrinsic values with external "objective" measures rooted in necessity, fear, dogma, etc that evolved over eons of suffering and exploitation under various forms of colonialism where the winners wrote the history. The ramification of these mismatched attentions/intentions is that we live in a world obsessed with optimizing efficiency, creating a strong work ethic, taking on ever-more responsibility and monopolizing nearly the entirety of our time over a career. Instead of innovating, automating and empowering the workforce to share in the risks and rewards so that someday work is not equated with basic survival. I believe that the most important thing we can do is disrupt the status quo. In this case, that means thinking outside the box to whatever level is needed to equalize pay between a custodian, a retail clerk, a truck driver and a CEO. The framing of ideas and barriers to entry which prevent that leveling are the root cause of wealth inequality and represent the primary source of injustice in our lives. If someone happened to win the internet lottery or buy Bitcoin at $10 like I didn't, and is wondering where to invest, stop looking to foreign markets or whatever is over the horizon, and ask what your parents and loved ones sacrificed to get you where you are today. Then ruthlessly work to remove the obstacles they faced for future generations. Anything less is not "real work" IMHO, it's just an ever-growing shrine to your ego.
  • DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    How do we get to a world where every still has there basic needs met but we value the things that bring us dignity over productivity?
    • zackmorris 3y ago
      I got downvoted a bit, so I should probably add some context to my point: I moved furniture for 3 years in the early 2000s after getting my computer engineering degree so that I could make rent while writing shareware games, to hopefully win the internet lottery and be able to work on AI someday (which never happened - I'll explain below). It was backbreaking work and I came up with a new invention almost every day that would make the job easier. Some low-hanging fruit would be to require sun awnings over ever door on the trailer and require that truck drivers to carry at least 2 hand trucks (dollies). Beyond that, any number of Roomba-like devices would largely eliminate the human element of packing/loading/driving/unloading/unpacking. Except that nobody wanted to innovate anything. I came to realize that one of the attachments that people form is to their own suffering. Being a lumper (furniture mover) becomes an identity like coal miner, with its own lingo and culture. We spent most of our days laughing at the clueless yuppies who could never do our job, and the poor rich people who had learned nothing from life because they didn't tip. It's like being in boot camp every day and then being asked to carry water for someone because they don't like to hold things. Anything else than what we were doing would be an easier gig, if it weren't for the current gig preventing our escape. --- Anyway, I was lucky to never get seriously injured on that job, but I came away from it forever changed. In many ways the futility of it destroyed my will to work. Not because I was lazy, but because after paying my dues I realized that all labor represents ineficiency. It occurs when the boss isn't creative enough to find the technology that avoids the need for the labor in the first place. Extending that thought to its logical conclusion, money itself represents inefficiency, because if people have the knowledge and resources to support themselves, then they don't need money to pay for things. This is what I meant above by a win never happening for me. I saw through the matrix too young, which made concepts like investing anethma to me, because I saw that all profit comes from skimming productivity from workers. I independently derived what Karl Marx was saying, before I even knew what socialism really was. And nobody wants to hear about any of that stuff in hypercapitalist USA. The reality I came from was a patriotic/patriarchial construct where the best we can do is suck it up and work harder tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. Like the opening scene of Avatar, where the suck (a term borrowed from Jarhead) and unobtainium were more compelling than a tropical paradise. Shows like Yellowstone touch on this - that the hardest workers are paid the least, and that bosses are locked into political games of the status quo beyond their control that they themselves may not even agree with. Wealth inequality triggers our projections, so that the wealthy think they work the hardest, and workers think they are paid well. Today we're seeing that dissilusionment with the workaday world in all facets of life. Starbucks workers know their jobs could be automated, but then they wouldn't get paid. Uber drivers know that self-driving AI will get them caught in a race to the bottom for pay. Amazon workers know (at least at a subconscious level) that their pay is locked to wages in China. We're all pinned down by our current gigs to the point that they have consumed our imaginations, so that all we seemingly do now is fight amongst ourselves in a zero-sum game. So, if you've followed this far, the solutions are obvious and apparent: * Stop equating merit with financial success * Give labor a 50% seat at the table on every corporate board (like Germany) * Encourage automation over "hard" (pointless) work * Prioritize labor-saving innovation over profits * Stop skimming the profits of labor for building skyscrapers and pork barrel projects * Legally require that bosses and workers swap roles for at least 2 weeks out of the year (controversial, I know) * Run doctor's orders by nurses (in all supervisor-assistant relationships in all jobs) * Prioritize equal pay and do the "real work" of reforming the workplace in every way needed to make that possible * Have tech companies listen to their engineers again instead of just their designers/partners/investors * Most importantly - transition to automated robot labor and UBI Now, these are the first 10 things I thought of. There are hundreds/thousands of similar insights from feminism and labor relations (see Martin Luther King Jr). It's not so much about learning what to do, as identifying injustices in the system and reforming them. This is what progressivism and wokeism are about. I understand that half the people on HN may not identify with what I am saying. They may say that these ideas might hold back the "job creators" propelling innovation forward. But I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. Happier healthier workers are more productive. And wealth inequality is so high that adjusting tax brackets for UBI would cause a reduction in taxes for anyone making under the US GDP per capita of $75,000. Note that the median income is around half that, so most of us are already having half of our productivity or more skimmed via low wages and taxes. I've tried to write this as objectively/conservative and old school as I could, in the way that one might appeal to labor in the 1950s at a republican convention. Because I think that the left is generally onboard with these measures. The difficulties aren't in principles, but communication.
• notShabu 3y ago
  I wonder if this has the effect of increasing "market rate" so that only big companies with economies of scale can be competitive
• caycep 3y ago
  One playbook in how to survive against Amazon?
• Ericson2314 3y ago
  Fordism
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Answer: They don't https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Truck-Driver-Salaries-E715_D_KO8,20.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Walmart-Truck-Driver-Salari... Looks like top reported are at $75k.
• subsubzero 3y ago
  There is a narrative that Wal-mart pays low wages, I think its quite apt as most positions do pay quite low, I worked at Wal Mart while in college and saw it first hand. A few things to note, certain positions do pay well, store managers for one, I know for a fact that over 20 years ago certain store managers would see over $300k in yearly compensation. In addition once I got into tech after college I worked with a few walmart.com ex-employees, and these employees stated that part of their bonus was tied to a percentage of sales walmart.com made and they said the bonus pay was wildly lucrative. So Wal Mart does pay well in fact if you are in the right position. Considering keeping your shelves(and online distribution centers) stocked is the lifeblood of the company it behooves them to have a healthy circulatory system and not have drivers who do not deliver on time or get into accidents.
  • pavel_lishin 3y ago
    > So Wal Mart does pay well in fact if you are in the right position. This feels like a globally true statement, regardless of the employer, no?
    • resolutebat 3y ago
      Most companies don't have 14,000 of these "right" positions.
      • jonlucc 3y ago
        Most companies don't have 2.1M employees.
      • filmgirlcw 3y ago
        14,000 out of their total number of employees is such a drop in the bucket though. If you can get hired as a Wal-Mart trucker, from what I understand, you're the best of the best. Also, consider there are like 3.5 million truck drivers in the US - only a tiny percentage of those can get jobs at places that pay as well as Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart has 1.6 million US employees alone, so you're talking less than 1% of total jobs when you say 14,000.
• JeremyNT 3y ago
  Here was a recent and (somewhat) related post about the trucking industry and training for a CDL in Texas [0]. A very interesting read about both the macro environment and the particulars of several people looking to enter this career. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046904
• voidmain0001 3y ago
  Are the drivers expected to deliver 110% all day and everyday? We all know long haul truck drivers pee in empty Gatorade bottles to avoid using a restroom. Do Walmart drivers also defecate in diapers to avoid stopping so they can continue to be in the top tier of drivers?
• wolverine876 3y ago
  How does Amazon pay its truck drivers? They seem like the closest comparison, with their own distribution system. Amazon's reputation is treating employees poorly, but maybe truck drivers are valued.
  • massysett 3y ago
    Does Amazon even have truck drivers? Every time I see a Prime trailer, it’s got a random company pulling it.
• Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  This article somehow ignores the burning question it raises: What distinguishes an okay trucker from a great one? Why are they worth so much more?
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    Zero accidents in your career.
  • cjmcqueen 3y ago
    Reliability. Truckers aren't just drivers, they're mechanics and logistics strategists. The assignment is to get from point A to point B, but there a lot of decisions in between. Source: two good friends that drive truck for a living. One in Iowa and the other in Michigan
• kraig911 3y ago
  Between this news and the other bit how store managers make 400k someone is doing good PR work for Walmart somewhere!