My son lives in Chicago and we were talking about this yesterday. He was really interested in the approach they’re using:
A nationwide wave of one- and two-day walkouts that began this week in New York City will spread to Chicago on Wednesday and Thursday, when hundreds of area workers at roughly 60 fast-food and retail locations plan to walk out on the job in protest of working conditions and low wages.
Demands range from a living wage, which they peg at $15 an hour, to the ability to unionize without retaliation, says Lorraine Chavez, outreach coordinator for Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago, the group that organized the strikes. Local companies McDonald’s, Potbelly, Sears and Walgreens are included in the list of 26 national fast-food and retail chains where workers will strike.
“Workers are just so excited and enthused about drawing a line in the sand and saying we’re not going to take these conditions anymore,” Chavez said, adding that unlike April’s walkout, this week’s will expand beyond downtown. Employees are planning to strike at the Whole Foods on Halsted in Lakeview and at McDonald’s restaurants in Albany Park and McKinley Park.
Among those striking Thursday will be Andrew Little, 26, who works at the Victoria’s Secret on Michigan and Superior. Little credits his participation in the April strikes with landing him a $2.26 raise when he returned to work, bringing his total hourly wage to $11.26. “When they told me I was getting a raise, I thought it would be 5 cents or 10 cents,” Little said. “[The larger raise] happened because of the strike, because of what happened on April 24.”
Now, Little wants Victoria’s Secret to revise its on-call policy, which he says forces him to clear his schedule for work without guaranteeing him hours. “I want a steadier schedule, whether it’s four hours or eight hours,” he said.
Based on what low wage workers tell me, the scheduling issue is huge. It really isn’t right to ask people to structure their whole lives around a constantly shifting schedule at jobs that pay so little. Add children (and dealing with child care) and it’s just a recipe for stress and unhappiness because the whole family stays in a constant state of chaos. It ripples, too, because people providing childcare are also at the mercy of the constantly shifting schedule, and they are also low-wage (or no-wage) workers.
We heard a couple of weeks ago about how workers need help budgeting their money, so a credit card company was generously helping them with that. It would be a hell of a lot easier to budget their money if they knew how many hours they were getting and when they might be working, don’t you think?
From New York to several Midwestern cities, thousands of fast-food workers have been holding one-day strikes during peak mealtimes, quickly drawing national attention to their demands for much higher wages.
These strikes, which are planned for Milwaukee on Thursday, carry the flavor of Occupy Wall Street protests and are far different from traditional unionization efforts that generally focus on a single workplace. The national campaign, underwritten with millions of dollars from the Service Employees International Union, aims to mobilize workers — all at once — in numerous cities at hundreds of restaurants from two dozen chains.
The strategists know they want to achieve a $15 wage, but they seem to be ad-libbing on ways to get there. Perhaps they will seek to unionize workers at dozens of restaurants, although some labor leaders scoff at that idea because the turnover rate among fast-food employees is about 75 percent a year. Or the strategists and strikers might press city councils to enact a special “living wage” for fast-food restaurants. Or perhaps by continually disrupting the fast-food marketplace from counter to counter across the country, they can get McDonald’s, KFC and others to raise wages to end the ruckus. The protests’ organizers acknowledge that yet another goal is to push Congress to raise the federal minimum wage and pressure state legislatures to raise the state minimums.
In explaining why her union is pouring dozens of organizers and significant sums into the effort, Mary Kay Henry, the S.E.I.U. president, said, “Our union’s members think that economic inequality is the No. 1 problem our nation needs to solve. We think it’s important to back low-wage workers who are willing to stand up and have the courage to strike to make the case that the economy is creating jobs that people can’t support their families on.”
I’m thrilled they’re getting so much media attention.
Mike in NC
In today’s shitty local newspaper, they saw fit to print a Letter to the Editor submitted by some elderly moron complaining about the high tax he had to pay on a fucking milkshake. Apparently it was the fault of the many illegal aliens invading the country, but not the Republicans running the state government. Maybe the solution is to lower the minimum wage.
Tone in DC
If I had to deal with that scheduling (just straight 9 to 5 here in Beltway Bandit land), I’d be pissed too.
Kay, thanks for staying on this.
Gin & Tonic
OT, but I know you’ll be interested, Kay – the Miami Herald is reporting that Tony Bennett will be resigning.
cleek
i’m sure most people have worked enough part-time hourly jobs, regardless of the wage, to know that scheduling can be a nightmare.
and being told “we need you to close tonight and open tomorrow” when you were looking forward to leaving at noon for a couple of days off is kindof how these hourly jobs go.
Kay
@Gin & Tonic:
Wow. Thanks. I’m surprised. At first glance, his explanation looks reasonable. Then you get to the actual emails, where he was busily excluding 4 charter schools so “we can say” they’re at “50% ‘C’ or better”.
I don’t think that part aligns with his explanation :)
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Tony Bennett is giving up singing?
mclaren
@cleek:
No, it’s worse than that. Workers are typically told “we need you to close tonight and leave at 1:00 in the morning and then be on call at 5:30 AM in the morning in case we need you to come in and open.” That’s gross abuse. It’s not reasonable. It’s tantamount to getting rid of the 8-hour working day.
Human beings need more than 2.5 hours of sleep. (It takes half an hour to get home from a 1:00 am shift, then at least another half hour to get to sleep, and a good hour after you wake up before you finish showering, brushing your tetth, getting dressed, and drive to work. That’s 2:00 am to 4:30 am for the worker to sleep.)
That’s not just “annoying,” it destroys people. Human beings can’t survive for any length of time with 2.5 hours of sleep per night.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Amir Khalid:
He had a good run.
Belafon
My oldest is working two jobs before he goes to college. One is at the clinic where my wife works, entering information onto the computers for them. The other is at one of those self serve yogurt shops. The guy running the second one likes to call up about 30 minutes before he needs you to work, which is lousy but ok if he calls saturday or sunday morning. But he called at 2:35 in the afternoon on tuesday, wanting my son to be there at three.
About the only good thing is that the owner uses teenagers, who aren’t currently trying to make a living, just having some extra money. But he takes full advantage of them (he has a tip jar so that he can pay $7 per hour). My son’s largest paycheck so far has been $98, and that’s because he volunteered for the 4th of July and ended up working 8 hours.
Paul in KY
@Gin & Tonic: I hope he resigns with Atlantic records! What a voice…
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Beat me!
Mr Stagger Lee
Neil Cavuy is wagging his fingers and would like to have a word for all those ungrateful peasants!
JCT
@Kay: Obviously you aren’t familiar with “New” math.
This is great news though.
Kay
@cleek:
It’s really bigger than that, though. It makes it really difficult to get out of the low wage job if you can’t designate a certain block of time to things other than the low wage job. I don’t think it’s comparable to people who are paid better and work when they’re needed, because they’re paid better in exchange for “on call”. It’s like we’ve taken the lowest wage workers and made them managers, without paying them for it.
If we’re all about a work ethic and striving, we have to at least make that possible. People like David Brooks like to lecture on “chaos” in families, but he attributes that to poor planning skills. They’d be better planners if they had some idea what was going to happen next month.
Roger Moore
Maybe if those employees were making a living wage- and $15/hour seems at the low end to me- their turnover would be less than 75% per year.
Kay
@Mr Stagger Lee:
I loathe him all out of proportion. He is really one of the worst people on television. Just the whole sneering-smug thing, which is his entire routine. I cannot bear that. Is being an asshole a requirement for that division of media?
Belafon
@Roger Moore: I wonder what the turnover rate at restaurants is in Europe?
Comrade Jake
I can’t fathom what it must be like trying to support a family via a job (or two!) at Mickey D’s or the like. The fact that so many people in our society don’t have any other viable choice is a real problem.
Violet
The scheduling thing is huge. People need to be able to plan their lives. It’s how we’re biologically hard wired. Constant chaos will make people sick. And that stupid McDonald’s budge thing, they expect everyone has a second job to make ends meet. How in the world can someone have a second job when their first job’s hours are constantly changing. It simply won’t work very well.
I think the food service workers have a trump card with regards to the health insurance issue–“Do you really want your food being prepared, handled and served to you by people who are sick and can’t afford to go to the doctor? Really?”
Kay
@Roger Moore:
They don’t want lower turnover. If they had lower turnover, and the employees stick around, they start feeling invested in the job and begin asking for things. I had never read that before yesterday, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? The thing is designed for high turn-over.
Butch
Was in Australia this spring, where the minimum wage is $18 an hour; yeah, prices are higher than here, but you’ve also got universal health care and universal education..
Pococurante
According to the McDonald’s budget a living wage is at least $12/hr.
Once the rent is adjusted to a higher realistic level and we add in food and heat suddenly $15/hr seems quite reasonable. With the added benefit that one can make that wage with one full-time job instead of two part-time ones.
Even then though I doubt they’d get a full-week’s worth of hours.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: Good point, Roger.
Paul in KY
@Kay: That’s what landed him the Fox gig. ‘Sneering asshole’ there is like ‘self starter who looks for work’ at a normal business.
Paul in KY
@Kay: See your point there. Sounds like the way those MBA assholes would think.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
G supervises workers who are “on call” (they’re an infusion pharmacy and sometimes patients need deliveries after business hours), but they have a few things that fast food workers don’t get — they have a schedule (ie they know when they’re on call) and they get paid for those on-call hours even if no one calls. They get a fairly minimal amount to be “on call” for X number of hours (I think it’s something like 8 hours at $10 an hour) and then if they actually are called in, they get paid their regular hourly rate from the minute they clock in until they clock out.
IOW, they actually get paid to wait around and see if they’re needed, which is completely different than expecting people to wait around for free.
Mnemosyne
Crap. I am in moderation because the type of business G works for is on the naughty list. FYWP.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Mr Stagger Lee: Sorry for the proofreading, excuse me while I go an beat my Somalian serv-OOPS my house-guest for the faux pas.
@Kay: Seeing Cavuto on a tumbrel along with Stuart (let’s starve granny for taking Obama’s food stamps) Varney would be so satisfying. Or have them forced to work at a fast food restaurant slaving under a cruel Middle Eastern manager at sub minimum wage would be just as good.
JCT
@Kay: While I am loathe to seem like I am defending McD – in the past these sorts of fast-food jobs were meant for teenagers trying to make an extra buck and probably originally designed around a volatile labor pool with high turnover.
Now that folks are actually trying to make some sort of sustainable living at these jobs this is a non-starter. Couple that to the more recent “profit uber alles” and anti-worker world views and it becomes a disaster.
Working a counter at McDs was never supposed to be a career path – it’s an indictment of what has happened to this country that it is – shameful.
Gindy51
@Mnemosyne: Same with airline pilots who are on what is known as reserve. Some months my husband does not do a days worth of flying BUT he is required to stay home, by the phone. No dinners out, no bottle of wine with dinner, no taking in a ball game. He can run short errands like get gas for the car but that’s about it.
He is paid his regular salary but gets no per diem money, a pittance really.
All jobs where you are required to be on call should at least pay that person 3/4 of their full salary.
Zifnab
@Violet:
We were scraping 10% employment a while back. I just think its comic to believe you can *get* two jobs in an economy where people are happy to have one.
Trakker
I’ve been waiting for this to happen for years, A few years ago I needed to pick to up some groceries at a Food Lion in western Maryland (since closed) and the cashier was sobbing uncontrollably. She apologized but said her boss said she had to change her schedule or quit her job, and she couldn’t change her schedule because she was caring for her elderly disabled mother and these were the only hours she could work. She said, “I don’t know how I’m going to survive!”
I asked if she was a member of a union. She shook her head no.
I hope this is just the beginning of the shat-on rising up and demanding to be treated as human beings instead of just another natural resource to be used up and discarded.
Pococurante
@Gindy51: I’m sure it is frustrating but that scenario is in no way comparable to minimum wage earners. A pilot salary in most cases is more than comfortable and pilots in general are at the top of the food chain for their industry.
Shakezula
My only quibble is they don’t want their wages supersized. They want them raised from the kids meal size to a regular hamburger meal. (I know it scanned better. But still.)
Roger Moore
@Belafon:
I think the turnover rate for waiters here in California is relatively low, probably because there’s no separate, lower minimum wage for tipped employees. That means they can make a living wage, and there are plenty of people who treat waiting as a career, rather than a temporary job they can hold until something better comes along.
Pincher
@cleek: I worked at a major fast food chain when I was in college. Standard procedure was for the boss to promise new employees a rich and steady schedule of regular hours, but then actually give the employees a spotty, inconsistent schedule (3 hours tonight, 2 hrs early tomorrow, 6 hrs on Sunday, …). It was torture. Not to mention the hours illegally shaved off (’rounded down’) on my timecard each week. I have boycotted that chain ever since (30+ years).
One problem is that fewer and fewer college students are getting this kind of work experience any more — so it is hard for white middle class people to even understand what minimum wage employees have to put up with.
Mnemosyne
@JCT:
Actually, McDs prides itself on being a company that promotes from within — the current CEO started as a manager trainee after leaving the Navy. So they’re also shooting themselves in the foot if they expect to be able to promote from within but make it impossible for people to stay with the company because they never know what hours they’re going to be working.
ellie
Kind of on topic. When I worked at Macy’s, the real Macy’s not the Federated store, we had what was known as an “iron day.” An iron day was when you worked all day and night, from open to close. I hated those.
Kay
@JCT:
I see what you’re saying but I’ve sort of come around on that. The work that people do should be respected as “real work”, whether it’s food service or surgery. I think that attitude starts at the bottom. In one of the examples in the story, the employer simply provided a microwave. That’s all they wanted. Some recognition that they contribute to that entity, have value.
I was so mad about the attacks on public workers partly because it’s anti-labor, all that, but also because there was just this dismissive attitude towards whole segments of work.
Chris Christie dismissed teachers as “babysitters”. I don’t think teachers are babysitters, but I also think babysitting is valuable work, all by itself. I was just blown away by that. What “counts” as work to him, I wonder?
Anyway, I feel like work in general has been devalued, which is such a mixed message, because we’re supposedly so delighted (!) by a work ethic.
Mnemosyne
@Pococurante:
You’d be surprised — all of the union-busting by the airlines has really lowered pilot pay and $25,000 a year is not unusual. Not exactly a princely salary.
Belafon
@Pococurante: Actually, I believe this was what one of Michael Moore’s documentaries was about. Some pilots actually don’t make a much more than minimum wage, especially when they are not constantly flying.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Wanting high turnover is just another reflection of the modern CEO attitude that employees are parasites. They simply can’t see that their employees are giving them something in return for their wages, and that often higher wages will give you more back than you’re paying out.
Southern Beale
Indeed it is. Friend of mine worked at Home Depot and ran into this. They could never guarantee him a set schedule, it was always week to week. And of course they wouldn’t make him full-time, he only had 20-25 hours a week. But because he never knew his schedule he couldn’t get a second job.
This is a major issue for people at places like Walmart and Home Depot and such, not just fast food places. It’s a tremendous dick move on the part of employers.
I’m so glad to see workers draw the line and say, knock it the fuck off.
My friend eventually got a retail job somewhere else which paid better and gave him a steady schedule. Of course, the store’s owner was a really good friend of his who took pity on him. I doubt that’s a solution for most people.
ruemara
It’s not just retail doing this. I work for the government. Most service positions are being shaved from full time to 3/4 time and from 3/4 time to half time. If you’re in the position I had in the media, you worked round a random clock. Which made the income issue harder since you couldn’t give another employer a straight schedule to work with. Also, with the idea of living wages, no one addresses hours. You can pay $12 an hour, but if you’re just getting 10 or 15 hours (our employer limits some part timers to 16 hours), that sure as hell isn’t a living wage. There aren’t any careers anymore. It’s just mindless drudgery.
Southern Beale
@Roger Moore:
Yes, the “human resource” has no value anymore. Just something to be exploited.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
They can still promote from within, because they have a two-tier system. There are peons who work the kitchen and the counter and are never expected to do anything else, and there are managers, who actually have some prospects. I guess there are a few people who manage to make the transition from line worker to manager, but my impression is that most of the manager types get hired into management because they know the franchise owner or another manager.
Paul in KY
@Pincher: If they screwed you over in that manner, you should have no problem naming the chain.
Nicole
@Pococurante: Not really- pilot salaries vary widely:
http://thetruthabouttheprofession.weebly.com/professional-pilot-salaries.html
There was some stuff in the news a few years back about some pilots earning so little they were qualifying for food stamps.
Pococurante
@Mnemosyne: @Belafon: @Nicole: I stand corrected. Thank you, and apologies Gindey51.
So such pilots can be basically the same category as the McDonald’s budget assumptions.
Violet
@Southern Beale: I think it all started going to hell when they changed the name of the department to “Human Resources” from “Personnel.” The change to “Human Resources” was a cover up move designed to make it look like they were becoming more friendly to workers when the exact opposite was happening.
Anyone who thinks a Human Resources department is there to support workers isn’t paying attention. It’s a CYA department for the corporation. If they can find a way to screw you, they will.
Kay
@Southern Beale:
JIT scheduling. Wal Mart pioneered it, and all the other big box stores adopted it. The part that would drive me crazy is getting sent home. I mean, come on. They are not actually machine parts. You can’t store them for 2 hours and take them out again.
bemused
@Gin & Tonic:
He said he resigned because “I believe that when the discussion turns to an adult, we lose the discussion about making life better for children”. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night or it’s conservative speak because I don’t get what he is saying.
The Moar You Know
@JCT: Oh yes it was. A bunch of teenagers – white kids did the good hours, the minorities could pickup the open and close shifts. Those, obviously, were week-to-week workers. The career guys were the three or four practicing drunks or recovering addicts hired to “manage” the place. Better than homeless. Some retired Navy petty officer who bought the ownership hype would have his life savings tied up in the franchise. That was how it was designed to be run from the get-go, a lower middle-class establishment from the owner to the customer.
It was never supposed to be a mega-billion dollar global business. The week-to-week folks weren’t supposed to be permanent workers, but are. Expectations are different now. But most of the company, and most of the country, hasn’t figured that out yet.
Violet
@Pococurante: Yep, a lot of them. The most experienced ones are still making good salaries, but the up and coming ones really struggle.
Do we really want the people who fly us around in planes to have crappy work schedules that may mean they’re less rested and encourage them to fly even if they’re not rested because they need the money? Do we really want the pilots of our commercial aircraft to be making so little money they need second jobs? How dumb is that?
Davis X. Machina
Seasonally-adjusted unemployment in the Yazoo Delta region of Mississippi was zero per cent — zero!.
In 1860.
rdldot
@Trakker: amen
Pococurante
@Mr Stagger Lee: A lot of folks over there are ragging on Cavuto, disbelieving he could be a fast food store manager at age 16. I detest Cavuto, but have to note my best friend in high school was the night store manager for the biggest McDonald’s in the area. This was circa 1979-1980.
@JCT: It was certainly a career path for my friend who for many years was able to support a stay at home wife and two kids, though last we chatted he was a guard at a private prison.
Belafon
@Pococurante: Now, imagine that you are flying with those pilots. Like teachers, a lot of them do it because they love their jobs, and would never actually think of doing anything bad, but what if they were stressed because of their low pay – a child got sick and where were they going to get the money – or were trying to do some side job to make some extra money. All of this stuff could potentially affect their focus.
Roger Moore
@bemused:
I think he’s saying, “My lawyer has told me not to talk about the real reason I’m resigning, so I’m going to spew some nonsense and maybe help my team at buzzword bingo.”
The Moar You Know
@bemused: He’s saying teachers shouldn’t even factor into the discussion, because they are THAT worthless.
bemused
Oh teachers. I’m sure other rightwingers understood him perfectly.
Pococurante
@Belafon: Sure puts getting the wrong order at a fast food place into perspective.
aimai
Maybe someone said this upthread but the “on demand” scheduling that many, if not all, service jobs force on their workers is nothing more than theft of time and abuse of the worker. It should be illegal to force people into these part time, on demand, jobs–jobs that people can lose if they are a minute late to an unscheduled shift. Companies should not be permitted to immiserate their workers socially and physically as well as financially.
Pincher
@Paul in KY:
I didn’t name the chain because I think that exploitation and wage theft are generic to the fast food industry. Why single out one chain? But I’ll give you a hint: It starts with “W”.
Punchy
I appreciate that they want to make more money, but doubling their per-hour ($15!) is NEVER GUNNA HAPPEN. Maybe dial the demands back a notch and shoot for something reasonable?
The Moar You Know
@Pococurante: Not true.
It used to be. My dad was retired out of US Air in the early 2000s as their senior pilot, 7th highest paid guy in the entire company. Still didn’t make enough to qualify as 1%, but made more in a year than I make in five.
But guys who are starting out…it’s really bad. REALLY bad. Bad enough so that I religiously stay off of regional carriers and small airlines, because a guy making eight dollars an hour may really want to be a good pilot – but isn’t going to be. And that field is going to do nothing but get worse, because there is now a glut of fliers getting RIFed out of the Air Force/Marines/Navy and trying to get into an industry that is desperate to cut costs and already has enough employees.
Flying is going to get really dangerous in a few more years.
PurpleGirl
@Pococurante:
@Violet:
A few years ago there was an airplane crash involving a regional airline’s plane. The pilot was based in Buffalo but lived in Chicago (IIRC). She was still living with her parents because, again IIRC, she was making something under $20,000. It was possible that she was over tired already that day having flown from Chicago to Buffalo via NYC. The heyday of the high priced pilots are long gone.
maurinsky
I was an adult student at a local community college a couple of years ago, and several of my classmates were always dancing around their work schedules vs. their class schedules – not being able to make it to class because work called them in; having to quit their job because they couldn’t schedule classes without having a defined schedule.
How do you make your life better when you don’t have time that is your own?
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
Nope. Nor is he giving up coaching basketball. He’s just giving up messing with public education.
Two jobs are enough, apparently.
aimai
@Kay: I agree with this, Kay. Work is work. And hours are hours. If you are on duty for those hours, and organizing your life around getting to that job, what on earth differeence does it make whether you are “planning on making a career of it” or not? What’s happening is that all these jobs that women and teens used to do are notw the sole financial support for single parents, two income families, and also kids trying to put themselves thorugh school without parental financial backing. People need respect and certainity in their hours and they need full time pay for full time work. Regardless of what hteir intentions are or what other people in their household may be earning. McD’s work isn’t “pin money” work and never was.
aimai
@Punchy: Well, then the management can come back and offer something else, like a standard 8 hour shift with overtime. Plus health care.
IowaOldLady
To me, this is the inevitable outcome of the weakening of unions. Employers aren’t going to pay those wages and benefits out of the goodness of their heart. They never did.
Southern Beale
@Kay:
What does “JIT” stand for?
You know who else does this is those wretched call centers. Work in one of those places for a week and you’d be begging to flip burgers.
And also, what the fuck is up with all of the staffing agencies? This is like some middle-man skimming their own profit off the system, they are ubiquitous for the low-wage working world. Nobody hired anymore, everything is done through staffing agencies. When did this become a thing? WHY is it a thing? Why doesn’t Walmart hire their own people to stock shelves? Why does it always go through some crap staffing agency? They always seemed really abusive to me, and I don’t even know why.
Southern Beale
OT but WOWZAAAH:
BOOM goes the dynamite.
Tyro
@Belafon: he called at 2:35 in the afternoon on tuesday, wanting my son to be there at three.
By allowing such menial wages and abusive scheduling, we are basically providing a public subsidy to stupid people who run businesses, allowing them to profit despite poor business sense and inability to find business opportunities that would require higher wages and/or more consistent schedules. Our policies thus just create incentives to cause these business practices to spread. That is why they need to be shut down to allow more competent business owners to take control.
weaselone
@Southern Beale:
Not just low wage employees. There’s many staffing agencies for professionals which provide services all the way up through executive level management while taking out a 40% cut.
Gin & Tonic
@Southern Beale: Just In Time. Comes from inventory management.
Southern Beale
@The Moar You Know:
And if it’s that bad for pilots, pity the poor flight attendants……
I am not a kook
@Southern Beale:
Just-in-time. I believe it comes from the transportation industry. It’s a logistics concept where you try to minimize the time goods sit somewhere waiting. Basically, information technology applied to physical world.
Yes, it totally means you think your employees are spare parts.
Southern Beale
Here in Nashville Walmart is running ads featuring “ordinary” Americans who are apparently Walmart employees talking about how WONDERFUL Walmart is to give them a job because now they can support their families, afford to go to school, etc. Anyone else seeing these ads? The people in them are usually African American.
Clear propaganda targeting the anti-Walmart message.
Mike in NC
Didn’t some poor schmuck once tell Dubya that he/she was working three crappy jobs to survive, and that moron’s response was “You’re living the American Dream”?
Short Bus Bully
I’m struggling with staffing issues at work like this and I am solidly middle class. Middle management drone being asked to cover everyone on my staff who needs times off, while my wife and I scramble to throw together childcare at the last fucking minute. And no, I’m not allowed to bring in new staff to make things reasonable. The first thing that corporate does when money gets tight is start cutting labor cost.
Remember, they’re not people with kids, they’re just hours on a scheduling spreadsheet.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
I wonder if requiring employers to pay employees for those hours that they expect them to be “on call” would cut down some of the abuses. Probably not, though.
@Southern Beale:
You don’t have to pay benefits to a temp agency employee.
I’ve been hired to full-time jobs (including my current one) by starting as a temp, which is another way companies use them — to audition potential new hires without being stuck with ones who don’t work out. But, I can type and use a computer, so I’m more likely to get hired into a full-time position than a warehouse or maintenance worker.
Southern Beale
Here’s one of those Walmart propaganda ads I was talking about. “Opportunity, that’s the real Walmart” is the slogan.
Keep waiting for someone to do a parody, like they did with those ridiculous Clean Coal ads.
Paul in KY
@Pincher: Because they made the mistake of fucking Pincher over.
Southern Beale
@Mnemosyne:
Well yeah but you don’t have to pay benefits to anyone working under a certain # of hours a week. So I don’t get why they go through the middleman, that’s all.
Mike in NC
@The Moar You Know: I knew quite a few airline pilots from my time in the Navy Reserve. Most had plenty of stories about horrible schedules, loss of pensions, poor benefits, etc.
They called themselves glorified bus drivers. Granted, not as bad as retail.
Paul in KY
@IowaOldLady: Very good point!
? Martin
You guys are missing the bigger problem with the unpredictable hours. The working theory among the ‘make them suffer’ crowd of conservatives who keep enabling this system is that they just need to work multiple part time jobs and they’ll be fine. How do you work two part time jobs when neither has a defined schedule? When both are asking you to be on-call? When both are likely to be calling you in to work the same shift? Workers try to do it, until a conflict gets them fired, and then they have to waste time getting another part time job and repeating that process. This is pre-ordained poverty. This is also by design.
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
So you think they should pre-compromise? I think they should demand at least as much as they really want and then try to negotiate from there.
And OT, but I’m starting to see the comedy value of the NewsMax headlines. Their current headline on the top 25 Republican women is a real knee-slapper. They have almost as many news personalities (7) as they do elected officials (9), and their bench is thin enough to include utter electoral failures Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. Yeah, Republican Party, please show that list when you’re tying to show how great you are for women.
aimai
@Southern Beale: I think that its all part of keeping the worker at even more than arm’s distance. If you really don’t need any loyalty or experience from your workforce, and you certainly don’t want to display any, then putting everything at a great distance from management makes sense. Payroll? Complaints? imagine how hard it is to make a complaint about treatment at your work site to your temp office manager?
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: wow! quick! and he was such a nice singer.
scav
It’s a bare step up from the companies driving to a corner and yelling out “Who can flip patties?” and driving off with a crew. The worker absorbs the transportation costs, and the company juggles a bit more paperwork. Just In Time to a Just In T. Workers (and smaller companies) absorb the economic risk of over-staffing during slow periods, comes to the company’s rescue when they understaff (same for component parts). The economic risk of storing inventory is shifted back to the producers, who often don’t get paid until the product hits the cash register. Hell, we often bag and run the cash register for them. Risk and cost is inevitably shifted elsewhere.
Southern Beale
Trust me, I got a lot of office jobs through temp agencies back in the day. Hell, I spent a summer in college working as a receptionist for a temp agency. Those were the days of the teletype machine, and most of the jobs were secretarial, one of my jobs was to deal with the requests that came in from employers. They always said they wanted someone “with demeanor.” I thought that was hilarious. I imagined someone swaggering in shouting, “HERE’S YOUR FUCKING DEMEANOR, ASSHOLES!” They didn’t know what “demeanor” meant, obvs.
Back then it was always, “we need someone for a week because we have an employee out sick,” or, “we need someone to help with filing while we have this extra large order to fill.” NOT, “we are too greedy to pay for benefits so find us some poor sucker we can fire in a month just as they become eligible for healthcare and 401(k).”
Southern Beale
@aimai:
BINGO!!!!!
You nailed it, my friend.
They want employees to have loyalty but they sure as hell don’t show any.
Southern Beale
@? Martin:
Several people have made that point and also, how do you “work your way through college” when there’s always a big chance your work schedule will conflict with your class schedule?
Y’all, this is just another way of pulling the ladders up. You can’t improve your lot in life with “hard work” and “get an education” when the cards are stacked against you.
Fuck ’em. Well speaking of, I gotta get back to work. Laterz….
Michele C.
@Violet: That’s exactly it. It’s not just child care and the lack of sleep and the toll on your family, but how do you manage the two jobs when one or both play the “on call” game? And, as several people have said, how the world do you make a budget when one week you might get 10 hours and one week you might get 30 hours?
Trakker
Somehow we’ve gotten to the point where our society and our government are almost completely focused on businesses and corporations. People are no longer citizens but workers and consumers. They want our labor and our capital. We have no feelings or rights that anyone in power must respect. The last vestige of power we still have is our vote, and you see what is happening to that. The voters who might rebel against the corporations are now being squeezed out of the process. Pretty scary.
catclub
@Southern Beale: Also arms distance means that those workers have harder time suing Walmart for its abuses and sex discrimination. They have to go through the staffing agency first. Very similar to Walmart not owning the factory in Bangladesh that collapses. Just designing its products, and scheduling its production.
Kay
@Southern Beale:
Just In Time. It came from manufacturing. It refers to not stacking up inventory. They got better at buying materials and fulfilling contracts, scheduling those things. The parts are ready “just in time”. Many, many people here can probably explain this better than I can :)
I just picked it up out of the ether where I live, because we have a lot of manufacturing. I read that Wal Mart was using JIT scheduling, so I think it’s the same concept, except as applied to people.
Zifnab
@Kay:
Any that don’t act like machine parts just get fired.
Linnaeus
@Trakker:
It’s the new serfdom.
aimai
I got into a huge internet fight with a bunch of women who are in this kind of work, and their husbands are too. Half their internet postings are grumbling about their shift work and the difficulty of dealing with child care, elder care, medical issues, or even just shopping or cleaning house while juggling two separate shift work jobs (or more). And yet when I suggested to one woman that her husband ask to ask his boss to pay for gas/commute time now that he’d been assigned to a new and distant store location she and all the other women became hysterical with rage–at me!–because it was so very unamerican to try to exert any control over your work situation. They didn’t say it was unamerican, of course, but I had clearly sullied some kind of sacred belief about worker/employer relations. Asking for better treatment–hell, even just sticking to an agreed upon work situation–was seen as somehow extremely out of touch and elitist and wrong. I could have understood if they’d argued that the husband in question was in such a subordinate position in such a lousy job market that he couldn’t afford to risk being fired–but that wasn’t the argument they were making. They were basically arguing that it was morally wrong to ask the owner to fully reimburse the worker for his time and the cost of getting to work.
The American worker has been forced and cajoled into being an outside contractor and into a “self employed” mentality without grasping that if you are going to be a contractor and self employed you have to take into account your time/mileage/health care/retirement. You have to factor those things into the actual cost to you of taking job X. And you have to negotiate or unionize to make sure you are actually getting back from the job in wages what you are losing in opportunity cost.
roc
The ‘on-call’ thing is key to companies avoiding full-time employees.
You keep labor down by staffing for ‘slow days’ and only actually call people in if and when it heats up. So instead of 4 people in the store in case it gets busy and having the occasional crappy day for labor — you have 2 people in the store and 3 or 4 on-call. If it heats up, you call people in. If it doesn’t, you don’t. If you called people in and it slows down, you send someone else home. And you juggle who gets scheduled, who gets called and who gets sent based on the hours they’ve gotten that week, so you can keep everyone well below 35 hours — where you might have to do such socialist things as offering insurance, vacation, advancement, etc.
Bust the on-call grift and a lot of the corporate-welfare-via-relying-on-your-employees-getting-welfare is no longer sustainable.
(A joint like Walmart or Amazon can still swing it. But a fast food joint or small retailer can’t.)
sparrow
@Roger Moore: It’s called “Commodifying labor” and capitalist systems are always going to seek to turn human labor into a replaceable cog. Of course once that happens Capitalism fails to work any more, because who are you going to sell to?
Here is Greek Economist Yanis Varoufakis speaking on exactly that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYo5zUMbDhY
sparrow
@Roger Moore: It’s called “Commodifying labor” and capitalist systems are always going to seek to turn human labor into a replaceable cog. Of course once that happens Capitalism fails to work any more, because who are you going to sell to?
Here is Greek Economist Yanis Varoufakis speaking on exactly that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYo5zUMbDhY
WereBear
Late ’70’s, early 80’s. Office mercenary. I could run anything the engineering boys came up with… even if I had never seen it before.
I could move to a new place and land a temp job in 2 days. Snag a permanent offer (didn’t always take them) in a month or less. And they were real jobs.
My mother lost her real estate livelihood during the W administration. After a couple of decades of independence, she was stuck with Wal-Mart who didn’t keep their promises. After sticking it out with JIT scheduling for a few months, she became a paid companion to a rich woman.
Southern Beale
Ah so the plutocracy’s plan is working, then. We’re all slaves to the rich.
God help us.
Welcome to the glorious “service economy.”
Southern Beale
Ah so the plutocracy’s plan is working, then. We’re all slaves to the rich. It’s Downton Abbey, US-style.
God help us.
Welcome to the glorious “service economy.”
Kay
@roc:
They’re shifting risk, too. If they guarantee 4 hours for 3 people and the requisite number of customers don’t show up, they take a hit. If they can simply send the “extra” employees home, then those employees take the hit. They’re covered on the other side, too, because..on-call!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Southern Beale: Because it means you don’t have to handle the resumes. New college graduate comes in the door, wants to talk about job openings, the receptionist gives them the staffing company’s name and sends them on their way.
It means not having to have an HR department. All that is handled by a third party.
It makes life holy hell for people on unemployment, because the staffing company only counts once for the “looking for work” paperwork.
Southern Beale
@aimai:
Stockholm Syndrome.
Davis X. Machina
@aimai:
The Great Chain of Being didn’t just go away. It’s still there. The economic intuition of the average 21st c. person isn’t a helluva lot different from that of a 14th c. peasant.
The forelock-tugging impulse is probably genetic.
This is why the great European social-democratic parties of late 19th c, early-to-mid 20th c. Europe understood the importance of creating a worker’s bubble, from the doctor who delivered you, the mechanics’ institutes and works teams and pit bands and Turnverein, and newspapers, right down to your cemetery plot and burial society.
Class-consciouness is really, really hard to create, and easy to destroy, because there’s a millennium of osmotic pressure to work uphill against.
shell
My god, what’s happening? The North Carolina legislature is actually passing a sensible and humane bill?
“The state of North Carolina is about to pass a bill that will give emergency responders the legal authority to employ any means necessary to intervene in cases of dogs locked in hot cars — “
gelfling545
@Roger Moore: These places don’t care about turnover as they always have a new crop of people desperate for a job waiting to be called on. It’s exploitation of the poor and the retailers/fast food owners have made a fortune from it.
Davis X. Machina
@shell: Now if they would just extend that to undocumented workers in poultry processing plants….
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@shell:
I can only assume they’re making it easier to shoot dogs.
The Other Chuck
@shell: Well sure, it’s not like they’re human women or anything.
scav
@Davis X. Machina: Whereas I assumed they passed it explicitly to show how much more they cared about dogs than “those people”.
ruemara
I’m just reading these posted stories and looking over things. I just saw my old job listed as a new volunteer position. It’s not just retail. The mindset of JIT workplaces and all labour except mine is unskilled is poison in all sectors of employment.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@aimai:
I think I see the problem here.
Paul in KY
@Kay: I think they got this ‘just in time’ stuff from the Japanese. They have a word for it. Sounds better than ‘just in time’.
Davis X. Machina
@Paul in KY: It’s Kanban….
Kay
@ruemara:
That’s my take on it, now. It goes right from McDonalds on up the chain. First they came for…. :)
Paul in KY
@aimai: Jeezus! That was their argument?! Maybe they were lying a bit & didn’t want to admit their hubby was such a prole that if he asked for another bowl of gruel that he’d be fired?
Paul in KY
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Given the way they’ve been acting lately in NC, that’s the logical way to look at it, Thought Leader.
Mnemosyne
@Davis X. Machina:
Heh. I made a Kanban board for my knitting projects but haven’t really used it since we don’t have a lot of wall space and I am not a very organized person to begin with.
Is there a Kanban card for “this project jumped the queue”?
Paul in KY
@Davis X. Machina: Thank you, Davis. Of course, for the Japanese, it was created for non-people logistics only.
It’s pretty sad when the Japanese care more about people and employees than we do.
Kay
@Paul in KY:
We have a Japanese parts maker here, luxury cars. They treat their employees well. It’s considered one of the “better” jobs. They give them a slide presentation on why they don’t need a union when they’re hired. I think that’s fine, because it’s persuasive, right? They’re showing them why they don’t need a union, so there’s sort of an implied contract there. We’ll be decent employers, you don’t join a union.
The Moar You Know
@Paul in KY: It came from the Japanese, who never intended it to be used for labor, for chrissakes. It’s supposed to be used for screws and tires and shit like that.
scav
The early stuff I read about JIT (largely Japanese but we squeezed Chaebol in for some, presumably comparative reason) empacized how much the risk in that entire system was pushed down to the small, sub-contracting companies that were delivering the parts to Toyota et al. Sometimes nearly garage scale family companies were the shock absorbers in the miracle. So there’s that companies are people, my friend, ethos only from the other direction.
Roger Moore
@sparrow:
I think it’s about more than just commodifying labor. Turning labor into a commodity still sees it as an essential component of production. The thing that’s really destructive about today’s CEO mentality is that they’ve lost track of the connection between inputs and outputs. They act as if they can always reduce labor costs without ever cutting production, which is just delusional.
Figs
@cleek:
When I was in high school and working at McDonald’s, several times over the summer, when I’d get a lot of hours, I had managers moving my hours around so that I didn’t go over the part-time threshold. Hugely illegal, of course, but I was a 17 year old kid, so I didn’t know any better. I bet this still happens a lot.
JCT
@Kay:
I completely agree with this. “Work” has been redefined – and not in a good way for those who are not masters of the universe.
And to those of you “disagreeing” with me regarding McDs as a career path – maybe I am just older than all of you (and my teenage/college job was waitressing – another bastion of abuse) – but when McDs was just getting going it was our “local” small fast-food business in California and the kids did work the counter and there was precious little upward mobility in terms of wage increases and responsibility. So those high-turnover jobs up front were designed that way.
I don’t dispute that things have changed (especially given McDs worldwide explosion) and I certainly don’t believe that people shouldn’t see McDs as a career – but the way things are structured in these fast-food conglomerates – the deck is stacked. Look at how they treat “managers” – with unpaid overtime, etc. The NYT has had some illuminating stories. Sickening. Given the current situation people simply cannot depend on these jobs to make a living by design. That’s what is wrong and I think these protests are making that clear.
Francisco The Man
Went to the strike yesterday in St. Louis. Relatively well attended. The highlight for me was seeing Jim Hoft there, aka Gateway Pundit, aka the Dumbest Man on the Internet. He and one of his goons who looked to have been about 22 were trying to take video of people and goad them into saying dumb things. The goon at one point tried to rally a cop standing by to his side, sneering at “these guys making McDoubles.” The cop just gave him a disdainful look and turned away.
Paul in KY
@Kay: If your employer treats you great in all ways, then you wouldn’t need a union. Of course, those employers are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Southern Beale
Folks, I bring you the Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2013.
What does everyone think of its chances in this Congress?
scav
And to be fair, there is something in the attitude and treatment of labor as mere, easily relacable, interchangeable cogs that smacks more of the the American System of manufacturing than the original JIT system. The cross-breeding of the two systems is nasty.
Paul in KY
@JCT: I think what happened back then (and I worked at a McDs in 1976 – 77) was that they very early in the process identified the real go-getters in the young workforce & those people became the assistant managers/night managers-in-training, etc. etc.
The others were the expendables. I was one of those. Lot & lobby was my beat. That’s the non-military version of ‘bulk fuels’ :-)
Yatsuno
@Roger Moore: To be fair, they have little to disabuse them of that notion. The US is still amazingly high on the productivity scale and we’ve been near the top for decades. Americans actually like to work, we’re just getting shit for compensation of the time, labour, and effort. And until something intervenes to start counterbalancing that, it will only get worse.
Original Lee
Scheduling and wages are probably 80% of the problem with fast food and retail jobs. I have a friend whose son was working for a big box store that uses “just-in-time” job scheduling. The store needed extra bodies at opening time and at closing time and therefore the son was scheduled to work 6ish-10ish AM AND 6ish-10ish PM on the days he worked. He never knew which days were on his schedule until Saturday night – some weeks he would work M,T,Th,Sat, other weeks he would work M,W,F,Sun, and they were very careful to make sure he worked 28 hours/week. It was almost impossible for him to interview for other jobs or have a regular sleep schedule. He’s not working there any more because he finally managed to find a hole in his schedule big enough to apply for and interview for a better job, and he was only able to do that by swapping around his days to cover for a coworker who had a personal emergency.
PeakVT
@Southern Beale: Since it’s a sensible and apparently necessary bill, very low.
RSA
I’m imagining an alternate universe (or maybe just another country) in which you walk into a fast food restaurant and posted by the counter is a sign: The workers preparing your food this shift earn an average of $7.50 per hour. Bon appetit!
Or you board a plane: The pilot of this aircraft has an annual income of $20,000. Happy flying!
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
About a decade ago, I ran into this kind of strike while flying through Spain on my way to Italy. I believe the airline was Iberia and the flight attendants were having a “sick out” for the day. It was a new idea to me at the time and I believe pretty effective. The airline could still run flights with skeleton crews but service was definitely affected and I’m sure the airline’s bottom line was too. But at the same time, the strike didn’t put the company completely out of business. It’s great to see similar type strategies finally being used in the U.S.
Served
The workers at my usual lunch/sandwich place are striking outside today. It’s not a major chain, but they have two stores in the city (Chicago) and a few randomly in Colorado I think. It’s an inconvenience for me, but I really don’t care. I’ll survive one day without my lunch iced coffee.
When I saw them outside this morning they handed me a flyer and I responded with a “Kick ass, get paid, ladies!”
Another Halocene Human
ot: awesome
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/52626752#52626752
Chris
@? Martin:
… Reserve Army of Labor?
The Other Bob
Starting salary for a unionized automaker is now only $14 per hour. If the fast foodies organize, auto wages will have to rise again.
Chris
@aimai:
What sickens me about people like that is that a huge chunk of them accept it because they still buy the American Dream kool aid that someday, all that work and shittiness is going to pay off and they’ll get to be the manager – and then, anyone else who wasn’t as lucky and stayed in the dead-end position is just proof that these people were unworthy and deserve the shitty life they’re stuck with.
The American Dream has become “yes, exploitation sucks, but hey, someday maybe you could be an exploiter!” Crab bucket society at its finest (laughably, that analogy is mostly used against “jealous” liberals who don’t want that to happen).
Another Halocene Human
@RSA: I wonder how people would feel if pilot salaries were listed next to that low, low fare.
It amazes me how people–including my wife–will put up with shitty flight itineraries, dirty planes, and underpaid workers because that flight is $6 cheaper on Priceline. I. Don’t. Even.
btw, can some latin scholar explain how you get from iter to itinerary? Like, who snuck that extra syllable in?
Another Halocene Human
@Southern Beale: Hahahaha, that’s a good one. Even if it gets passed in imaginary pipe dream congress, the current SCOTUS would toss it out as unconstitutional.
Another Halocene Human
@Chris: A lot of these white males have been trained their whole working lives that they can asskiss the boss and get shortlisted into management, so they think this is the natural order of things, they deserve it, and everyone else is a whiner or a “goldbricker”.
Of course now if you get hired in entry-level (however designated) you stay there, so they hang around the jobsite crying about how they been done wrong.
I have a real problem on my hands on my jobsite because the white males want “merit” pay to come back, knowing full well that they get it and others don’t (hence the “merit”). It completely fucks any attempt to organize around wages and actually make progress.
Roger Moore
@JCT:
And I think the idea of a work ethic has been twisted to serve the MOTU. We’re supposed to be motivated by a love of work, and the MOTU see that as an excuse for not bothering to give us additional motivation in the form of adequate pay. We’re supposed to take our shit and like it because anything else is proof that we lack a good work ethic.
Original Lee
@The Moar You Know: Ditto that for the airplane mechanics. My cousin started out as an civil aviation airplane mechanic four years ago, and it’s really tough for him to make ends meet. And the stories he tells about the stuff that goes on has made me think hard about flying anywhere.
Chris
@Another Halocene Human:
And convince themselves that it’s all because liberals with their unions and regulations and minimum wage and affirmative action and taxes other conspiracies to profit the blacks has thrown the Righteous Market out of whack. It’s certainly not the bosses who are the trouble. They’re dying to recognize talent and promote it, but their hands are tied, poor babies.
catclub
@RSA: Maybe pilots could put out tip jars. Probably double their salary. Taxi drivers get tips.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Another Halocene Human: It’s a third declension noun.
Nominative Iter Itinera
Genitive Itineris Itinerum
etc.
Bubblegum Tate
@Roger Moore:
I love how they both push poll and troll the shit out of their readers with their stupid polls. Look at the one they have going right now: “Should Obama use Zimmerman verdict to ban guns?”
So awesome.
Another Halocene Human
@Mnemosyne: There’s something in labor law about “waiting to be engaged” that companies try to weasel out of at every chance they get.
Basically, companies want to be able to fuck your whole day and then not pay you for the privilege. Is this bullshit? Hell, yes.
Another Halocene Human
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Ahhhhhh, so we could back form “itiner”, realize it sounds silly, and elide that to the familiar “iter”.
Isn’t there an associated verb that’s all irregular’n shit? What’s up with that? (And why does French say vais vas va … allons allez… cuz that shit makes sense?)
Roger Moore
@Southern Beale:
I don’t know about its chances in Congress, but I predict that it will fail judicial review 5-4.
Another Halocene Human
@Chris: It was those dumb Blacks in the union, they took away our merit pay!!!
Stupid fuckers.
I still can’t get an answer out of these clowns as to why you would even want someone on the job who doesn’t “merit” “merit play”. Obviously they suck so why not ask them to leave?
If we want higher pay shouldn’t we be doing a professional job? What benefit is it to the employer to have an uneven work force?
(Of course the benefit to the employer is to pit employees against each other, which program is continuing along swimmingly, but these yobs are too dumb to figure this out.)
Another Halocene Human
You know what’s really, really, really ironic about my particular jobsite? Merit pay got nuked over a case involving a white female, one who in fact had made racist comments (allegedly she called a lady’s mixed race kids “zebra children”). The (Black, West Indian) supervisor was swinging his you know what around and took her immediate supervisor’s positive (based on the facts) eval and redid all her scores to the minimum because he is a big bully and perceived that all of the supervisors bitch about her, thus figured she was an easy mark. The (Black, male) union president fought the case and lost and turned around and negotiated flat COLAs for the next three years instead of COLA+merit.
When this is pointed out to certain people they spin some fantastic tale about this lady, bless her heart, deliberately not getting merit pay so she could stay on welfare.
Roger Moore
@Another Halocene Human:
Point me to the airline that has a decent itinerary, clean planes, and well paid workers, and I’ll be happy to pay more to fly on it. But as far as I can tell, the airlines are on a serious race to the bottom in quality. Apart from international flights, it’s very hard to find an airline that hasn’t compromised quality in an attempt to keep prices low.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Another Halocene Human:
Holy smokes, that’s racist nowadays? I’m going to have to update my employee handbook.
Roger Moore
@Bubblegum Tate:
They also use them to harvest emails. Voting apparently requires them to send you an email that you return to “verify” your vote, and which completely coincidentally also signs you up for their email list.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay: Just In Time. It came from manufacturing. It refers to not stacking up inventory. They got better at buying materials and fulfilling contracts, scheduling those things. The parts are ready “just in time”. Many, many people here can probably explain this better than I can :)
It’s manufacturing jargon for “what is the hardest way we can do this while spending the most money?” In theory you have no inventory, reality is different; things break, suppliers aren’t going to take the hit for you, contracts cancel, customers change the order and so forth. But it’s the popular theory among the 1% and we know how detached from reality those people are.
Chris
@Another Halocene Human:
Yeah, you gotta give ’em credit for knowing how to deflect their workers’ attention.
GRANDPA john
@shell: now if they would develop the same empathy for humans that they have for pets.
Tokyokie
The nature of employment is that a worker devotes his time and attention to duties that are performed for the benefit of his employer, and in return, the worker receives wages. So what is a worker who is “on-call” doing? Although it may not involve the duties that he performs when at the work site, even it’s just waiting by the phone and making himself available, that worker is devoting his time and attention to duties perscribed by his employer. Only he is not compensated, because it is not considered “work,” when the only real difference is that absence of compensation. On-call should mean on-the-clock, without exceptions.
In this country, we have a term for uncompensated labor performed for the benefit of an unrelated party. It’s called involuntary servitude, and the 13th Amendment explicitly banned it. It’s not a matter that JIT staffing should be illegal, under my reading of the Constitution it is illegal. And every company that engages in this practice should be pursued under the RICO statute, with their stockholders jailed and their assets seized. And I’m serious as a heart attack about this.
Imprison the Walton heirs and confiscate their inheritances to the point they’re reduced to penury. What have any of them done in their miserable existences to deserve anything else? And then move down the retail line.
flukebucket
@The Other Bob:
Everybody knows this is bullshit. They are making hundreds of thousands every year just for tightening bolts! (wingnut reaction)
Davis X. Machina
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Optimē factum. Gratum mihi est hoc vidēre.
Tyro
@Roger Moore: Point me to the airline that has a decent itinerary, clean planes, and well paid workers, and I’ll be happy to pay more to fly on it.
The reason there’s a race to the bottom is because people generally buy plane tickets based on price, not quality. You’re going to be stuck in an aluminum tube for a few hours. You might as well bite your lip trough the experience and save a few bucks rather than pamper yourself and leave yourself with less money for dinner when you arrive. My calculus would be slightly different for an international flight, but that is why international flights are generally higher quality.
KS in MA
@Southern Beale: Also, if your employees work for a staffing agency, they don’t count as “your” employees for statistical purposes– such as how many of your employees make less than X dollars an hour, have fringe benefits, etc. Right?
JCT
@Original Lee: My cousin the airline pilot has been banned from discussing this stuff at family get-togethers.
slag
@? Martin:
And good luck relying on public transit to get you to where you need in time. So, then there’s the cost of the car. And oh crap, you forgot to buy milk before you left, and it’s now midnight and all the stores are closed. Better head to 7-11 and spend $5 a carton.
The shitty life of being poor isn’t an incentive to save and earn more. It’s an impediment to doing those things. And it’s astounding to me that half the people in this country don’t get that.
Mnemosyne
@Tyro:
Generally, yes, but I would never fly US Air again. The noises that plane made while in flight were way too alarming for me to feel safe on their planes again.