hallinan

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I set the schedules at Walmart.

66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it.

People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay.

I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me.

Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of.

Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall.

Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers.

The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line.

We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares.

We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have.

The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short.

I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door.

You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store.

There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying.

The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour.

Monday through Sunday, we pay our half.

The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program.

It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.

[hallinan @hallinan]

@AlfieJCarter MCP

[hallinan @hallinan]

@Codie_Sanchez SMB

[Peter Agboola @baba_Omoloro]

Anthropic has launched free courses to master AI with certificates for $0.00

https://t.co/hwJvuJHIdo

[hallinan @hallinan]

@Zephyr_hg News

[hallinan @hallinan]

@dimitarangg AI

[hallinan @hallinan]

@paulswaney3 Integration !!

[Military Support @MilitaryCooI]

Honoring USMC Cpl. John Kinsel Sr. He passed away at the age of 107. He was one of the last 3 remaining Navajo Code Talkers and served with the 9th Marine Regiment & 3rd Marine Division during the taking of Iwo Jima. Rest easy Marine 🇺🇸

[Bricktop_NAFO @Bricktop_NAFO]

This is Narciso Barranco.

He is the father of 3 boys.

All of which served as United States Marines with 2 being current active Marines.

[Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids]

You telling me this fat slob in Memphis pulling a gun on the daughter of a man they snatched is a real ICE agent

[Proud Native Americans @proud_native_am]

They will never erase the history of our Navajo Code Talkers. 🎖🦅🇺🇲

[U.S. Naval Institute @NavalInstitute]

#RIP John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway who passed away on Monday at at the age of 105. Hemingway was the last surviving Battle of Britain pilot. Born in Dublin in 1919, Hemingway joined the RAF in 1938. He flew Hawker Hurricanes during WWII and survived being shot down four times.

[MichaeloKeeffe @Mick_O_Keeffe]

Shocking new footage of the Clonmel migrant/refugee camp!

If you have ties to Ireland I ask that you share this footage.

Ireland is being planted again and the world needs to see what’s happening.

[Rep. Jack Kimble @RepJackKimble]

This is worrisome to me. Yes, of course Columbia should be sanctioned, but I don't see why Dartmouth and Brown are getting off without even a warning.

[MichaeloKeeffe @Mick_O_Keeffe]

A Pakistani immigration lawyer who specialises in getting illegals into Ireland wants to become an Irish Senator.

I can't believe I have just typed that sentence.

This Pakistani man wants to deliver a "New Ireland".

Wake up Irishman. Wake up!

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

Stranger luckily intervenes before a scammer wipes out 40k from a women’s bank account

[Bloomberg Crypto @crypto]

Northern Data is getting closer to a deal to sell its crypto mining operations as the company looks to capitalize on November’s Bitcoin rally https://t.co/XACXbpsit5

[AltYellowstoneNatPar @AltYelloNatPark]

The censorship algorithm has reduced our audience by roughly 95%, and seriously, who does that to a wildlife advocacy group ?

You can help by retweeting, liking and following. If we're going to preserve what few wild places remain, we need you to get involved.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

Get him.

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

The Boss says it all. What a great message.