If a policy is unneccesary And it causes unfavorable outcomes for a group, there seems to be no reason to keep besides that side effect. A retail job has good reasons to require people to work on weekends, but here would be no good reason for most office jobs to, say, require managers specifically to put in hours on Saturday.
Requireing managers to relocate out of commuting distance seems unneccesary. Do they have any proof that this leads to better outcomes? I’ve certainly never worked at a company that requires gratuitous relocation for promotion. Indeed, a managers connection to their team is usually an asset.
Likewise, long hours are a part of retail. But when you are talking about 90 hour weeks, you are not talking about a job. You are talking about two jobs. Is there really any reason Walmart can’t allow two jobs worth of work to be plit between two people? Hiring temporary holiday staff is standard practice on the floor, why not in the office?
It’s slowly starting to happen further up the food chain. Target has a new incentive they provide when requiring business travel, they’ll actually provide a second ticket for your spouse (might only be on overseas trips). They figure they are already paying for the hotel, so the additional cost is small and rarely used.
From what I’ve noticed, it’s getting harder and harder to find employees willing to travel frequently. And the trend is for younger/unencumbered workers to take that position for a few years before getting promoted to a non-travel position.
A friend of mine just had her division at work re-org’d such that instead of having 10 people where 3 were dedicated to traveling, they cut staff back to 7 and required everyone do some travel. Six months later everyone on the team left.
None of this is any different than what existed 100 years ago. Going into a mine shaft sucks, if people are willing to do it the work will get done. At some point over the next few years Walmart will realize there is a cost to this policy as more and more men refuse to move. The quality of available pool gets worse, and changes get made.
This assumes the workers they have are not easily replaceable. When that is the case a company will accommodate them.
In this lousy economy where people are lined up for a job it is easy to toss the one who wants special treatment for the one who will work for less and say, “Yes sir! How High sir!”
There is a real cost to turnover and most companies know it but it rarely changes their policies overly much.
Bottom line is you can expect the company to do precisely what is in their best interest and no one else’s.
Right, and this is the “free market solution” that most people are so scared of. If there are lots and people that are both qualified for the job AND willing to move 100 miles than there isn’t much that the encumbered can complain about.
If Walmart et al. realizes the policy diminishes the quality of their managerial pool they’ll alter it. Like you said, Walmart will do what’s in its best interest, and the workers will do what’s in their best interest. And at some point there is enough overlap for the two to find a mutually beneficial relationship.
The downside to this is that it’s possible Walmart will see the cost, and instead of changing the policy they’ll change the nature of the job, essentially dumb it down to match the quality of the available work force. And it’s here that you see wages lowering, because the job got reduced. Same job title, mostly similar job functions, but some of the decision/logic/intelligence has been removed and with it a few thousand a year.
This is very similar to what’s happened in the restaurant industry. Trained and talented cooks became too expensive for most restaurants, so the job was downgraded from cooking from scratch meals to reheating out of a bag. Applebees doesn’t need thousands of cooks to each make a mango salsa when they can have one central factory produce it and send it nationwide.
Sysco and US Foods are making a fortune selling any variation of prepared food you can imagine. If you want you could buy regular potatoes, but for a few cents more you could get pealed, then diced, then mashed. Ready to cook fries of any shape. It’s a lot of work/time/skill to make a huge batch of mashed potatoes, so places are opting to buy it in a bag and save on labour.