Labor Group Gets IBM’s Watson to Help Walmart Workers

Betsy Marler enjoyed her job as a sales associate at a Walmart in Mobile, Ala. She was hired in August 2009 and, three-and-a-half years later, promoted to pharmaceutical department manager at a different store and given a raise to $10.05 an hour. She was 53 and married with four grown kids, one of whom also worked for Walmart, when she started the new position on a Monday in January 2013. Four days later, doctors discovered a mass on her lung.

During the next year, Marler went to dozens of doctors’ appointments and underwent three surgeries. She had to figure out which leave policies applied, a sometimes complicated process for Walmart workers. The retailer, the largest private employer in the country, with more than 1 million workers, has more than 250 pages of human resources policies. When Marler was sick, those policies were available only on Walmart’s intranet, called the Wire, and accessible only on company computers—only when employees were at work and on the clock, she says. According to a company spokesman, since early 2016 employees have been able to access information about the company’s paid time off and leave policies from any device.