Walmart Policies For Employees
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Walmart will soon offer better parental leave than most U.S. companies. The new policy for biological parents, announced in January, will go into effect on March 1, according to a company spokesperson. The company already has rolled out a more generous policy for adoptive parents.
This matters because America remains one of just three countries without paid maternity leave, and Walmart is America’s biggest employer. With 1.5 million U.S. employees, its workforce is bigger than the populations of roughly a dozen U.S. states. While the policy only applies to full-time workers, that is still hundreds of thousands of people.
And since only 14% of civilian U.S. workers have access to any paid parental leave, employees at most American firms can now say the words, “I’d have better parental leave if I worked at Walmart.” That creates — at least in theory — pressure on other companies to follow suit. Indeed, since Walmart announced its new policy, Starbucks announced that it would be expanding its parental leave benefits as well.
The new Walmart policy: 10 paid weeks for birth moms and 6 weeks for other new parents, regardless of whether the employee is hourly or salaried. That’s much more than employees get at firms with which Walmart competes for workers, such as hourly workers at Yum! Brands, another large employer, which operates Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and others, where store managers get 6-8 weeks if they’re birth mothers, and nothing at all if they’re biological fathers. (Executives get more, but hourly workers get nothing.) And at McDonald’s? New parents in management roles get a single week. That’s right: one week. Hourly workers? Again, they get nothing.
But Jackie Telfair, Walmart’s SVP of Global Compensation, told me this move was not about competing for workers with other companies. Instead, she said, it’s “an investment in our associates…[and] if we invest in our associates, they will invest in our company.” Telfair said they knew the benefit would be important to their employees. “We knew from our associates that this was a benefit that was important to them,” she told me.
Walmart also recognized that what when workers have stability at work, they can thrive at home, according to Telfair. And when they can thrive at home, they’ll have better work engagement, performance, and productivity. In other words, this was a business decision. Walmart’s view is that, from a human capital management perspective, expanded parental leave makes a whole lot of sense. This is borne out by the data: research has shown that paid leave increases not only the probability that new mothers will return to their jobs, but also increases the hours they work when they do so.
What’s remarkable about Walmart’s move is that it’s not just workers in low-paying jobs who are likely to cast an envious eye over Walmart’s paid parental leave. It’s also people who work at more “elite” employers, like Princeton University, which offers employees just two fully paid weeks, and Wellesley College, which offers just four. It includes employees at General Motors and Ford, where new mothers get only 6-8 weeks at both, and new fathers get 2 weeks and bupkis, respectively. It includes workers at Cargill (two weeks) and Boeing (three) and CVS (six).
So why did Walmart — sued just a few years ago by 1.5 million female employees for gender discrimination — become a leader on parental leave? Walmart has attributed the move to the recently passed corporate tax cut, as have other companies expanding benefits or handing out one-time bonuses, but there are reasons to be skeptical of this. For one thing, the U.S. is currently near full employment, meaning the labor market is tight; companies know they need to work harder to get the best candidates. And corporate profits have been at all-time highs for years; I have trouble believing that companies flush with cash couldn’t afford to offer paid leave earlier. While companies will save money as a result of new U.S. tax policies — Politico estimates Walmart will save $1-2 billion a year under the new plan — studies show that the costs of offering paid leave are minimal: a study in California, which is one of a handful of states to mandate paid leave, showed that 87% of employers said offering paid leave cost them nothing, while 9% said it actually helped them save money.
Moreover, says Katie Bethell, Founder & Executive Director of lobbying group Paid Leave for the United States (PL+US), the status quo has become seen as a risk. “There’s starting to be brand risk for being a company that doesn’t support family leave,” she says, “and there’s gender discrimination risk if you’re only offering it to women and not to men, or if you’re undermining women’s ability to succeed in your company.” This isn’t just hypothetical. Several companies — including CNN, JP Morgan Chase, and Estee Lauder have all been sued by men making the case that giving them less leave on the basis of their sex was illegal. Between 1998 and 2012, family-leave discrimination lawsuits shot up 590%, according to estimates from the Center for WorkLife Law — even though overall, discrimination lawsuits fell.
Despite the strong business case for offering paid leave, most companies still need to be convinced. Bethell outlined four things that may have been part of Walmart’s decision to offer paid leave:
Broad employee support. Showing that there’s broad support for a new policy in your organization is important, says Bethell. In Walmart’s case, she pointed to a petition for better policies that garnered thousands of employee signatures. A Walmart shareholder also introduced a resolution calling for better paid leave about a month before the company announced the new policy.
Persuasive stories. Statistics and numbers are always helpful, but “you need to be able to go to your decision-maker with stories of real employees who are affected by the inadequate family leave policy,” Bethell says. “Those stories are especially powerful if they relate to the recruitment and retention of talent.” Stories like a job candidate you really wanted to hire turning you down because of your leave policy, or someone talented leaving the organization because of a bad experience with parental leave. “Those are the kind of stories that really ring with leadership, and really highlight for them the market opportunity they are missing.”
Bethell highlighted the story of one employee who had come back to work at Walmart just one week after giving birth even though her baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). (According to Department of Labor data, about one in four U.S. women return to work within two weeks of giving birth.) She couldn’t afford not to work. Employers hear that kind of story, says Bethell, and say to themselves, “That’s not the kind of employer I want to be.”
A strong proposal. Bethell said employees who want better leave policies should not stop at saying that the current policy is inadequate — they should let their corporate decision-makers know exactly what they want the new policy to be.
While there’s more to a comprehensive policy than a certain number of paid weeks, that is often the central question. What’s the ideal length, then? Some experts have put it at between six months and a year. That’s the point at which babies are (often) sleeping through the night, smiling, remembering faces and interacting with their caregivers, and eating solid foods. But since almost no U.S. companies are that generous, employee advocates will have to decide what they can settle for. Collecting data on what competitor firms offer is tough: when PL+US surveyed the largest employers in America a couple of years ago, many refused to disclose their policies. Websites like Fairygodboss or Glassdoor can help, but are often incomplete since the information on those sites is crowdsourced. And the state of paid leave in the U.S. is so dismal, advocates may have a hard time making the case that “we should do this because everyone’s doing it.” Instead, would-be changemakers can try to make the case that their companies should be leaders on this issue rather than laggards.
Persistence. Any successful change effort requires more than a single meeting. Bethell estimates that it took about a year of concentrated effort on the part of employees and activists to convince Walmart management to change their policy. That would not be out of line with efforts I’ve heard about at other companies. For example, when women at the New York Times lobbied for an expanded leave policy, they spent months researching other companies’ policies and building a business case. “I’d be lying if I said it was a smooth road from the time five of us decided to write a proposal over lunch to its ultimate approval by our executive committee,” Erin Grau, VP of Operations at the New York Times, told Fairygodboss in an interview, “But it was worth it.”
After all, as Bethell puts it, “You’re talking about a benefit that everyone needs, regardless of what job they have.”