‘Every Day Is Frightening’: Working For Walmart Amid Covid-19 Crisis
As retail giant Walmart continues to work around the clock to accommodate employees around the world, the company is also facing an unprecedented health crisis of its own.
While Walmart is working to keep workers on the job in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the company is also dealing with a staggering number of employee furloughs.
The company has said that it would take an average of 20 days to return all of its employees to work from furlough. The number of furlough days was reported to be a staggering 20,500, or about 2.5% of its workforce.
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Walmart said that it had reached a point where the company’s financial and safety measures put the health and safety of its employees first.
The company has now added a second line of defense and says that it is taking extra measures to protect its employees during the virus crisis. The company says that it is now using personal protective equipment and increasing the training its employees receive to protect them against the virus.
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Walmart also says that it is implementing two additional actions to protect its employees.
This is an edited and updated version of an article originally published on March 20, 2020.
Furloughs, pay cuts and store closings
Some 3,800 employees were furloughed, including 900 hourly workers.
Many Walmart employees have been forced to work from home in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, Walmart implemented a partial store closure of its U.S. stores as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the country. The company said at the time that it was making adjustments at its distribution centers and would consider further reductions as more data became available.
On Monday, Walmart announced another partial store closure in the U.S. and Canada. The company said it would close some of its U.S. stores and some of its Canadian stores until April 15 “to focus resources on the fight against the coronavirus.”
Walmart has also seen a number of other changes to its workforce.
The company said that it is laying off about half of its U.S. hourly worker and retail associate employees, meaning about 750,000 people. This
