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Imagine this: you work at Walmart, where you make $800 a month. Then the company asks you to spend $50 to buy clothes that meet its dress code.
That’s what happened this month. Walmart workers, who are already struggling to make ends meet, and who often rely on food stamps to get by, have to buy polo shirts and khakis in specific colors.
It’s a great way to help the company meet its financial targets, if nothing else.
“Walmart’s new uniform policy is likely to bring Walmart $50 to $100 million to help boost struggling sales. Meanwhile, the Waltons could pay for new uniforms for every store employee with about six days of earnings from their Walmart shares,” Organization United for Respect (OUR) Walmart, a union-backed group, wrote on their Facebook page.
The goal, according to the Walmart dress code announcement obtained by Gawker, was:
- To help customers easily find us - and understand who’s shopping and who’s working.
- To help drive teamwork, customer service, and sales.
The company didn’t say why teamwork or customer service require every employee to be part of a well-coordinated army of retail robots.
Forget whether this is smart. Is it legal?
It is. US labor law does require companies to pay for official uniforms. But Walmart is not issuing a uniform – it’s requiring a dress code. By requiring that employees wear clothes that they technically could wear outside work, the company gets the protection of the law when it asks employees to fork over more money.
Uniforms with logos, on the other hand, have to be paid for by the employers as employees wouldn’t be expected to wear those clothes outside work.
The move was expected. Early this August, Walmart announced that by 29 September its employees will be required to wear clothes that abide by the new dress code.
Now we have details. The new uniform – sorry, dress code – is to be “white or navy blue collared shirts with khaki or black pants, capris or skirts and closed-toe shoes in any color. You can “mix and match” all of these colors.”
“When an employer selects clothing you could wear anywhere else, they are not required to pay for it,” explains Judy Conti, a federal advocacy coordinator at the National Employment Law Project. “Black or khaki pants – it doesn’t come more basic than that. White or navy blue shirt: now, maybe you don’t wear white or maybe you don’t wear navy, but I’ll bet you wear one of them.”
“So they’re looking to enforce a measure of uniformity and still give people enough options that there’s never going to be some combination of those that you couldn’t wear somewhere else – even if you don’t,” said Conti.
The Walmart employees she has spoken with noted that customers don’t have trouble identifying them as employees.
The nondescript clothing will, however, cost the employees. Especially the collared shirts.
“Even if in their current wardrobe they have a collared shirt, they probably don’t have enough to get themselves through the week without having to wash everything,” explains Conti. The collared shirts, which will make Walmart workers “look a little more professional”, “are by definition more expensive than white or blue T-shirts.”
In the context of Walmart wages, the added cost could seem like a cheeky request. About 825,000 Walmart employees are paid less than $25,000 a year. In order to supplement their wages, employees at just one Walmart store collect about $1m in food stamps and public assistance in a span of a year, found a report prepared for the House of Representatives.
One Walmart employee, Richard Reynoso, wrote a letter to the company noting that he couldn’t afford the clothes required by the new dress code, reports the Huffington Post. Reynoso, who makes $800 to $900, wrote:
The sad truth is that I do not have $50 lying around the house to spend on new uniform clothes, just because Walmart suddenly decided to change its policy. If I have to go out of pocket for these new clothes, I’m going to have to choose which bill to skip.”
Advice from Walmart as to where employees might get the new uniform?
“Have you checked your closet? You may have a white or navy-blue collared shirt that is compliant already,” wrote Barbara Simone, a long-time Walmart employee who made the original dress code announcement.
Simone added that while the employees were free to buy the required clothing from anywhere, appropriate items were also being offered in store and will be marked with a “spark” on the tag.
Walmart’s employee discount is nothing to brag about, however. At Walmart, employees are eligible for 10% discounts on any in-store purchases.
Other companies offer deeper employee discounts. At Macy’s, such discount is 20%. At Urban Outfitters, it’s 40% for apparel and 25% for specialty merchandise such as jewelry, beauty and furniture. At JC Penney, it’s 25%.
“That’s so nice of them,” joked Conti, adding, “[I say that] with all the sarcasm I can muster. If they had any sensitivity to their workforce, which is paid next to nothing, if they really wanted to do this right, they’d have offered them free clothing. It would cost them nothing.”
The Walton family, which owns more than half of Walmart, is worth about $145bn.
