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My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

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Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#31

Post by danso »

I kind of did a double take at this:

> Even though I was living rent-free in a guest bedroom, my every-other-Thursday paycheck couldn’t help me climb out of my hole, particularly after the state took half my pre-tax, $300 weekly salary for child support payments.

> * got the opportunity to leave Sporting Goods Inc. for a temporary job as a communications director for a Capitol Hill nonprofit, a gig that paid twice as much per week as I’d earn in a month at the store. That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck, though it was a step in the right direction.*

- 300 * 52 = 15,600 annually

- 15,600 * 4 * 2 ("twice as much per week as one month") = 124,800

- "That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck"

So, at least $150K or even $200+K? Gah-damn! I know big beltway journalists get a decent salary, but Politico is a relative newcomer (though profitable and growing).

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#32

Post by agumonkey »

I'm still surprised how close to my last job this is. The do everything, get nothing [1]. Same mindset about being robbed by employees. The worst part there, to me, was the absurdity of it. You have to be on 100% ~24/7 even when there's nothing to do. But you're certainly not allowed to change things in any way to simplify or increase productivity. Something any programmer will cringe at to death. This is something very different from other jobs like mcdonalds where the rush impose high productivity constraints meaning things are already quite optimized. No time's wasted: you're active and for some valuable reason. Helps a lot.

[1] optional bonus: being slightly mocked by less educated people that will then ask you for hints about things they don't understand. Of course, I helped. Slave genes.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#33

Post by maxerickson »

cobrausn wrote: post #27
scarmig wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd just push down wages for the parts of your schedule you're actually working, though. Minimum wages are the type of thing where if you push on one side, it incentivizes employers to extract more value by any means possible out of you. I'm a broken record on this, but: an unconditional basic income is the answer to this situation. The only way you can make sure every job has dignity is for every person to be abl…

So, what happens if the unconditional basic income becomes 'the new poverty' as the economy adjusts and the price of basic goods and services change? We'd end up in the same spot - they can treat you like crap, because you are replaceable, and you still need the money. I should say I also have no idea if that's what would happen. Just a concern.

It's hand wavy, but you can probably say that Northern Europe is quite a lot closer to having a basic income than the U.S. I think the basic standard of living is higher there than the U.S., by a variety of measures.

(not sure it's clear: by basic standard of living, I mean the standard of living typical at the bottom end)

edit: I guess it's probably not great to compare the package of social policies to basic income though.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#34

Post by dec0dedab0de »

cobrausn wrote: post #27
scarmig wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd just push down wages for the parts of your schedule you're actually working, though. Minimum wages are the type of thing where if you push on one side, it incentivizes employers to extract more value by any means possible out of you. I'm a broken record on this, but: an unconditional basic income is the answer to this situation. The only way you can make sure every job has dignity is for every person to be abl…

So, what happens if the unconditional basic income becomes 'the new poverty' as the economy adjusts and the price of basic goods and services change? We'd end up in the same spot - they can treat you like crap, because you are replaceable, and you still need the money. I should say I also have no idea if that's what would happen. Just a concern.

It would need to be continually maintained to avoid that.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#35

Post by krstck »

It seems to me that working retail has gotten a lot worse since the recession. I worked retail after high school before deciding to go to college, and then worked the same job on summers home from school. What was interesting was that between when I started that job in 2005 and when I left for the final time in 2010, my coworkers went from being mostly high school and college kids to all sorts of folks of varying ages and backgrounds. That was the most telling sign of the recession to me. I strolled in to pick up my job where I'd left off in 2010 and I remember every single day people asking for job applications. I had thoughts like, why would you want to work here? This is a job for kids! But we even had a PhD biologist for a while.

Conditions have been deteriorating for a while now. Extended hours on holidays, terrible scheduling, and peculiar "performance measurement" tools. At my particular store, they adopted a system of tracking how many transactions a cashier performed per hour and then penalizing them when those transactions exceeded a certain number. The thought was that if a cashier rang up so many customers an hour, then some of them had had to wait in line and the cashier was at fault for not calling backup. (What backup? And what if they were just a really fast cashier?) Another was the obsession with collecting customers' email addresses. Cashiers were expected to collect so many email addresses a day or week or whatever or be threatened with losing their job.

My silly, between school semesters little retail gig had become very stressful towards the end because of the obsession with these metrics and a general attitude of "I could fire you today and have someone cheaper by tomorrow".

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#36

Post by VLM »

cobrausn wrote: post #27
scarmig wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd just push down wages for the parts of your schedule you're actually working, though. Minimum wages are the type of thing where if you push on one side, it incentivizes employers to extract more value by any means possible out of you. I'm a broken record on this, but: an unconditional basic income is the answer to this situation. The only way you can make sure every job has dignity is for every person to be abl…

So, what happens if the unconditional basic income becomes 'the new poverty' as the economy adjusts and the price of basic goods and services change? We'd end up in the same spot - they can treat you like crap, because you are replaceable, and you still need the money. I should say I also have no idea if that's what would happen. Just a concern.

Freely available, more or less safe and sanitary public water fountains have not resulted in economic or cultural collapse; nor have they wiped out the bottle water market.

The people who really hate the idea of a basic income often have a religious background... how dare they be allowed a civilized level of charity without following religion, etc.

One way to work around price manipulation is to cut out the highly profitable middleman... Here's your bag of rice and block of cheese, see you next week. Need a safe warm place to sleep? Here have this empty unlocked jail cell. It would likely close resemble a long term version of natural disaster / hurricane aid, perhaps more formally run. In culturally inferior areas it'll almost certainly resemble the worst imagination (caricature) of the projects. In better cultural areas, it'll probably look a lot like a student dorm. People gonna be themselves, no matter if you like it or not.

If you want even the slightest tiny bit better, and most will, that'll cost a bit. In fact it probably will cost a bit more than now.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#37

Post by krstck »

Domenic_S wrote: post #14
joshreads wrote: post #2

A lot of this is just "person who's had white-collar job for years doesn't get how difficult service jobs are", but making your already low-paid employees do unpaid overtime work is s-k-e-t-c-h-y, and actively illegal.

Between ages 15-21 I worked a lot of retail. I had managers who would do the "on time is late" thing, or make me clock out and then wait for 20 minutes for them to unlock the door at closing time. I knew those things weren't legal, and I'd make a stink about it. I was an exemplary worker, which I'm sure afforded me some leeway, but more importantly I was young, white, and living at home with my middle-class parents.…

> What's the solution? Mandatory severance for every job?

At the risk of opening a-whole-nother can of worms.... universal basic income.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#38

Post by hershel »

Sweden offers a nice solution to this: responsible unions.

In Sweden there are 2 unions, One for white collar workers and one for blue collar employees. The salary rates/hikes are industry wide.They are usually determined by the competitive part of the economy - the export sector and than applied to everybody.

The unions understand their role as protectors of employees, but on the other hand, understand the need for Sweden to remain competitive and the huge responsibility put on them by representing so many people without hurting the economy. So they come with reasonable demands.

All this is supported by the Swedish mentality of fairness, which makes employees happy just taking their fair share.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#39

Post by bhauer »

danso wrote: post #31

I kind of did a double take at this: > Even though I was living rent-free in a guest bedroom, my every-other-Thursday paycheck couldn’t help me climb out of my hole, particularly after the state took half my pre-tax, $300 weekly salary for child support payments. > * got the opportunity to leave Sporting Goods Inc. for a temporary job as a communications director for a Capitol Hill nonprofit, a gig that paid twice as…

> twice as much per week as I’d earn in a month at the store

300 = retail pay per month.

300 * 2 = 600, which is twice the retail pay.

600 * 4 = 2,400, multiplying by four weeks to account for new job earning twice as much per week as per month in retail.

2,400 * 12 = 28,800, which is an estimate for the annual pay at his new job.

Politico most certainly pays more than that.

Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap

#40

Post by rayiner »

josephschmoe wrote: post #26
rayiner wrote: post #8

I accept that the market drives down the wages of service workers, but their working conditions are just outrageous to me. Automation and optimization has turned retail into a hellish job. On demand scheduling, zero tolerance policies, wage theft, etc. Its MBAs and programmers making a buck by burdening the people who are least equipped to find a job doing something else. See also: http://www.thenation.com/article/17…

Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work? I'm soooo sorry for eliminating work no one wants to do. Unemployment isn't an engineer or an MBA's fault. It's the fault of shareholders, executives and congressmen: they're the ones hoarding the money at the top. I guarantee you, if the money went to the engineers, we'd have 98% employment right now and the jobs would be a whole lot mor…

Service jobs aren't inherently crummy. What makes it crummy are the software systems that let managers schedule people on variable, on-demand schedules, and policies that micro-manage bathroom breaks and the like. There's an entire industry focused on getting additional tenths of a percent out of service workers.

Papa John's founder said it'd cost something like $0.50 extra per pizza to offer his employees health insurance. I'm not even talking about a luxury like health insurance. What would it cost to let employees take a few extra sick days or be able to plan on when they'll work or the occasional unplanned bathroom break? http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1djlt0/pregnant_tmobil...

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