"Amazon and Walmart executives are probably
plotting a way to make money off of workers while
they sleep!"
"The immense wealth accumulated by the Waltons
and Bezos is extracted from the labor of hundreds of
thousands of workers worldwide that toil for both
corporations. "
In move to compete with
Amazon, Walmart asks workers to make deliveries during commute
By
Evan Blake
6 June 2017
Walmart, the world’s largest multinational retailing corporation,
unveiled a new package delivery program Thursday, in which the company will pay
its employees to deliver packages to customers on their way home from work.
The program shows how Amazon’s exploitative practices are lowering
working conditions for the entire working class. With Amazon occupying a
dominant position in online retail sales, it dictates the terms of employment
far beyond its own workforce.
The new initiative is the brainchild of Walmart’s e-commerce director
Marc Lore, who publicly announced the new program in a blog post on the
company’s web site. Lore, who worked for Amazon between 2011 and 2012, wrote
that the goal of the program is to “cut shipping costs and get packages to
their final destinations faster and more efficiently.”
“Cutting costs” is corporate code for increasing the level of
exploitation of the workforce in order to increase the company’s profit line.
At present, last-mile delivery—the movement of goods from a transportation hub
to the final delivery destination, often the consumer’s residence—accounts for
an estimated 53 percent of the total cost of online retail delivery.
The move is part of an effort by Walmart to control an even
greater portion of its workforce’s lives. Amazon and
Walmart executives are
probably plotting a way to
make money off of workers while they sleep!
The average FedEx delivery driver earns roughly $24/hour, while
the average UPS driver earns close to $30/hour, according to Glassdoor.com. An
entry-level Walmart employee, on the other hand, earns a mere $9/hour during
their first 6-18 months of training, at which point the starting wage is
roughly $10/hour. The new “associate delivery” program thus strives to replace
largely full-time, salaried truck drivers with informal, minimum-wage
employees. It marks another step toward the “uberization” of the global
workforce.
Stephanie Luce, a labor professor at the City University of New
York, told the Washington Post, “The
practice seems ripe for abuse if the company does not compensate workers for
the full cost of their journey, the expenses related to gas, car depreciation,
and potential problems like accidents, tickets or parking expenses. Like other
‘gig economy’ type jobs, there is a potential to benefit workers—but in
reality, most of the benefits accrue to the employer, not the employee.”
The competition between Walmart and Amazon shows the degree to
which a handful of massive corporations dominate the world economy.
Nearly all growth in the retail market now stems from e-commerce,
and in 2016 Amazon accounted for 53 percent of all growth in US e-commerce
sales for the year, placing immense pressure upon Walmart to elevate its
standing in the online marketplace. This prompted Walmart’s decision last
August to purchase the e-commerce web site Jet.com for $3.3 billion. As part of
the acquisition, Jet.com founder and CEO Marc Lore was promoted to president
and CEO of Walmart e-commerce and given a total compensation package of $243.9
million, making him one of the country’s highest-paid executives.
Lore was previously the co-founder of Quidsi, the parent company
of a family of web sites including Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, and more,
all of which were sold in 2011 to Amazon for $545 million. Last March, Quidsi’s
subsidiary companies were all deemed “unprofitable” and closed, widely seen as
a an act of retribution by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos against Lore’s decision to
head e-commerce at Walmart.
Since Lore took the helm of e-commerce operations, Walmart has
engaged in an acquisition spree, buying out online footwear retailer
ShoeBuy.com ($70 million), outdoor gear company Moosejaw ($51 million) and the
online fashion web site ModCloth ($45 million) in the past year alone. At
present, there are ongoing negotiations to acquire the menswear web site
Bonobos.com for a reported $300 million.
Walmart’s efforts to compete with Amazon in e-commerce, including
the latest move to hire current employees to deliver packages on their commute
home, has had a substantial impact on corporate sales. In the most recent
quarter, Wal-Mart reported a 63 percent increase in e-commerce sales, up from
29 percent growth in the previous quarter and its fourth consecutive quarter of
increases.
BLOG: WALMART USED TO LOCK ILLEGALS IN
THEIR STORES AT NIGHT TO DO THE CLEANING.
THE WALTON FAMILIY THINKS IT IS COMMIE TO
PAY LIVING WAGES TO LEGALS!
Meanwhile, workers’ wages at both corporations stall. As they
compete with each other for market share, they similarly compete to increase
the profit margin by “cost cutting”—i.e., cutting workers’ wages and benefits.
The average Walmart employee in the US earns a starting wage of
$9/hour, while the average Amazon warehouse worker in the US makes roughly
$12.40/hour, or annual salaries of roughly $18,720 and $25,792, respectively.
Last year, Walmart had an operating income of $22.76 billion,
while Amazon raked in $2.37 billion of net income. At present, the six heirs of
Walmart founder Sam Walton, who own a majority of the company, possess a
combined net worth of roughly $143 billion.
With the rise of Amazon, founder and CEO
Jeff Bezos has seen his
personal fortune
skyrocket. On May 30, Amazon stock topped
$1,000/share for the
first time, pushing
Bezos’ wealth to $86 billion and making him
the
second-richest person in the world. In the
past year alone, Bezos has accrued
$22.5
billion, and in the last five years he has
earned an astounding $66.6
billion, or
$25,342 per minute .
The immense wealth accumulated by the Waltons
and Bezos is
extracted from the labor of hundreds of
thousands of workers worldwide that
toil for both
corporations. This is the real source of profit under capitalism,
and is the driving motive behind Walmart’s new package delivery program, which
seeks to extract surplus value during its workers’ drive to and from work.
Walmart and Amazon workers have no interest in the frenzied
competition for profits between the two major conglomerates. Rather, their
interests lie in unifying with one another against both corporations in a
common struggle for social equality.
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