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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

> and it won't be near their hourly wage nor gas/wear & tear costs.

Well then, I suppose the people involved will just have to do the math and see if it makes sense to them. The horror.

Im in the 'wait and see' camp.. but you can say a program is voluntary, while in truth it's required to keep your job.

Just label all the people who refuse as not being team players. Dock them on their performance reviews for it. "Johnny over there wouldn't take a short detour on his way home, so we had to send someone out to deliver a package. If he's not willing to help out, maybe he should go work some place else."

There.. a required voluntary program. This is the natural language/playbook for every manager out there.

Many of the workers involved have hours that change on the whim of their supervisors. Employees who aren't team players don't get hours.

Do you have any evidence at all that this will be the case here?

I was speaking generally... but I think its going to be pretty difficult to avoid in an organization like Walmart, with its low-margin and strong emphasis on efficiency and controlling costs, to look at a sheet that says an employee is 2 minutes from a delivery point, but instead we had to send a truck 30 minutes out to deliver a package... it's going to be hard for that manager not to take that as a willingness to help.

Once you have a sheet with times and delivery points for each employee.. it becomes a measure of the employees willingness to assist. If other employees are willing to drive 10 minutes, and you're not willing to drive 2 minutes, it raises the question of why.

And that question is definitely going to be asked if the alternative (30 minutes for regular delivery) results in an additional cost to the company.

But as I said, we'll have to wait and see.

When the alternative is starving, taking a worse deal is just what you have to do. And Walmart controls the workers hours, so that's a huge mess.

This can become abusive in a hurry. Suppose the net after gas is that delivering packages pays $5/hr. Walmart knows how many deliveries their workers take, how many they need, and what hours get scheduled. More packages need going out? Cut hours for folks not delivering, schedule the folks delivering for more days with short shifts or split shifts.

Sadly for a lot of people, the short term win of being able to use the extra couple dollars to feed the family causes them to act 'irrationally' and ignore the longer term consequences.

> Sadly for a lot of people, the short term win of being able to use the extra couple dollars to feed the family causes them to act 'irrationally' and ignore the longer term consequences

Sort of like driving for Lyft or Uber?

The wear on vehicles alone adds up quickly into large maintenance bills... yet many people still drive for them on an amateur level, making long term profits questionable (buying new tires after 1-2 years instead of 3-4, for example).

And when it doesn't, the manager will see their bonuses going away and the workers will be labeled non-team-players, their performance reviews will be harsher and some slackers will have to go to make room for dedicated people.

Labor unions, when they work, are a beautiful thing.

It's sad reading people cheering their own exploitation. But I'd expect nothing less from HN.

You think the average HN employee works shifts at Wal-mart? No, it's people here cheering other's exploitation (in the name of the mythical "freedom").

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...

Again, you're saying this without even knowing what the pay structure is.

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.

And your assumption that employee is even allowed a cost/benefit option is based on... ?

All of this hypothetical except for the fact that Wal-Mart is known for a) ruthless schedule management like keeping workers locked in warehouses b) a known price-cutter both on vendors and employees to the point their employees often qualify for state aid for under-employed / under-paid (i.e., welfare benefits).

Given that, it'd be surprising if an non-exploitative option will be available for the workers who will be doing these deliveries.

But of course, we'll see.

> And your assumption that employee is even allowed a cost/benefit option is based on... ?

I'm not assuming anything, I'm giving Walmart the benefit of the doubt. As you said, "we'll see", no need to shit on them providing their employees with an additional revenue stream before the program is even implemented.

Giving Wal-Mart the benefit of the doubt flies in the face of historical facts/data. Feel free to argue otherwise.

Let's keep it civil.

Are you operating on old assumptions? The average hourly wage is $13.38 for full-time workers and $10.58 per hour for part-timers [1]. Not bad for unskilled labor.

1: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/20/news/companies/walmart-pay-r...

Walmart has not earned that benefit of the doubt. Given that it is Walmart, the default is to assume that it will be exploitative until proven otherwise.

I've only heard good things about Costco. I wouldn't give Costco the benefit of the doubt. Every company (except nonprofits) exists to accrue profit. There's no other factor. They do not have any interest in mind than profit. I definitely assume the worst from Walmart.

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