Scott Connors took to social media and local press outlets after his sister Annie and other part-time workers found out their jobs at Walmart had been cut without warning on Black Friday. On December 14th, WAMC aired an interview with Connors about the situation and the toll it had taken on Annie.
“She's sitting home crying, calls me every day crying, wants to know what she did wrong, why they don't like her, why they won't let her work, and she just doesn't understand it," Connors explained. "And I've told her that I've launched a social media campaign, I'm trying to get her job back and trying to get her hours back, trying to get it so she can go back to her normal life because she has now no money and no hours. So, I think the equitable thing, the decent thing for Walmart to do at this time of the year would be to give people their hours back and give them their lives back.”
While the Pittsfield Walmart declined to comment, WAMC reached Walmart Senior Director of Global Communications Anne Hatfield. She described the situation as a misunderstanding, and that “an associate’s work hours are based on two things: when the associate tells us they are available to work and when customers need them most. We’ve reached out to get everyone together and talk through the situation.”
According to Connors, that’s exactly what happened later on Thursday — but only after he garnered the attention of local media. He picked up Annie’s story from the time of his talk on WAMC airing.
“She was still without work," Scott continued. "She didn't have her hours back, and Walmart was not communicating with us at all. And I got a call from the store manager after the stories ran, and said Walmart would like to do a Zoom call with myself and the folks from BARC to discuss her employment status.”
Berkshire County Arc, or BARC, places people with disabilities into employment at businesses throughout the region. Scott says Annie has worked with them for years happily.
“So, we scheduled the call," he continued. "I would characterize it as sort of contentious actually. I told them that the things that I wanted to know was, why this happened, why weren’t people given notice? Was it something that was sanctioned by corporate? If not, why did they let one person make these changes for everybody and not notify them? What metrics were going to be put in place so it didn't happen again?”
For Scott, clearly identifying who had accountability for the situation was of paramount importance to the negotiation.
“They went through this whole big thing of saying that they manage their business through the business needs of when customers are in the store, and they look at different metrics, and they look at different hours of when people are in there and on and on and on," he said. "So, they never really answered my question until I kept pressing and pressing them. And they finally admitted that it was not a corporate decision- It was a decision based on the local manager, Brian. He was the one who cut everyone's hours.”
Brian Bissonnette is the Pittsfield Walmart’s manager.
“I said, you know, why weren't people given any notice?" said Scott. "And know his answer to that, which was a very semantical one, was, well, people's schedules are available on the computer three weeks in advance, they could look at it. And I said, okay, but here's the thing- My sister has worked for 18 years at Walmart. She's had a fixed schedule, number one. Number two, she doesn't know how to log onto the computer there without the assistance of Matt, her job coach, who you've now banned from the backroom. And number three, she would have absolutely no reason to go and check her schedule, since it's fixed. So, that was their rationale for that. But then we got into the whole thing of, they said, well, could she work a different schedule? And I said, no, not really, because she has special needs and she relies on public transportation to get to and from work. So, then it was, well, when is that available? So, I said, well, it's not available nights, it's not available weekends, and because it's a public transportation thing where you have to call and put her on schedule. You can't just do it day-to-day, and it's very hard once you get off the schedule to get back on with them.”
After going back and forth with Walmart representatives over Annie’s schedule, Scott says emphasizing the growing news coverage of the incident proved to be the ace up his sleeve. Not long after hanging up, word came back.
“About two hours later, I get a phone call from Brian, who's the store manager, who said, Scott, we got, quote, 'permission' to put Annie back on the schedule, her regular normal hours, and she should be all set to go," Connors told WAMC. "And I had also asked that she'd be reimbursed back pay, because she lost all this pay and all this time, because of no fault of their own. It was their fault that they did it. So, I said to him, I find it funny that you've got permission when you're the guy who made the cut. You're the guy who made- And we talked about that on a call. I asked him, I said, Brian, I understand you don't do the schedule, but you approve the schedule. So, you know what's going on, because he's tried to plead, well, I didn't know what was happening. And I said, that, sort of the plausible deniability doesn't work here, because you approve the schedule. You're the store manager- You know.”
It's been an emotional roller-coaster for Annie.
“At first, I went and told her that we had had the meeting, I didn't know what was going to happen," Scott said. "She was still kind of full of angst and saying, I want my job back, what’s going on, why don’t they like me, and so I said, you're just going to have to wait. And then when I called her and told her that her hours were back and she was going to go back to work, she was ecstatic. She's down visiting my brother right now. After the holiday, she's going back. But she was absolutely ecstatic about the fact that she had her job back.”
One of Scott’s major takeaways from the episode is how little the multi-billion-dollar Walmart values part-time workers.
“This giant behemoth of a corporation who had a local manager who really screwed up," he told WAMC. "And they were going to stand by him and defend him rather than say, you know what, this was wrong what he did. We apologize, we're going to put her back to work. They were more about defending his practice than they were about standing up for the workers.”
