Walmart workers speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Friday said the megastore’s staffing problems and poor pay were hurting the company’s image and contributing to lagging sales.
Their statement comes after a week of rallies across the country by labor activists, union representatives and workers in cities such as Chicago; Dayton, Ohio; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The demonstrators have taken aim at the plight of the company’s low-wage employees and the burden they say Walmart’s staffing policies place on working mothers.
Walmart has grown from a single store in Rogers, Arkansas, into a massive American institution. It takes in more money per year than most countries produce in GDP. It employs 1.4 million people, or nearly 1 in 100 American workers. Its stores cover 1.1 billion square feet.
There was a lot of pomp and circumstance at Walmart's (WMT) shareholder meeting Friday. In the "pomp" department, over 20,000 of Walmart employees were treated to a star-studded spectacle featuring Pharrell, Robin Thicke, Florida Georgia Line, Sarah McLachlan and Harry Connick Jr., among others.
As the White House convenes its summit on the issues facing working families this week, it’s easy to feel discouraged. The proposals topping the agenda–paid leave, flexible work, childcare–are all great ideas. The problem is they’re the same great ideas advocates have been suggesting for years—decades, even.
There was a lot of pomp and circumstance at Walmart's (WMT) shareholder meeting Friday.
In the "pomp" department, over 20,000 of Walmart employees were treated to a star-studded spectacle featuring Pharrell, Robin Thicke, Florida Georgia Line, Sarah McLachlan and Harry Connick Jr., among others.
As the nation’s trillion-dollar student debt continues to rise, a new analysis of public higher education’s funding finds dwindling state support is the key factor driving rising tuition costs and deepening student debt.
President Obama signed an executive order Monday that could extend student debt relief to an additional 5 million people — a move aimed in part at better educating young borrowers of their rights while jumpstarting a moribund debate on the issue in Congress.
Big news! President Obama announced an Executive Order this afternoon that would extend the protections of Income-Based Repayment to an estimated five million more student borrowers.
This week, President Obama ordered changes to the federal student loan program that could help millions of borrowers make their payments more affordable starting in December 2015.
For young adults who entered the workforce between the start of the Great Recession in 2009 to the present, days spent searching for jobs — any jobs at all — have stretched into weeks, months and even years. This endless disappointment seems to be the new normal for a generation of young people who were once assured that if they graduated from high school, attended college and studied hard, they would enjoy gainful employment in the field of their choosing.
A higher federal minimum wage may be a pipe dream in a stalled Congress but with cities and states increasingly raising their own minimums and more workers protesting nationally, President Obama had to get in on the action. For workers employed by federal contractors only Obama issued an executive order this February raising the minimum wage to $10.10. But is that enough? Some of those workers didn’t think so.
A public policy group instrumental in a successful campaign to win a higher minimum wage for federal contract workers is now aiming at a larger target — federal contracting companies.
Demos, in a report released Wednesday, said Uncle Sam could better use his $1.3 trillion in purchasing power by pushing government contractors to improve conditions for their employees.
Once upon a time, the term “government job” was not synonymous with boondoggles, corruption or the perennial “waste, fraud and abuse.” During the New Deal, the state proudly created jobs and spent public money as a vital intervention to check the excesses of market capitalism. Today, the public is disgusted with both fiscal policy and the free market.
Did you know millions of Americans live with debt they can not control? That's why I've developed this unique new program for managing your debt. It's called Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford.
Another major retailer in the United States is giving a boost to its base salary, although the size of the increase will vary from state to state. On Thursday morning, the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA announced that it would be adopting a new wage structure which is expected to increase pay for about 50% of its American employees. The change in company policy will take effect on January 1, 2015.
Last month, IndexCreditCards.com asked, "Are you embarrassed by your credit card balances and credit score? " The question was prompted by a survey from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling that found three times more consumers being ashamed of their card balances than their weight.
President Barack Obama recently defied Republican threats to file suit against him for his use of executive orders. "If House Republicans are really concerned about me taking too many executive actions, the best solution to that is passing bills," the president said. "Pass a bill, solve a problem."
Nate Silver has already dubbed the 2014 election as "the least important in years." But this year's midterms are still breaking records for at least one thing: Secret political spending.
Eliminating poverty seems like an impossibly utopian goal, but it's actually pretty easy: we can just give people enough money that they're above the poverty line. That idea, known as a basic income, has been around forever, but it's made a comeback in recent years.
If being a parent often feels like a constant juggling act, it can be that much more challenging for single parents. Between work and parenting, it can feel like there’s never enough time, energy or money for the things you want to do. And that feeling may extend to your credit too. You may barely have time to check your credit, much less fix it.