WAL-MART Stores Inc is planning to sack hundreds of workers at its headquarters in Arkansas as part of the retail giant’s efforts to pare costs, it has emerged.
500 workers are being threatened with the sack, with Wal-Mart refusing to comment on the matter on Wednesday. More than 18,000 people are employed at the McDonald’s Bentonville, Arkansas office.
Foreshadowing the onslaught on jobs at the Arkansas office which is just beginning, Wal-Mart Chief Executive Doug McMillon has been quoted as saying: ‘There are no cash registers in the office.’ McMillon and other top executives are to present their programme of cost-cutting in the company at a meeting with analysts and investors later this month in New York.
Speculation over job losses in Bentonville has been increasing for weeks, fuelled by reports on the matter in local media. Recruiting firms have reported an influx of CVs from Wal-Mart employees concerned about losing their jobs. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has seen its stock market price down a massive 26 per cent so far this year.
In August, Wal-Mart reported weaker quarterly earnings and lowered its annual profit forecast. Elsewhere, Whole Foods has announced it is to sack 1,500 workers over the next two months. Whole Foods said this week that it will axe 1.6% of its workforce, in an effort to reduce prices for customers.
Whole Foods Market Inc. is an American supermarket chain specialising in organic food that first opened on September 20, 1980, in Austin, Texas, also home to its headquarters. The company has 91,000 employees and 431 supermarkets in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and has its main produce procurement office in Watsonville, California.
It claimed that most of the job cuts would come through what it called ‘natural attrition’. Whole Foods also claimed that many of the workers will be able to find other positions at the company, since it is currently planning at least 100 new stores and hiring for 2,000 open positions.
Whole Foods, which sells fruit and vegetables and other products at vastly inflated prices, showed falling sales numbers last quarter, in part, it is thought, because of lingering bad press. Earlier this year, city officials found that the company was overcharging customers in New York. Co-CEO Walter Robb also complained in a summer conference call that California’s new paid sick leave law has been adding to employee expenses.
Whole Foods is also gearing up to open up its new, lower-cost ‘365’ chain next year, which the company has been pitching to lower paid young people. Meanwhile, on Thursday, Whole Foods announced that it will no longer sell goods made by prison labour after protests against the practice.
The store said it would remove tilapia and goat cheese prepared through an inmate work programme in Colorado by April 2016.
These products have been sold in Whole Foods stores across the US since 2011. The most recent protest against the practice of using inmate labour took place in Houston, Texas last Saturday.
Whole Foods defended the system, which it claimed supported inmates, but said it was choosing to end it because it made some customers uncomfortable. Michael Allen, a prison reform advocate who planned the Houston protest, said: ‘Whole Foods is hypocritical because it says it cares about the community, but what it really cares about is profits.’
The company said it believed the programme was an opportunity to ‘help people get back on their feet and eventually become contributing members of society’. The use of prisoner workforces is controversial because the inmates are paid below minimum wage. Allen notified Whole Foods in August of his intention to stage the demonstration in front of a Texas store if the company did not stop selling these products.
A few hours before it began, Whole Foods announced it had decided to stop stocking the inmate-produced fish and cheese. The products in question came from the Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI) through third parties to Whole Foods. Meanwhile, hotel workers are calling for a boycott of two San Francisco hotels that have allegedly rejected employee calls to unionise.
Unite Here Local 2, the union for hotel and restaurant workers in San Francisco and San Mateo counties, held demonstrations at the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf and the Le Meridien Hotel all day on Monday and Tuesday this week to demand that the hotel owner, Maryland-based Chesapeake Lodging Trust, approve a fair process where workers can choose to unionise.
The demonstrations were intended to coincide with the hotels’ Institutional and Investor Security Analyst Conference. ‘The owners, the Chesapeake Lodging Trust, are hosting an event for their financial analysts to showcase how successful they are,’ Unite Here Local 2 spokeswoman Tho Do said. ‘We want to be there to show what it’s like being in a labour dispute in the San Francisco community.’
The hotels are both described on their websites as recently renovated ‘luxury’ establishments. According to union officials, the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf and the Le Meridien Hotel are the only two hotels in San Francisco with an active labour dispute. They are outliers (in San Francisco),’ Do said. ‘The owners are not here, they don’t really care what’s going on with our community.’
Representatives of Chesapeake Lodging Trust could not be immediately reached for comment.
‘We want to send a message to the owners here hosting the event that the entire San Francisco community is standing with the Chesapeake workers,’ Do said. ‘We’re calling on the employer to agree to a fair process to unionise. We hope they hear us loud and clear that we’re going to continue and it’s not going to be business as usual.’
