From the I’net Void: “A buddy of mine from grad school was from Arkansas and had friends who were employed at the walmart HQ in the HR department. Those friends told him that Walmart would toss out resumes from the ivy league schools.”
True? I know Walmart subtlely doesn’t hire highly-edumacated peeps for its hourly positions because they are afraid of unionization, or at least that’s the word on the street. But at HQ? Is this a legacy of old timer Sam W., who distrusted them northeasterners, or just another myth?
Nobody hires highly educated folks for low paid hourly positions. Nothing to do with unionization, and everything to do with the fact that highly educated folks don’t really want low paid hourly jobs. They will work and take the paycheck while continuing to look for a better job. Once they find a job that pays $0.50/hr more (and they will) they quit, forcing you to hire and train a new person.
Just for the record, Leslie Dach, Walmart’s Vice President for Corporate Affairs and Government Relations has a bachelors degree from Yale and a masters from Harvard, and Linda Hefner, Executive Vice President has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Well, that is quite true, but my question is based on hirings at walmart corporate headquarters, where an education is necessary. And many people with bachelor degrees still apply for part time work at walmart, and are reportedly not hired because of fears of unionization.
Why fears of unionization? As a general rule, the more educated you are, the less need and desire to form a union. It’s people that can’t get ahead on their own (generally speaking) that want/need unions.
WalMart does tend to have a ‘promote from within’ culture (Target, on the other hand LUVS those Ivy League MBAs) - a lot of their corporate headquarter’s employees started in the stores. That background probably creates a lot of state college grads at headquarters and not an Ivy League culture (people don’t tend to put themselves through Yale working at WalMart).
Since they do a lot of internal hiring, getting hired at WalMart corporate from the outside can be tough.
know Walmart subtlely doesn’t hire highly-edumacated peeps for its hourly positions because they are afraid of unionization, or at least that’s the word on the street.
I doubt thats true. Everywhere Ive worked we’ve always dismissed overqualified people from entry-level positions. They hate the job, they complain, and in a few months they’ve quit out of frustration (I didnt get an masters to do office admin!!!) or because they found a better job. Of course they were notified about what the job entails but they have some crazy idea that once we see what kind of precious snowflake they are we will immediately move them to a VP position. Hiring managers want people who will stay at the job for a while. Walmart has other ways of crushing unions. Not to mention competitive educated people are probably the least likely to get into unionization, as collective bargaining hurts their personal bottom line.
I also find this unlikely to be true when it comes to corporate management. Everything Ive read about Walmart is about how the best and brightest MBAs run the company and how their hard-nosed, ultra-competitive approach is very much the best of American business.
For the OP:
Is your friend’s context folks applying for corporate in Bentonville?
Folks applying for store or district manager?
Folks applying as hourly store associates in entry-level positions?
Does anyone actually believe that? If so, how do they explain the strength of teacher’s unions, government employee unions, and unions such as the Writers Guild and the Newspaper Guild?
Actually many better educated people are smart enough to question it when management tells them that unions are bad and consider the possibility that management may not be offering unbiased information.
Yes ^ There was a strong push a couple years ago from one union (and this of course has happened many times before and since) to unionize, supposedly there were sending their people (with degrees apparently) to start work at walmarts. The walmart leadership decided that low-education people could be more easily intimidated and confused as to the benefits of a union. This is just what I read in a paper, in about 2005.
Ivy League staff are generally in professions that are treated well enough that they don’t unionize.
The problem with unionizing Wal-Mart is that low-skill workers are hard to unionize, and unions representing low-skill, easily-replaceable workers have little bargaining power.
It’s just not that hard to scab 99% of the staff at my local Wal-Mart if you have to.
I don’t know that Walmart is unique in casting a wary eye on Ivy Leaguers who apply for low-level jobs. The manager at Red Lobster or Office Depot might ALSO wonder why a guy with a degree from a prestigious school wants to work as a waiter or stock clerk.
That doesn’t mean they WON’T hire such people, but they’re bound to ask WHY the pplicant wants to work there. If the answer is, "Well, the economy is slow, and I need some kind of paying job until I find something better, well, NO employer wants to hear that. Whay would I hire you if I know you’ll be out the door first chance you get?
On the other hand, if the answer is, “I’m going to be in graduate sachool for the next two years and I need a steady job that lets me take classes,” well, that’s different. Graduate students often take jobs that are, technically, "beneath " them. It wouldn’t be shocking to see an Ivy League law student working at a menial part-time job.
Quite simply, look at the number of union versus non-union jobs in the country. Educated people are educated enough to know how to consult laws and apply them if they want a union. So why don’t they form unions?
(Government unions are already entrenched, and many states [such as mine] have union support built into law. The writers and newspapers guilds are so small that they’re not representative of the country in general.)
This isn’t supposed to be a pro-/anti-union post, so don’t steer it that way. It’s not a debate, and it’s quite clear: educated people that have jobs requiring education have less need/want for forming unions. That’s a fact.
I read in the paper just this morning that a Quebec Walmart had agreed to a union contract. The first time employees at a Qubec branch of Walmart unionized, Walmart closed the store. This caused an enormous amount of negative publicity, but they got away with it (that is, they were able to convince the authorities that the closure was justified by the lack of business). I think that another closure would have doomed any Quebec operations. Incidentally, the labour laws are very favourable to workers who want to unionize.
As far as who wants to unionize, I never did since I didn’t want my activities directed by unions (obligation to strike, and so on), but I taught at McGill, the only non-unionized university in the entire province. A friend at another school is very upset that his union is trying to get a strike vote to ask for, I think, a 13% increase in these straightened times.
Unions are based on the usefulness of collective bargaining and that usefulness is a function solely of the economic underpinnings of the industry. Any industry which consists of employers of large numbers of approximately equal jobs has potential for unionization. Industries with large numbers of small or individual proprietors have lower potential.
Education is a partial factor underlying the industry type. Many professions rely on small or individual proprietorships. However, these always - not sometimes, always - use some type of surrogate, like the AMA, ABA, or state licensing boards for collective bargaining, lobbying, and enforcement. Other professions, like teachers and reporters, work for large employers and so have historically unionized.
Skilled and semi-skilled workers historically worked for large industrial organizations, which made them good targets for unionization. However, as the economy has shifted markedly toward a service economy the logic of unionization has diminished. That isn’t a function of education; it’s a function of the type of businesses that exist. It’s also a function of a prosperous economy over the past quarter century. A prolonged economic downturn may encourage unionization among workers in companies like Wal-Mart. Or the competition for jobs may allow the companies to be more ruthless in their anti-union activities. That’s been encouraged by conservative policies at the national level, so that may change as well.
How about backing up your claim with some figures? What percentage of those who are educated, say, with a college degree, are unionized as opposed to the percentage of those who are not. Maybe then we’d see how much of a “fact” your fact is.