People have been used!

A recent article by Jessica Wildfire on productivity caught my attention especially as so much of it hit home regarding multi-tasking and job issues.

As someone who spent years in the retail/service industry both as a worker bee and as a manager, that paragraph jumped out at me.

My first job was at a pizza place as a teenager. The owners/managers had a habit of scheduling employees to be at work at a given time, but frequently I would walk in for my scheduled shift and be told “don’t clock in yet, we are not busy. Just sit over there until we need you.” And I did, as an inexperience young person.

Over the next two decades I put in time as an employee and a decade of it as a manager. I never allowed that to happen to me again and I tried to not treat my staff like that either. One paragraph in Jessica’s article stood out:

“Listen to someone who works at a big box store. Those places won’t even give you a regular schedule. You don’t know your hours until a day or two in advance, and they change all the time. Your boss can even call you and demand you show up early or leave late.”

So true. As a manager of 7-Elevens, we were expected to juggle people’s schedules. It was a device for analyzing patterns of data for internal theft detection. But as a means to acquire loyal employees? Not so much.

In 1987, I was hired to manage a convenience store which was one of a small chain locally owned. It was in a pretty tough neighborhood and the manager before me had hired a security company to send a security guard in on Friday and Saturday nights. The problem was that I would get different guards each night and each weekend and they did not become familiar with the customers and which ones were troublemakers. Also, when the store was slow, they lounged around. So I terminated the use of security guards and added my own employees to the schedule to watch the door when busy to prevent shoplifters from dashing out the door. When business was slow, they could also help keep the store clean and stocked.

This tactic created a situation where several of my staff got overtime pay. Overtime pay is a big no-no in the retail world which likes to keep employees under 30 hours and juggle their shifts. The owner generally let me run the store as if it was my business, but during me monthly meeting with the owner going over the books, he asked about the overtime. He wanted me to eliminate it and bring people’s hours down. I told him if I cut hours, the staff would need to look for second job to make ends meet. Then, eventually the other job would take precedence, the the employee would look at my store job as the expendable job and I would soon be on a hiring cycle again. As it was, I had the lowest turnover in the seven-store chain and I had lowest theft levels of all seven stores, despite my tough neighborhood location. Tom let me continue to run it as I did.

After I left a decade of retail management, I went into manufacturing and eventually got into the engineering side of the industry. During one interview a few years ago at a local auto parts facility, the plant manager asked me how I felt about working overtime. Keep in mind, this was a salaried position, not hourly. I responded that sure, if we have some issues blow up or we have a launch in progress, I would work as necessary. But did I want to work 60 hours a week, week after week? Nope! I didn’t get the job but would not have taken it had the offered. Clearly, this place wanted to burden their staff with added hours rather than hire more people.

My wife had job with a decent company back in the 1990s on salary. But her workload was such that she would be in at 8am and come home at 5pm. After dinner, she would be back on the computer for another 2–3 hours! I finally calculated it out and told her she was making less than minimum wage with the hours she was putting in. The only bright spot was that they were flexible enough for her to deal with issues when our son was in daycare or elementary school.

The issue Jessica discusses about regular schedule really burns me. Managers have always done this to a degree, but it used to be on paper or an Excel spreadsheet. Now, special scheduling software with inputs on hour by hour sales trends automates the schedules. Many businesses operate as if they are an employees ONLY employer, despite not paying or scheduling enough hours for the person to even live on and such schedule jockeying makes it difficult or impossible for people to get a second job to make ends meet.

I was in a union for one year as a grocery stocker at local chain. The contract provided us with some regularity of schedule, though the union sold out us employees who were recently hired by accepting a new contract the previous year which created a two tier wage schedule. If I stayed 20 years I would never make the amount of hourly pay the guy three aisles over was already making.

GM got the UAW to do this a few years ago also. A couple years ago, to their great credit, Kellog (the cereal company) union workers went on strike and their primary motivation was to not accept a two tier system which would screw newer, younger employees out of good pay.

And people wonder why it is now hard after the pandemic to hire people. Companies and managers want to go back to business as usual and the workforce is tired of getting exploited so some CEO can make seven figures or more.

It’s always a race to the bottom for everyday workers.

[1] https://medium.com/@jessicalexicus/if-youre-not-doing-too-much-you-re-not-doing-enough-680a1a6525fe