Wal-Mart pledges to keep hiring pace in U.S. this year

By Nandita Bose and Sruthi Ramakrishnan

(Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc will create about 10,000 jobs in the United States this year as part of a previously announced plan, it said on Tuesday, as President-elect Donald Trump puts pressure on companies to hire more U.S. workers.

The world's largest retailer joined companies like General Motors Co and Amazon.com Inc, which have rushed to announce their plans to add U.S. jobs. Trump, who takes office on Friday, has repeatedly singled out and criticized U.S. companies across industries for not doing more to keep jobs in the United States.

The additional jobs at Wal-Mart, the largest private U.S. employer, would represent less than 1 percent of its U.S. workforce of about 1.5 million and are consistent with its hiring in previous years.

Most of the new employees, including hourly workers, department managers and supervisors, will be in 59 new stores announced in October as part of a $6.8 billion capital spending plan for the fiscal year beginning in February.

Store openings will decline from 130 this year. Wal-Mart hopes to offset that drop by adding positions for e-commerce services like online grocery pick-up, a spokesman said.

The new stores in the next fiscal year will also support about 24,000 construction jobs.

"We view this as an opportunity to participate in an ongoing conversation about the private sector's role and address the contribution we are making to the community," Wal-Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez said.

Wal-Mart's announcement comes as it has been letting thousands of U.S. employees go so it can focus more on e-commerce and putting more staff on the sales floor.

The company said last week that it would cut hundreds of human resources jobs and last year announced plans to eliminate thousands of back-office positions. Wal-Mart said it had offered "customer-facing jobs" to many of those workers.

Other companies have also announced plans to add or save jobs.

GM said on Tuesday that it would invest an additional $1 billion in its U.S. factories and move some production from Mexico, moves that would create or retain 1,500 jobs. As of December 2015, it employed 97,000 U.S. workers.

German drug and pesticide maker Bayer AG, which is buying U.S. seed company Monsanto Co, pledged on Tuesday to maintain its more than 9,000 U.S. jobs and add 3,000 new U.S. high-tech positions.

Trump has taken credit for these statements. "With all of the jobs I am bringing back into the U.S. (even before taking office), with all of the new auto plants coming back into our country ... I believe the people are seeing 'big stuff,'" he tweeted on Tuesday.

Wal-Mart also said that by July, it would open 160 training academies, adding to the 40 it already has. More than 225,000 workers will receive up to six weeks of specialty training and graduate from the academies in the coming fiscal year, the company said.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Chicago and Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bengaluru; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)