Walmart is famous for a lot of reasons, and not all of them have a happy face. Clashes between management and underpaid employees are common, and Walmart has been accused of everything from threatening and punishing workers to cutting worker hours to avoid giving them benefits.
Worker advocacy group Our Walmart recently released an app to help empower hourly employees.
The app, named WorkIt, is based on IBM's Watson artificial intelligence program and it can answer around 200 of the most common questions Walmart employees have about their rights, benefits, and company policies. When the employee has a question the app can't answer, the app queries a volunteer peer expert. After learning the answer, Watson adds the question and answer to the database.
The app was designed to provide Walmart employees with the answers to their most common questions. Jason Van Anden, owner of software development shop Quadrant 2, told Forbes that he was approached by Our Walmart in April to develop the app.
The project was designed to fill an information void for the massive workforce, and save employees from management intimidation and abuse. Walmart doesn't provide an employee handbook, and its rapidly changing protocols make it difficult for employees to keep up. Their only source of information until now was an intranet service known informally as "the wire," which they can only access from work, using a trackable login, often from a computer in the manager's office.
Walmart has received strong criticism in the past for their attempts to prevent their workforce of over a million strong from unionizing. "Creating an app like this," said big box retail analysts at EMS Barcode, "showcases how the employees have come up with new and advanced ways to move around the traditional methods of communication that Walmart offers and take things into their own hands."
Walmart is fighting the app tooth and nail, naturally, claiming the labor organization is "trying to get our associates to turn over personal information to the union by using deceptive and slick looking social media and mobile apps."
Why Is Employee Communication a Threat?
Walmart employees have taken to Facebook groups and other methods of communication to trade information, but WorkIt is the first targeted app that directly addresses their specific issues. In addition to the FAQ feature, the app has a news area, a community-wide chat, and a message board.
It doesn't sound dangerous, but pushback from Walmart employees and the supporting public have resulted in bottom-line killing bad press.
According to Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University, "This is a battle for the hearts and minds of the workers. In the future, human resource management will be on people's telephones."
Walmart, and other big retailers, see employee organization as a credible threat. Collective bargaining eliminates the human capital corner-cutting practices like lower pay for women working the same jobs, wage theft, and LGBT discrimination.
The WorkIt app may be the first step to organization. Employees can make contacts, compare notes, and talk about taking action without risking their jobs, and that may be a legitimate concern for companies with a huge workforce of low-wage workers. Information is the first step to empowerment. Social media has provided the level of community support required to spur action, and now technology has provided the means to directly connect with peers, and to make collective decisions without the benefit of a formal union.
Any big-box retailer trying to profit by keeping employees in the dark should be nervous. And should have seen this coming.