Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Walmart to hire lots of veterans. Unfortunately, it's hiring them to Walmart jobs.

Walmart sign on store. Good news, unemployed veterans! Soon you can be veterans with low-paid part-time jobs, thanks to Walmart's efforts to make itself look good. Won't that be fun?

Walmart plans to hire 100,000 veterans over the next five years, according to Walmart U.S. CEO Bill Simon, speaking to the National Retail Federation. That's a lot of jobs:

Gary Profit, a retired Army brigadier general who is senior director of military programs at Wal-Mart, said the company might not be able to guarantee that every veteran who wants a full-time job will be able to get one. But he said that because of the size of Wal-Mart's retail operation and supply chain, it is almost certain that the company could find a job'even a part-time one'close to any veteran who wanted one.

'If you're a veteran and you want a job in the retail industry, you have a place at Wal-Mart,' he said.

Awww, lucky duckies. But wait. If Walmart's willing to admit to the one teeny tiny issue about the jobs not necessarily being full-time (a striking admission from a company that routinely tries to claim more of its workers are full-time than is actually the case), there are other issues veterans should be aware of before sprinting off to their local stores looking for jobs. The big one, of course, is Walmart's low, low wages, so low that Walmart routinely tops lists of employers whose workers are forced to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. Then there's the fact that your part-time schedule will be totally unpredictable, and of course all the opportunities for wage theft and discrimination.

But as long as everyone ignores the details and just focuses on how many veterans have some kind, any kind, of job thanks to Walmart, it'll seem like a great deal. So, go Walmart!

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