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Walmart Offers To Foot College Tuition Bills for US Employees (bloomberg.com)
Walmart will begin offering to subsidize college tuition for its 1.5 million workers in the United States, joining a growing list of companies that are helping employees pay for higher education as a perk in a tight labor market. From a report: The retailer's 1.5 million employees can now pursue associate's or bachelor's degrees in business or supply-chain management at three nonprofit schools for $1 a day, according to a statement Wednesday. Walmart will subsidize tuition, books and fees and provide support with the application and enrollment processes. As many as 68,000 employees might sign up, Walmart executives estimated. "Many of our associates don't have the opportunity to complete a degree," said Drew Holler, Walmart's U.S. vice president of people innovation, in an interview. "We felt strongly that this is something that would improve their lives and help us run a better business." The tuition program -- offered to part-time staff as well as full-timers -- is the latest move by Walmart to improve employee retention and engagement. A handful of other companies, including Starbucks and Amazon, also offer tuition support.
How about paying a livable wage.
it was basically an backhanded way to get me into a training program for the job. The way it worked they would send me to a specialized program for some skill they wanted me to have (that had no value outside of their business). If I dropped out I was on the hook for tuition. Also I had to pay out of pocket and wait for reimbursement, which wasn't paid out until 6 months after I graduated.
Fortunately I got out before they foisted it on me. The way it was structured I was basically paying for required training and then if they made enough money off me in 6 months I'd get it back. All the risk was on me. I'm not saying this is what it is, but it sure looks like it.
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For once, TFA provides the answers:
"offered to part-time staff as well as full-timers"..." Courses can be taken...online"...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-30/walmart-s-tuition-play-comes-as-choosy-employees-head-for-exits
Until participants get fired for having restricted availability due to the classes they're now taking.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
WalMart makes their entire business on low prices, at a 3% profit margin (impressive). They've said they're neutral in minimum wage; they seem to support it, some say because a higher minimum wage will crush WalMart's small competitors.
Higher wages will inevitably lead to higher prices. It's not by much, but it's there. A $2 raise is about a 10% price increase on average--$20 pants become $22 pants--and they don't want everyone running to Target, causing loss of WalMart jobs, gain of Target jobs, and disruption for working families.
A minimum wage increase would cause a wage increase at WalMart and Target, causing the associated price increases. Structurally, nothing changes: WalMart still has lower prices, even if those prices are slightly-higher. Any impoverished Target employees shopping at WalMart are still shopping at WalMart, are better-paid, are paid more than enough to offset the price increases themselves, and so funnel more money into WalMart (so they can keep their same profit margin without as much of a price increase). WalMart gets richer.
It's WalMart's 3% NOP that gets me. That's insanely-low; it's impressive, to say the least. Adidas Shoes has 5%; about 8% is reasonable, just by being a common baseline; Comcast usually has 11%; and Microsoft and Apple hold above 20% NOP. I support a fair corporate income tax with a higher tax rate when the corporation's NOP is above reasonable levels; that generally means WalMart gets a tax cut and Apple gets to pay 48%. I don't honestly have a problem with this.
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University education has become quite dysfunctional. There're large chunks of it that server little in the way of educational value and too many students who are either incapable of even those low bars or have no real interest in attending. It's warped into a perverse kind of monster that is incentivized to attract as many students as possible to get their loan money with no real concern for the quality of education. This has led to an adult daycare type of situation where schools will spend large sums of money on student centers, athletics, and anything else that will attract more students. All manner of useless degrees are offered, because the university doesn't care if it does students no good as long as it attracts students and their tuition payments. Worse (or better if you're the college) yet, if you give a student a useless degree, they'll eventually figure out they need to come back for even more college at some point in the future.
We've done today's youth a massive disservice by telling them that they need a college education. If you're going to work retail for the rest of your life, a college education is useless. Similarly, too many kids overlook trade schools at the expense of chasing a four year degree. There are all together too many young people entering college at 18 that don't have any idea what they want to do with their life yet and invariable fail or drop out due to disinterest or confusion. We need to tell people that there's no shame in getting a minimum wage job and figuring out how to be an adult and what you want to do with your life before going to school. I think that message would prevent a large part of the problem.
Removing government backed loans would probably fix the other half. When banks are on the hook, the actuaries will crunch the numbers and quickly realize that loaning $100,000 to someone for a degree in underwater basket weaving is a good investment. If rich kids want to get useless degrees on mommy and daddy's dime, that's their own business, but letting an 18 year old run up six figure debts that they can't hope to repay is just irresponsible on society's part.
There is no better test for "not college bound" than becoming a Wal-Mart employee.
Why?
If one is wanting to go to school, why is a Wal-Mart job somehow crosswise to that goal?
My son has a $10/hour job he's held for two years and is starting college in the fall. Where I don't expect him to work full time and be a full time student to pay his way given I have the means, he *could* easily attend college and pay for it himself working part time, at least for the first two years at the community college.
If he can do it, I'm sure working at Wal-Mart wouldn't be that different.
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We also need to fix our broken system of subsidies and tariffs that add sugar to almost everything that is both convenient and cheap.
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Living pay check to pay check isn't about how much money you bring in, but about how much you are spending in most cases.
It's more about managing what you spend to match what you take in than making more money. Usually more money doesn't help people who live paycheck to paycheck, it just allows them to dig a deeper hole. If you are struggling to service unsecured debt, you likely have a spending problem. If you find that a raise only puts you deeper in debt, your problem is spending, not earnings.
In today's day and age, in most places in the USA we are rapidly approaching full employment. This means it's a seller's market in labor. So if you don't make enough, get a better job. If you cannot get a better job, develop better skills and try again. So if you *really* need more money, you can get it by working hard, but if you don't control your debt load, it won't change a thing to earn more.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That's nice, Walmart, but I think what people want is to not have both mom and dad working 60 hour work weeks yet still be living paycheck-to-paycheck.
That sounds reasonable when shooting from gut instinct, but that instinct is almost always wrong. I've watched what happens when the minimum wage gets an unreasonable boost: working hours go down to compensate, and usually go low enough to overcompensate. Thus, employees make less money with the wage increase than they made before it.
In my city, most full time minimum wage employees saw working hours slashed substantially so employers wouldn't have to pay as much as they were already paying. When the Affordable Care Act went into effect, those same employees had their working hours slashed yet again to ensure they fell below the earnings threshold that would require their employers to pay for health insurance.
A better solution would be for those parents to not be parents until they are financially and educationally viable to support a family. For those parents who didn't think before exchanging DNA, this is why your parents told you to not have sex until you were able to support a family. Your life is probably very difficult now, and you have only yourself to blame.
This doesn't require a lot of brain power. It's simple common sense.
Living pay check to pay check isn't about how much money you bring in, but about how much you are spending in most cases.
I don't know who you think you are by being rational, but stop it! People don't want to take responsibility for themselves, but would rather make poor decisions and then blame someone else for the inevitably poor results.
Living pay check to pay check isn't about how much money you bring in, but about how much you are spending in most cases.
I don't know who you think you are by being rational, but stop it! People don't want to take responsibility for themselves, but would rather make poor decisions and then blame someone else for the inevitably poor results.
Yea, I'm very sorry.. The whole "pull yourself up by your own boot straps" "hard work wins" message is quite hurtful to those who think the world owes them and will throw a riot, burring down their own neighborhoods to prove it. I know the pain they feel when the welfare checks get delayed or the WIC debit card stops working for 20 min and I just added to it by making them feel responsible for themselves, if just for a brief moment..
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Fiscally conservative?
You mean one that supports tax cuts while wanting to pay to revamp out military's murder devices and technologies?
A fiscally conservative president would tell the military industrial complex to go bugger itself.
The majority of WIC recipients are actually gainfully employed. Stop repeating racist dog-whistle stereotypes from 1993.
Maybe some smart but poor kids will now choose to work at WalMart for a few years for the opportunity to attend college without accruing crushing debt.
Only I can judge you.
Walmart's starting hourly wage is $11/hr. If both mom and dad are working 60 hr work weeks, they're making almost $70,000/yr combined. There are a lot of places in the US where making that much is not living paycheck to paycheck.
Your comment is a perfect example of why this policy is important.
You seem to prefer corporate brainwashing over education. Econ departments at most "traditional" universities tend to be fairly balanced to conservative. The OP favors a monoculture of corporatism.
Adjust this per capita -- costs of living are lower in poorer states, so they can in turn pay less per capita in "welfare." Also, a lot of the poorer red states didn't expand Medicaid.
or do you work for one and wrote it yourself? This is one of their talking points. It's always the same: We can't raise your pay because somebody else will just take it away if we do. Maybe it's the gov't. Maybe it's the businesses you shop at (funny that for Walmart employees).
It's a lie. No, employees making $15/hr don't pay 40% of their income in taxes. Even at $15/hr (the living wage as of 2018, though it's going to have to be raised soon) you pay about 15-20%. Less if you have kids. I know, I made that kind of money for years before getting a better job.
Tuition assistance is fine and dandy, but it's no substitute for a living wage. People need to live while they go to school, and it's unreasonable to expect people who couldn't make it through college in their teens & 20s to do it while working for a living in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Sure, some people have done it but they're outliers. You're being disingenuous at best and a right wing, anti-worker shill at worst.
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The OP favors a monoculture of corporatism.
As the OP in question, I'd like to correct your misunderstanding.
The OP favors a polyculture of interacting individuals - but with the nonaggression principle as the core law for their interaction, recognizing property as "crystalized labor" (to quote the epiphany of a left-wing labor union leader of my acquaintance), and with groups having no more rights than those of the individuals of which they consist.
"Corporatism" is yet another set of socialist schemes, and quite outside the above acceptable set.
(Or are you using the left-wing swear word definition of "corporatism", which amounts to plutocracy? That's not within the set, either.)
Unfortunately, the current left-wing, though its members mostly don't realize it, is a fanatic religion, with anything related to a useful business practice labelled as sin, and the practitioners of business labelled as sinners. So any educational institution whose members adhere to this religion will necessarily be teaching counter-productive lessons to its students.
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