Walmart is now requiring its sales associates to wear uniforms. And Walmart stands to make $millions selling them to its own employees, who get a measly 10% discount.
They aren’t really “uniforms,” claims the company, which says it's just a new dress code it’s imposing on workers. By refusing to call the specified black or khaki pants and collared, short-length white or navy shirt combination "uniforms," Walmart is getting around having to pay and care for them. According to federal law, if minimum wage workers are required to wear uniforms, then the company must pay for the uniforms and pay to clean and care for them as well.
Instead, Walmart is specially tagging any store items that meet its “dress-code” requirements, offering employees their usual discount for buying the un-uniforms themselves. And obviously most workers will need more than one.
By imposing this added cost on its workers, many of whom are barely surviving with the help of public assistance, Walmart has found yet another way to exploit its underpaid workers and the American taxpayers who are covering expenses Walmart refuses to pay. Instead of further exploiting both, Walmart could raise wages to just over $10 an hour without raising its merchandise prices more than pennies.
But if Walmart refuses to pay workers a living wage, then it must pay for their uniforms - whatever it calls them.
We, the undersigned, say a uniform is a uniform and Walmart should have to pay for those it requires of minimum-wage workers like every other company in America.
One of the world’s richest companies, with profits of $4.09 billion last quarter alone, should not deprive its employees of health care and wages high enough to pay for food, much less make them buy special clothing just to work for such low wages.
News sources also point out that employees are being asked to come up with these new work outfits rather quickly - by next week, further imposing undue hardship on many who already can’t afford to pay their existing bills for what they are being paid in wages.
Furthermore the American public, who is footing the bill for much of Walmart’s stinginess, has been pushed to its limit as well.
We demand that Walmart stop devising schemes to exploit the public and its own workers and either pay its workers decent wages or pay for their uniforms and for their cleaning and care as well.
Thanks for your time.
