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Comment by ovao | Hacker News Reader

> These are nothing more than PR moves.

They’re certainly good for PR, and perhaps that’s the primary intention, but employees are benefitting from it.

Sure, but throwing large amounts of tax breaks at corporations in the hopes that a few scraps will trickle down to workers as PR efforts is inefficient. There are much more efficient ways of achieving even better outcomes for workers.

Right, but imagine if instead, they gave them a raise instead of a one time bonus? That is how you actually benefit workers.

Raises are likely to be more useful to employees than bonuses, particularly over the long term. These bonuses don’t preclude the possibility of more bonuses down the road, however. It’s unclear at this point exactly how things are going to shake out along those lines.

Walmart employs about 2.3 million people. At $1000 per employee that's $2,300,000,000 going back into the economy.

Now, if Walmart gave everyone who worked there a $1 raise. With about 1.5 million full-time employees working around 1700 hours per year (US average 2016) that would mean about $2,550,000,000. So that bonus is almost equivalent to a temporary raise in terms of benefits.

That is just for full-time employees. A blanket $1 raise would probably come out to about $4,000,000,000 each year that Walmart may not have if the tax cuts are removed by the next administration, which they very well could be.

Walmart has said that the bonuses will cost $400M, so that's not $2.3B going into the economy. Only some employees are eligible for a $1,000 bonus: some will receive between $200 and $1,000, and employees who earned less than $11/hour prior to the raises are not eligible for a bonus.

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