As someone who is probably a professional salaried employee somewhere, it's hard to think about why this is bad.
When you're stuck in one of these gigs, you need to be in good with the floor managers to get hours -- those folks control you because they have the power to starve you out with limited hours or "on call" shifts (i.e. you wait around and be ready to report to work within 15-20 minutes), or just fuck you over by assigning you impossible shifts and firing you for attendance issues.
So it's pretty much a given that if you are that guy who doesn't agree to deliver crap on the way home, you're not going to be around for long.
They are replacing UPS/Fedex/USPS for a reason -- cutting corners on things like insurance, depreciation, etc allows them to make an incredible inefficient operating model cheaper.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...
Workers also have to ... provide proof of insurance.
Judging from the way most companies compensate their employees for extra work I bet it won't be much. Just a guess.
The fact that they're piggy backing on employees going home, regardless of extra pay, tells me that they're doing this on the cheap. If this part is on the cheap, there's no reason to assume that the rest isn't.
Win win!
I'm tired of people wrapping shit in a pretty bow and trying to pass it off as a gift. It keeps happening, and people keep going along with it. Maybe this time we'll unwrap the policy to find a nugget of gold, but fool me umpteen times...
I'm against exploitation of workers, too, but at the end of the day there is only so much you can do with jobs that require relatively unskilled labor. If a 15 year old can do your job as well as you can after a few months of training, it's not a safe job that you can expect anything out of. It's gonna get automated away anyway.
But here Walmart (whatever their other faults), offers a way for workers to make money doing something they already have to (thus it has more utility than their normal role), and they're evil?
If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works.
Kind of damned if you do damned if you don't isn't it?
Yet there is a world of a difference between Walmart jobs and Costco jobs. Unemployment in the US is lower than some countries with better worker's rights.
> If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works
No, not the world, mostly just the US. For the rest of the world, the line between employment and unemployment is not so bad that you have people with full-time jobs and still need food stamps. I feel that setup is a covert government subsidy to corporates. But hey, we shouldn't mess with the "job-creaters", right? Or else.
Working at Costco sounds like a dream in direct comparison. Benefits, decent pay, etc. Hell, they have an entire wall dedicated to employees of the month that go way back. It's funny how a little goodwill towards your workers seems to have a ripple effect, making shopping at Costco a lot less stressful since the workers are relaxed and happy, willing to small talk while they ring ya up, the managment is roaming around managing, etc.
Being treated like a suspect for visiting the pharmacy without a membership card is my big gripe with Costco. However we just transferred my grandparents stuff to a better, more competent pharmacy. Now I have no gripes.
"If people's regular jobs paid a "living wage", people wouldn't have to Uber, but it's how the world works." Just because some folks have to do it to get by doesn't make it right or desirable. If we can do things as a society so that people don't have to Uber just to get by - and we aren't doing it - we as a society are horrible people. And that is more where we are at now.
Walmart is known for high wages.
For the Uber/Ubereats and other gig economy estimates, $11/hr is well above the industry take home.
Walmart is in progress of raising it's minimum wage to $11/hr, 22% more than federal $7.25 minimum wage. The Times covered this in the past https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/business/walmart-raising-...
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...
Walmart has turned, e.g., food assistance programs into a subsidy for themselves.
Sure it is, if they are willing to accept more rapid turnover and the workers they are competing for have no better offers.
Certainly, some folks in the world survive on $1/day. That doesn't work in the U.S.
We know that Walmart wages are insufficient alone, because workers there tell us that they need, for instance, SNAP to feed their kids.
Thus SNAP is, in part, now a subsidy to Walmart.
SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase. Every dollar not spent on food is another dollar someone might collect in rent, or cell phone service, or clothing. Wal-Mart may benefit greatly from SNAP, but it benefits far more from its customers having more income that they don't have to spend on subsistence than it benefits from its employees being able to accept a lower wage. And of course Wal-Mart accepts SNAP payments from its customers because Wal-Mart sells groceries.
You're missing my point. SNAP is a direct subsidy to Walmart not because they sell food, but because many of their workers cannot live where they live without being enrolled in SNAP due to the low pay.
SNAP subsidizes Walmart by supplementing workers' paychecks.
That's similar to what welfare was like before welfare reform in 96 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_...
I'll circle back to the question I asked several levels ago. If SNAP suddenly disappeared, do you believe that would cause Wal-Mart to raise its wages? If not, then your point is moot since it's not saving Wal-Mart any wage costs.
As another example, there's the people working 70 hour weeks across 3 jobs - no one of those is paying what's necessary to sustain the employee.
Moreover, if you're okay with high turnover, there may be people willing to work for you unsustainably for a time just to lower their burn rate.
Car? What car? You are walking, biking, riding the bus.
It's doable, barely, just barely and there will be troubles if anything comes up.
I doubt it.
But none of those things were specified in OP's post.
I don't disagree. Not a good life.
People live on a buck here and there and change they find in vending machines as far as a "living" goes. Technically they are "alive" but it can't be nice way to live.
Kind of makes one wonder exactly what level of "living" is acceptable. I suppose preferences vary.
Go look at the size of a log cabin, they were about the size of a single bedroom today and large families lived in them.
The amount of money and extra time that we spent on just one baby was astounding - clothes, doctor visits, food. Many more trips to the store/pharmacy/doctor, etc, than normal.
The USDA's child cost estimator [0] says that raising a child in the midwest costs about an extra $12000 a year, on average. Not all of that breakdown may apply, but even if you were to ONLY look at food costs, an extra $1500/year in food (when you're only making the hypothetical $800/month discussed in the GP) is not "a little".
I want to emphasize in this context (gig delivery) that the recent UberEats Stockholm posting indicated even less than $5/hr.
>Instead of paying their employees a living wage, or offering benefits befitting a delivery driver,
Obviously you can criticize Walmart's current practices. The issue is whether this policy is any worse than what they had before.
>they can offset all of the risk, deprecation costs, etc associated with delivering a package all for the low cost of what amounts to a tiny raise in their existing payroll.
Do you give the same objection to every other company that pays for mileage for work-related travel? Is that also "shunting off depreciation costs"?
Why are you assuming that they won't have an insurance policy for such deliveries or pay for mileage like every other company?
Edit: clarified which part was responding to what