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I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

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Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#151

Post by MattGaiser »

schwartzworld wrote: post #144
baron816 wrote: post #84

> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits. Had they not been locked in by the pension, I'd imagine most of them would've quit, and Frito-Lay would've been force to improve conditions. I wonder if unions prefer pensions pretty much for the same reason--it all…

Yeah, definitely that and not making sure their members have security when it's time to retire.

You can get the same security from investing the money taken from your paycheck in a diverse way. That is all the company is doing.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#152

Post by mchusma »

I thought about this case more and the root issue appears to be pensions.

They create a situation where someone will do a job they don't want to, not because they are forced but because their entire retirement relies on it.

Pensions are just a bad idea.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#153

Post by MattGaiser »

Wouldn't overtime cost Frito-Lay a lot extra? I don't get how a business can get to the point of heavily using it to the point that employees complain without thinking that it must hire more people.

And in plenty of union workplaces overtime is easy to give away, so they must be so enormously understaffed.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#154

Post by [deleted] »

MattGaiser wrote: post #153

Wouldn't overtime cost Frito-Lay a lot extra? I don't get how a business can get to the point of heavily using it to the point that employees complain without thinking that it must hire more people. And in plenty of union workplaces overtime is easy to give away, so they must be so enormously understaffed.

[deleted]

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#155

Post by PascLeRasc »

treis wrote: post #105
pryelluw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? As someone who had to do similar work for years the answer is that there were no alternatives. No one takes a shitty job on purpose.

That then raises the question of why they're paying time and a half to work their employees to death.

Exhausted employees have less time and energy to apply for better jobs, learn new skills, or organize. This reduces turnover. It also helps that some employees will develop health problems from overwork, and then they really won't be able to afford being without insurance.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#156

Post by balfirevic »

mcculley wrote: post #39
samatman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it is super weird that you put caffeine on that list. I assume, because you did it, that you're one of those mutants who doesn't use it nor like it much. Good for you and all, but caffeine made the modern world , the majority of the population uses it every day, and industrial society wouldn't function without it. It's also super-cheap even on a modest salary, and most workplaces give it away for free because of…

I am aware of Pollan's recently well-publicized assertion that caffeine made the modern world. I am unconvinced. I quit caffeine a few years ago. I'm not an unusual mutant. I have the genes on markers rs4410790 and rs2470893 that indicate a typical reaction to caffeine. ( https://enki.org/2017/08/13/quitting-caffeine/ ) Most people experience a temporary increase in productivity until they build up a tolerance for ca…

> Thereafter, they are just paying and consuming to avoid headaches and reach the baseline.

No, it is also for a great deal of enjoyment.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#158

Post by pfranz »

MattGaiser wrote: post #153

Wouldn't overtime cost Frito-Lay a lot extra? I don't get how a business can get to the point of heavily using it to the point that employees complain without thinking that it must hire more people. And in plenty of union workplaces overtime is easy to give away, so they must be so enormously understaffed.

My guess is they've exhausted the local supply of labor for the price they're willing to pay, but I've been in situation where I don't think they crunched the numbers (or they didn't care). In my situation, which I feel bad comparing since it wasn't anywhere near as egregious, a team of us had mandatory overtime--enough to cover another salary at base pay. They didn't want to hire someone else because they said paying us 1.5x was less than hiring someone new with benefits. What I don't think they appreciated was covering vacations, resignation, or illness put even more stress on us and local laws required double-pay after a certain number of worked hours (which was put on us to try and avoid but still cover the shifts). When someone did resign, interviewing and onboarding made the next few months suck. Even with stronger labor laws than Kansas, the economic pressure wasn't enough to have them address the situation. A few people didn't mind the overtime and had the flexibility and willingness to work.

I suspect that many organizations have a "model" that's profitable and they're afraid to mess with it or dig into problems making it work better. I had another job where it was kind of a joke that most people quit their first week. They had a group that had been working there for years, they just had a lot of turnover for new hires. It seemed like a weird process to interview and hire so many people that left immediately, but they were running (presumably) a profitable business and they didn't seem interested in changing things.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#160

Post by michaelmrose »

clairity wrote: post #29
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a very good question. I think in general it is important to realize that a significant amount of "design" work goes in to creating economies. Local, state, and national decisions will lead to certain conditions. How were those decisions made, and under what conditions? For any given place the answer will be different. How does one place compare to another? It is my view that it is perfectly feasible to design eco…

as nice as that utopia would be, the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive. the other option is actively coercing a daily/weekly work limit, and that not only severe…

Instead of there being no way its completely trivial.

Furthermore you just said we have to choose between hard limits that will provably reduce exploitation and harm and handy wavy notions of dignity and equality with literally zero actual suggestions of any kind given.

The people that are vulnerable to exploitation and harm are virtually always the lower paid individuals without options or stability. If you want to allow a high powered lawyer or a highly paid software developer to work 80 hours this week while protecting lowly paid people who fab "chips" composed of delicious cheese instead of silicon its simple. Add exceptions for individuals making n dollars where n is a function of the median income in the state preferably multiple times n. For example the median income in WA state is about 41k. Make individuals making 164k+ exempt from overtime rules under the reasonable presumption that they can negotiate their own rules.

Otherwise

- Time past 8 hours in a day paid double, time past 12 hours paid triple.

- Days in a row past 6 paid double, days in a row past 8 paid triple.

- Hours in a week past 40 paid double, past 60 triple

- Require 2 consecutive days of rest after every 5 or more days on. Working on one of these days double the pay.

Forbid any employment that doesn't guarantee a minimum of 24 hours and tax the beejesus out of anyone who makes use of more than 30% part time labor defined as less than 36 hours. Ensure that running on >30% part time labor is substantially more expensive than not.

Forbid paying employees less than their scheduled hours for the week. Schedule someone for 24 hours and figure out you planned poorly. Yes you can send your people home but you can't opt out of paying them.

Make work schedules agreed with less than 2 weeks notice cost 1.5x rate to discourage forcing people to live on call for meager wage jobs.

Propose this and people will scream that you are destroying their business. Let people live this for a year and you will shockingly find them adapting to it by providing predictable scheduling to their 75%+ full time staff who work sane hours.

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