With 1.3 million workers, there's no bigger, or more closely followed, employer in America than Walmart, and Kristin Oliver is the HR executive responsible for all of them. In an exclusive interview with Forbes' Paul Noglows at the Forbes Reinventing America Summit in Detroit this month, she talked about the company's recent decision to raise their minimum wage, the decision-making process behind it, and why she thinks Walmart and other employers are increasingly recognizing that they have a responsibility to help those at the lower end of the economic scale.
“We know who employs the same workforce that we do,” she said. “But I’ll tell you, what I feel happening in the industry is sort of a convergence of interests, that for the American economy we have to take a different point of view and find ways as employers to meet our business needs, but also to lift up a segment of the population that really needs work experience to better their own lives. And in order to do that, we’re going to have to cross the aisle and have partnerships with other people.
“So, for example,” she said, “McDonald's came out and made a wage announcement shortly after we did and we had been in consultation with them for quite some time. So there are lots of industry leaders that are really talking and partnering with each other right now on how to make this better for people.”
In April, McDonald's said it would increase wages at company-owned stores nationwide to at least $1 an hour more than the local required minimum wage, and an average of $2.75 an hour more than the federal minimum wage. McDonald's did not respond to requests for comment. In response to a follow-up question that doesn’t appear on the video, Oliver said the companies did not discuss the actual dollar figures involved in their proposed raises during their discussions.
As for Walmart’s decision to raise its lowest pay rate to at least $9 an hour, $1.75 above the federal minimum wage, Oliver said the company “really focused on what our associates were telling us was important to them, more so than a financial analysis about what the impact was going to be to the bottom line. We looked at what our associates wanted from their employment, what really made a difference, and the suite of things that we announced are what make a difference to them.”
That suite includes changes to scheduling and increased choice about flexibility in work hours. “The scheduling piece is super-important,” she said. “People care about how many hours they work, and predictability in their paycheck.”
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