(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest private employer, has been criticized by activists and by its own workers for not paying living wages or providing full-time hours to those who want them. This week, however, all of the company’s senior executives appeared on a stage in Rogers, Ark., for six hours, and no one in the audience of investors and analysts asked much about the company’s 1.3 million U.S. employees.

It was only afterward, when Wal-Mart Chief Executive Office Doug McMillon spoke to reporters, that the issue of pay came up. McMillon said that Wal-Mart “wants to be in a situation where we don’t pay minimum wage at all.” That sounds good. But it’s so vague that it’s hard to know if this amounts to a shift or is merely a clever attempt to set the issue aside.

McMillon noted that of Wal-Mart’s U.S. workforce, fewer than 6,000 earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. The company reports an average full-time hourly wage of $12.92, but it doesn’t provide a figure for its many part-timers—30,000 of whom will lose their health benefits next year—in addition to those who already lost them.

Any increase in wages would come as part of a larger effort to “invest in its associate base,” McMillon said, with the possibility of using promotions and bonus payments to improve opportunities for workers. He didn’t provide any other details.

At the investor conference, McMillon called the store employees Wal-Mart’s “secret sauce.” After describing some of the problems at the stores—not having enough of the right items in stock and long checkout lines among them—he said: “You get what you deserve. We’re getting what we deserve. We have to set up our associates to win. They need us to get some things done so they can.”

That was on Wednesday. Less than a day later, a couple of hundred protestors marched in New York and Washington, calling on Wal-Mart to pay workers $15 an hour in an echo of the rallying cry for fast-food workers. The New York protesters walked to a Park Avenue building that is home to Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and a woman with a net worth of $34.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index. The Walton family, among the richest in the world, owns slightly more than 50 percent of Wal-Mart.

The protesters wanted to present Walton with a petition signed by Wal-Mart workers in 50 states asking for the company to publicly commit to paying $15 an hour and providing consistent, full-time schedules. Walton, who spends little time in the city, wasn’t there. Twenty-six people were arrested for blocking traffic.

“Wal-Mart doesn’t have any locations in New York City. Perhaps that’s the reason why the workers this group is talking about don’t have access to career advancement or competitive wages or quarterly bonuses, or their schedules three weeks in advance,” Kory Lundberg, a Wal-Mart spokesperson said in a statement. “If they worked at Wal-Mart they would.”

Instant Insights /

Wal-Mart to increase minimum wage -- eventually

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