Word: martelis
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...expanded its 10% employee discount on nonfoods to include produce. Long-term employees asked for an extra week's pay instead of an extra week's vacation. (They got it.) Workers with less experience asked for quarterly, not annual, bonuses if their store met targets. (They got it.) Wal-Mart, in turn, wanted help available at peak demand in the stores, meaning nights and weekends. (Of course it got it.) The company has also instituted some wage caps...
...retraining is part of Wal-Mart's response to critics who accuse the company of being a repository of faceless, low-paying work. Now it's threatening to get squishy, rolling out an idea called Associates Out in Front, known as active listening in the HR trade. Store managers must meet with 10 associates each week and hear them...
...Mart's ardent, union-backed critics such as Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, these improvements are just crumbs from the corporate table. Wal-Mart's national hourly-wage average of $10.74 is more or less competitive with Target or Kmart, but its total package still lags behind union competitors in the supermarket industry...
...company's newest medical-insurance plan, for instance, offers associates the chance to buy family coverage for $14 to $21 a month. But the deductible is $2,000--a huge outlay for a cashier earning $17,000 a year. Wal-Mart says this Value Plan is the most cost-efficient approach for 70% of its associates, many of whom have other coverage through either a family member or the state. Fewer than 10% of its associates lack health insurance, the company says...
...while Castro-Wright and his team plan the Wal-Mart of the future, the company's legal team has been fighting the same old ugly labor battles. Wal-Mart has been tarred by an ongoing gender-discrimination class action filed in California in 2001, and it recently was ordered to pay $62 million in penalties on top of the $78.5 million judgment awarded by a jury last year after it found Wal-Mart guilty of shortchanging associates in Pennsylvania who worked during their breaks or after they clocked out. (Wal-Mart says it will appeal.) Nor has it looked...