Walmart will soon offer better parental leave than most U.S. companies. The new policy for biological parents, announced in January, will go into effect on March 1, according to a company spokesperson. The company already has rolled out a more generous policy for adoptive parents.
This matters because America remains one of just three countries without paid maternity leave, and Walmart is America’s biggest employer. With 1.5 million U.S. employees, its workforce is bigger than the populations of roughly a dozen U.S. states. While the policy only applies to full-time workers, that is still hundreds of thousands of people.
And since only 14% of civilian U.S. workers have access to any paid parental leave, employees at most American firms can now say the words, “I’d have better parental leave if I worked at Walmart.” That creates — at least in theory — pressure on other companies to follow suit. Indeed, since Walmart announced its new policy, Starbucks announced that it would be expanding its parental leave benefits as well.
The new Walmart policy: 10 paid weeks for birth moms and 6 weeks for other new parents, regardless of whether the employee is hourly or salaried. That’s much more than employees get at firms with which Walmart competes for workers, such as hourly workers at Yum! Brands, another large employer, which operates Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and others, where store managers get 6-8 weeks if they’re birth mothers, and nothing at all if they’re biological fathers. (Executives get more, but hourly workers get nothing.) And at McDonald’s? New parents in management roles get a single week. That’s right: one week. Hourly workers? Again, they get nothing.
But Jackie Telfair, Walmart’s SVP of Global Compensation, told me this move was not about competing for workers with other companies. Instead, she said, it’s “an investment in our associates…[and] if we invest in our associates, they will invest in our company.” Telfair said they knew the benefit would be important to their employees. “We knew from our associates that this was a benefit that was important to them,” she told me.
Walmart also recognized that what when workers have stability at work, they can thrive at home, according to Telfair. And when they can thrive at home, they’ll have better work engagement, performance, and productivity. In other words, this was a business decision. Walmart’s view is that, from a human capital management perspective, expanded parental leave makes a whole lot of sense. This is borne out by the data: research has shown that paid leave increases not only the probability that new mothers will return to their jobs, but also increases the hours they work when they do so.
What’s remarkable about Walmart’s move is that it’s not just workers in low-paying jobs who are likely to cast an envious eye over Walmart’s paid parental leave. It’s also people who work at more “elite” employers, like Princeton University, which offers employees just two fully paid weeks, and Wellesley College, which offers just four. It includes employees at General Motors and Ford, where new mothers get only 6-8 weeks at both, and new fathers get 2 weeks and bupkis, respectively. It includes workers at Cargill (two weeks) and Boeing (three) and CVS (six).
So why did Walmart — sued just a few years ago by 1.5 million female employees for gender discrimination — become a leader on parental leave? Walmart has attributed the move to the recently passed corporate tax cut, as have other companies expanding benefits or handing out one-time bonuses, but there are reasons to be skeptical of this. For one thing, the U.S. is currently near full employment, meaning the labor market is tight; companies know they need to work harder to get the best candidates. And corporate profits have been at all-time highs for years; I have trouble believing that companies flush with cash couldn’t afford to offer paid leave earlier. While companies will save money as a result of new U.S. tax policies — Politico estimates Walmart will save $1-2 billion a year under the new plan — studies show that the costs of offering paid leave are minimal: a study in California, which is one of a handful of states to mandate paid leave, showed that 87% of employers said offering paid leave cost them nothing, while 9% said it actually helped them save money.
Moreover, says Katie Bethell, Founder & Executive Director of lobbying group Paid Leave for the United States (PL+US), the status quo has become seen as a risk. “There’s starting to be brand risk for being a company that doesn’t support family leave,” she says, “and there’s gender discrimination risk if you’re only offering it to women and not to men, or if you’re undermining women’s ability to succeed in your company.” This isn’t just hypothetical. Several companies — including CNN, JP Morgan Chase, and Estee Lauder have all been sued by men making the case that giving them less leave on the basis of their sex was illegal. Between 1998 and 2012, family-leave discrimination lawsuits shot up 590%, according to estimates from the Center for WorkLife Law — even though overall, discrimination lawsuits fell.
Despite the strong business case for offering paid leave, most companies still need to be convinced. Bethell outlined four things that may have been part of Walmart’s decision to offer paid leave:
Broad employee support. Showing that there’s broad support for a new policy in your organization is important, says Bethell. In Walmart’s case, she pointed to a petition for better policies that garnered thousands of employee signatures. A Walmart shareholder also introduced a resolution calling for better paid leave about a month before the company announced the new policy.
Persuasive stories. Statistics and numbers are always helpful, but “you need to be able to go to your decision-maker with stories of real employees who are affected by the inadequate family leave policy,” Bethell says. 100 top free software. “Those stories are especially powerful if they relate to the recruitment and retention of talent.” Stories like a job candidate you really wanted to hire turning you down because of your leave policy, or someone talented leaving the organization because of a bad experience with parental leave. “Those are the kind of stories that really ring with leadership, and really highlight for them the market opportunity they are missing.”
Bethell highlighted the story of one employee who had come back to work at Walmart just one week after giving birth even though her baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). (According to Department of Labor data, about one in four U.S. women return to work within two weeks of giving birth.) She couldn’t afford not to work. Employers hear that kind of story, says Bethell, and say to themselves, “That’s not the kind of employer I want to be.”
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A strong proposal. Bethell said employees who want better leave policies should not stop at saying that the current policy is inadequate — they should let their corporate decision-makers know exactly what they want the new policy to be.
While there’s more to a comprehensive policy than a certain number of paid weeks, that is often the central question. What’s the ideal length, then? Some experts have put it at between six months and a year. That’s the point at which babies are (often) sleeping through the night, smiling, remembering faces and interacting with their caregivers, and eating solid foods. But since almost no U.S. companies are that generous, employee advocates will have to decide what they can settle for. Collecting data on what competitor firms offer is tough: when PL+US surveyed the largest employers in America a couple of years ago, many refused to disclose their policies. Websites like Fairygodboss or Glassdoor can help, but are often incomplete since the information on those sites is crowdsourced. And the state of paid leave in the U.S. is so dismal, advocates may have a hard time making the case that “we should do this because everyone’s doing it.” Instead, would-be changemakers can try to make the case that their companies should be leaders on this issue rather than laggards.
Persistence. Any successful change effort requires more than a single meeting. Bethell estimates that it took about a year of concentrated effort on the part of employees and activists to convince Walmart management to change their policy. That would not be out of line with efforts I’ve heard about at other companies. For example, when women at the New York Times lobbied for an expanded leave policy, they spent months researching other companies’ policies and building a business case. “I’d be lying if I said it was a smooth road from the time five of us decided to write a proposal over lunch to its ultimate approval by our executive committee,” Erin Grau, VP of Operations at the New York Times, told Fairygodboss in an interview, “But it was worth it.”
After all, as Bethell puts it, “You’re talking about a benefit that everyone needs, regardless of what job they have.”
Walmart, the single largest employer in America with 2.3 million employees worldwide, has come under fire for its attendance policy.Based on conversations with Walmart employees and results of a survey of more than 1,000 current and formerWalmart employees, worker advocacy group A Better Balance issued a report Thursday claiming the retailer has punished its workers for taking sick days and time off to care for loved ones and violated a number of worker-protection laws including the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).'Walmart should fully comply with the law so that no one is illegally punished for a disability-related absence or for taking care of themselves or a loved one with a serious medical condition,' Dina Bakst, founder and president of A Better Balance, the advocacy group that prepared the report, told the New York Times.Among the complaints A Better Balance received, employees have said they're afraid to call out sick, they've been penalized and even fired after taking sick time, and they face financial ruin as a result.Randy Hargrove, a spokesperson for Walmart, issued a statement to Business Insider in response to the report:'Like any company, we have an attendance policy that helps ensure our customers are being taken care of and that our associates are protected from regularly having to cover other's work duties. This policy requires that all of our hourly store associates be on time and work their scheduled shifts and manages against excessive absences.'We understand associates may have to miss work on occasion and we have processes in place to assist them. This includes legally protected and authorized absences, such as medical-related accommodation, FMLA leave, pregnancy and bereavement, that are not counted against our attendance policy. Associates may request a leave of absence or other reasonable accommodation at any time by talking with any salaried member of management or an HR representative. Each associate's circumstance is addressed individually, in compliance with company policy and the law. 'We have countless Walmart associates who successfully partnered with the company to authorize their absences from work. We believe we have the right training measures in place to help communicate our attendance, disability, and pregnancy policies to our associates.'Keep reading for more detail on some of the key points and quotes of the report:
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Created by a workers' rights group, WorkIt attempts to make it easier for Walmart employees to be able to access work-related information when not on the job.
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Image: Mike Mozart / Flickr
It's not easy for Walmart employees to get information about company policies. The giant retailer does not provide its workers with employee handbooks or copies of personnel policies, and even if it did, its policies are constantly changing. While a small amount of policy information is available to associates who log onto the WalmartOne app and website, most employee policies are only available in an intranet, known as 'the wire,' inside the company. Workers needing information on Walmart's policies have to access the wire when they're logged in at work, on a computer that's typically located in or near a manager's office—a situation that can be less than ideal. For example, a Walmart worker being sexually harassed may complain to her manager, but if the manager isn't addressing the issue, going into his office to use the intranet to figure out what to do next can be a little bit awkward.
The worker group Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) has taken a stab at liberating this internal information through an app of its own called WorkIt. 'We've been doing this work for a number of years and have really seen the tremendous economic insecurity and instability that people in low-wage jobs, and people working at Walmart are facing every day, and the fact that people are increasingly going to social media to look for and find help and support around the daily challenges they're facing at work,' said Andrea Dehlendorf, co-director of OUR Walmart. 'Levels of mobile adoption are incredibly high, so we decided to build our own platform to build a service that we see people needing, which is peer support around workplace challenges,' she said.
Download pokemon fire red randomizer. The app lets users ask questions on company policies or their legal rights. It uses IBM Watson AI technology and peer experts, comprised of current or former Walmart employees who volunteer their time to look up answers and train the AI bot.
The app also has a news area, a community-wide chat about issues users want to discuss with each other, and an area that operates more like a message board where users can discuss and organize around topics.
WorkIt is meant to be a less confusing way of accessing information than, say, Facebook and Reddit. 'We realized that the conversations are chaotic, they're disorganized, and it's very difficult to get the right answer,' said Dehlendorf. While Walmart workers can and do post questions on Facebook to try to figure out their rights when they're, say, at the hospital and are worried about getting fired for taking sick leave, they might get ten different and sometimes contradictory answers, which can be very confusing.
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'The reason that this is a particular challenge at Walmart is that they really systematically keep information about people's rights and benefits and the policies that govern the workplace inaccessible to people,' said Dehlendorf.
In fact, Walmart appears to be attempting to keep workers from downloading the WorkIt app. An internal memo obtained by Motherboard included a script in which employees were warned about WorkIt collecting their location and personal contact information, and Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg echoed the sentiment in an emailed statement published in the Wall Street Journal. (OUR Walmart's privacy statement is available on its website.)
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'This is a very busy time of year for our associates and they are receiving a lot of information from a lot of different sources. While they are focused on delivering a great holiday experience for our customers, we want to make sure they know this app is not affiliated with Walmart,' Walmart spokesman Blake Jackson said in an emailed statement. 'Our associated already have anytime-access online to the company's most current and accurate Paid Time Off policies. There is no way to know if the details this group is pushing are correct.'
According to permission details for each app as posted on the Google Play Store, the WalmartOne app requires the exact same permissions as the WorkIt app, though the Walmart-branded app is also capable of accessing identity and contacts to find accounts on the device, something the WorkIt app doesn't do. Download world cup 2014 game.
In addition to logistical difficulty accessing the Wire, many Walmart workers find looking up information on the intranet overwhelmingly complicated. The WorkIt app is meant to be more accessible, and if Watson can't answer a question, it'll delegate it to one of the volunteer peer experts. 'This isn't just about access to policy, this is about access to policy, legal rights, advice, and community, and that's what WorkIt really does,' says OUR Walmart co-director Dan Schlademan.
The app is currently available on Android, and will soon be released on iOS. OUR Walmart is also working on making the information available via text or other messaging tools so that it's accessible to workers who don't have smartphones.
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