Walmart is taking steps to make its workers a little less likely to have to go to predatory payday lenders … but not by paying them a living wage or offering more full-time schedules.
The world’s biggest retailer has unveiled financial-planning tools designed by Even Responsible Finance Inc. and PayActiv Inc., a move that lets its employees access earned wages ahead of scheduled paychecks and avoid bounced checks or payday lenders.
Staffers will receive eight free uses a year of the Instapay tool via Even’s personal-finance app, which is linked to the employee’s checking or prepaid account and Wal-Mart’s payroll system.
It’s good that workers won’t be paying outrageous interest rates to payday lenders or outrageous bounced check fees to their banks, but notice how Walmart isn’t doing anything about the root cause of workers’ need to access money between paychecks. That cause being that Walmart doesn’t pay its workers enough to live on.
Worker group OUR Walmart released a statement calling the move “another example of what is wrong at Walmart.”
"Rather than fairly compensating Walmart associates so that they earn enough to make it from one pay period to the next, Walmart's response is to create this new system and act like it is a benefit rather than the bandaid that it is. Living paycheck to paycheck is too common at Walmart and that is the problem that Walmart should be trying to solve. The billionaire Walton heirs, who own half of Walmart, saw their wealth increase by $12 billion in one day last month. They can afford to pay a fair wage so their associates are not living paycheck to paycheck.”
They can afford it, but they won’t do it. Instead, they go looking for good press for this, counting on many reporters not to notice that the statement being made is “Walmart doesn’t pay its workers enough.”