Wal-Mart just made another promise to employees, and it could be a bigger deal than the raise
Wal-Mart made huge news Thursday by announcing that it's raising its minimum wage to $9 in 2015, and $10 in 2016. 500,000 American workers are getting a raise.
But further down in the announcement, there was another change to company policy that's could be just as big, if not bigger, for Walmart's workers: fixed scheduling.
Here's the infographic from Walmart:
If this applies to a significant chunk of Walmart workers (the language says "some associates" so it's unclear), it could be huge.
The stress of low-wage work isn't just about low pay, it's also about having to be available 24/7 because companies use algorithms to perfectly match employee supply to customer demand. That's meant that employees are expected to be on call all the time, and can't necessarily count on a stable amount of money in their paycheck each week.
An NBC news feature from last year explains the problem:
When managers made schedules with a pen and paper, schedules tended to be fixed-making 11th hour shift changes was as much of a pain for a manager as it was for their workers. But now management functions have been turned over to software that's designed to treat workers' hours as a particularly free variable in a cash flow equation.
Fixed and reliable schedules, in addition to the bump in wages, are a huge win for Walmart workers.
The question, of course, is who are the "some associates" Wal-Mart will be doing this for?