Workforce Management

By Patrick Bannon, Rebecca DeGroff,  Noah Finkel, Richard Alfred (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)    The Supreme Court has unanimously that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require employers to pay employees for time spent passing through post-shift security screening.  

Arlington, VA - Retailers on Friday criticized the National Labor Relations Board decision that gave the go-ahead to new laws to expedite the union election process. The amendments, to go into effect April 14, provide for electronic filing and transmission of election petitions and other documents; eliminates or reduces unnecessary litigation; and allows parties to consolidate election-related appeals to the board into a single appeals process, the NLRB said in a statement.  

Bentonville, Ark. - Wal-Mart Stores has promoted Judith McKenna to COO for Walmart U.S., effective immediately.  She succeeds Gisel Ruiz, who has been appointed executive VP of Walmart’s International People Division, effective immediately.    McKenna  will continue to report directly to Walmart U.S. president and CEO, Greg Foran. Ruiz will report to Walmart International president and CEO, David Cheesewright. 
  

New York - The Supreme Court handed out a victory to Amazon and other employers when it ruled unanimously on Tuesday that a temp agency was not required to pay workers at Amazon warehouses in Nevada for the time they spent waiting for and undergoing security checks at the end of their shifts.   The court reversed a lower court ruling from last year  which had allowed the workers to sue under the theory that since their screening time was required by the employer, it should be compensated.  

Bentonville, Ark. – Wal-Mart reportedly plans to improve efficiency in its China operation by eliminating 250 jobs, and also open nine new stores and a new distribution center in China by the end of 2014. According to Bloomberg, the positions that will be cut are mostly marketing and merchandising roles, along with some cuts in departments including tax and asset protection.

Retailers are facing a growing onslaught of lawsuits from current and former managers and assistant managers who claim their employers should have paid them for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The managers’ assert that much of what the work managers and assistant managers do is not truly managerial and, therefore under the FLSA, they should not be exempt from receiving overtime pay for any time worked over 40 hours in a week.

True Value’s boss went undercover, and the cameras were rolling. True Value Company president and CEO John Hartmann will appear in the season six premiere of "Undercover Boss" airing on Dec. 14 on CBS. 

As a focus area of retail technology, workforce management may not be quite as sexy as CRM or omnichannel commerce. However, a lot of very exciting stuff is currently happening in the world of workforce management, as attendees of the recent KronosWorks 2014 conference in Las Vegas discovered. Here is a brief summary of three of the hottest current workforce management trends.