While grocery stores are essential, any individual employee is not. These are not skilled positions. Grocery store employees can and should be easily replaced. The alternative is the potential for a group of unskilled laborers to hold our nation's food supply hostage at time when many people who are out of work would gladly take their place. If they don't feel safe working right now, go home. Someone else will. Doubling their pay during a crisis won't make them any safer.
Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
71–80 of 113 posts
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paying people to not (come into) work is pretty much critical to not getting a huge number of people (not necessarily the same people!) killed in a pandemic.
Surely you agree there are some workers to whom that does not apply? I'm fairly sure we can't send all the utility workers home, can we?
If it's pandemic, the infected workers have to be sent home to avoid infecting others. This is actually even more important for the essential workers. Otherwise you end up with them all off sick at once.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#73I empathize with the workers, but isn't striking while there are >3 million people out of work a bad idea? Whole Foods could fire the strikers and replace them. It's not like they need particularly rare skills, just about any of the current jobless could take a shift.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#74I don't understand. WF charges 2-3x as much as a "regular" grocery store and prides itself on "ethics" and "sustainability". Why are we even having this discussion? Why aren't those employees fairly compensated and protected?
>Why aren't those employees fairly compensated
They are, otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to work there. Not one person who works for Whole Foods is employed by force.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#75Wonder if grocery store workers will largely be forced to unionize and fall under similar terms as airline industry with regards to limitations on a strike. "Essential work"
They already are unionized - at least in my neck of the woods (Ohio). If the Whole Foods employees are not, well, then that should be their first order of business.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#76I don't understand. WF charges 2-3x as much as a "regular" grocery store and prides itself on "ethics" and "sustainability". Why are we even having this discussion? Why aren't those employees fairly compensated and protected?
>Why aren't those employees fairly compensated They are, otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to work there. Not one person who works for Whole Foods is employed by force.
We agree to many unfair things day to day. It's not clear to me that accepting a contract means that the contract describes a fair arrangement. Fairness is also highly subjective; the employer, for instance, likely has a different opinion as to what is or isn't fair compared to the mass of employees. It's quite possible that even you and I have different ideas of what is and isn't fair. This is precisely why philosophers across the political spectrum have criticized the structuring of society on the basis of the abstract idea of 'fairness'.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you agree there are some workers to whom that does not apply? I'm fairly sure we can't send all the utility workers home, can we?
If it's pandemic, the infected workers have to be sent home to avoid infecting others. This is actually even more important for the essential workers. Otherwise you end up with them all off sick at once.
There's literally no-one here disputing that sick workers should get to stay home. What's being discussed is the proposition that healthy workers who decide to self-isolate should be paid to do so.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you agree there are some workers to whom that does not apply? I'm fairly sure we can't send all the utility workers home, can we?
If it's pandemic, the infected workers have to be sent home to avoid infecting others. This is actually even more important for the essential workers. Otherwise you end up with them all off sick at once.
[deleted]
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#79I empathize with the workers, but isn't striking while there are >3 million people out of work a bad idea? Whole Foods could fire the strikers and replace them. It's not like they need particularly rare skills, just about any of the current jobless could take a shift.
It's only a one-day strike. Unless you're openly an organizer, you're not taking much risk. The biggest thing you're thinking about in that situation is going without pay. But also, this is why strikes are only successful when you've got everyone taking part in them. The cost to replace an entire workforce is actually huge, and would shut down operations for a period of time. There would also be a campaign aimed at preventing folks from crossing their picket line: customers, new staff, etc. Enlisting elected leaders, etc.
More generally-speaking, it's illegal to fire NLRA-covered workers for striking. Granted, the penalties are minimal (penalties are backpay MINUS what the worker earned while they waited for the case to resolve itself... no punitive damages). Also, you have to actually win in court, of course -- and I'm guessing Amazon has good attorneys that can win a tough case. But if you're firing the entire workforce, no attorney is that good. It's clearly retaliation.
It's true that during economic downturns it can be hard to successfully organize, people in all industries feel more replaceable. But it's also true that at times when workers are feeling more pain, there can be tremendous activism. Additionally, there have been times in our country's past when workers were far worse off than today and yet risked far more than their jobs (in some cases, their lives) to win the protections we have now.
Re: Whole Foods employees are staging a nationwide 'sick-out'
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same way any other employer is able to offer PTO? It should just be a cost of doing business (and is in much of Europe).
... which is limited; often pro-rated in the first year of employment; and has to be scheduled in agreement with your employer so that not all critical staff go out on vacation at once. How are these things the same?
My take on the linked demand list was the included terms were broad and generic for public consumption, not the actual demands submitted to WF. Maybe they are the actual demands, in which case, it's like they are just be the employee's first ask, fully expecting to negotiate back to something more reasonable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#In_negotiations
Either way, PTO that allows workers to take enough time off to clear a quarantine order isn't unreasonable. All this chit-chat about all the workers staying home and grocers shutting down is missing the forest for the tress.