Speakeasy forum: How bout you?

and let's face it, service jobs anywhere tend to be low on pay and benefits.

There have been repeated accusations that WalMart hires multiple part-timers instead of one full timer to save paying the benefits they do give their full time employees.

Short notice scheduling changes unfortunately seem epidemic in service jobs also, partly because of people giving little notice when they are going to be out or quitting. Also unexpected customer volume often results in people being expected to work over with little notice, difficult for those with families, esp kids at home. This also causes other schedule changes because the company will have you work over today and not work a previous schedule shift later in the week to avoid overtime.Then someone else is moved to cover your shift, etc etc

it is precisely that uncertainty which is part and parcel of the WalMart plan to keep wages low. If you can pit the various employees against one another based on an absence of secure hours, if you hire 100 "associates" to do the work of 75 full time workers, then you don't have to pay benefits to them because none of them are full time, you don't have to observe many of the regulations regarding work conditions because they never can attain full time status, and thus escape the safety net intended for workers.

It's a scam, a scandal and an outrage, but folks who don't have to live that life don't recognize just what a form of continual harassment it is. Life isn't a lot better for store managers, and thus they are encouraged to oppress their employees. I'd like to avoid that word oppress, because it's too Marxist in its associations for most people, despite being a perfectly good English word and an accurate description of what keeping someone down and under-paid is. But there is no other word which encapsulates what is being done.

Hospital work used to be a regular thing for me. As the taps were tightened, and those with technical education took jobs those of us with experience were doing, my own hours became changeable. It used to be that it required a week's notice for a schedule change, but now Department of Labour, sorry, I'm up here now, Ministry of Labour Regulations, seem to be routinely ignored. Now I could complain, and find I didn't get the hours, or I could have gone to the Ministry and suddenly found myself laid off, or I could try to accommodate them. It was a wretched existence, but I did it. This was part of why we ultimately moved to Britain.

Nevertheless, as an educated person with an understanding of the history of late 19rh Century enterprise and the roots of Labour law, I understood the game that was being played. There are numerous historical precedents, but there was a time when employers were effectively forced by legislation to be fair in their work practices. Then the idea of outsourcing took hold, and a particularly nasty model of cost cutting in businesses that could not be outsourced took shape. Hire the employees as independent contractors, or hire more than you need and don't give any of them full time hours and keep them in Part Timer Hell. As I said, it is a ploy, and a very clever one which demoralizes the employees and greatly reduces their ability for cohesive action. Effectively it means there is a need to create Unions all over again, and re-fight battles that were won 60 to 80 years ago.

Employees have to have some kind of collective representation, or this will happen everywhere to everyone eventually. If you can keep the jobless rate above 5% there will always be millions just waiting to take a job regardless of the hours or the conditions.

You think all this stuff happens by accident? Employers learn this stuff in business schools across the nation, and middle class people who worked so hard to claw their way into the middle class that they, or their kids, want to repudiate their working class heritage, diaparage the force that allowed them to crawl out of the working class, the power of collective action, and the ability to negotiate for a bigger share of the profit pie.

In the 70's contrived bankruptcy vied with the leveraged buy out as a ploy to strip employees' pension funds from them and turn those moneys over to the owners of the companies. That's how the game has been played, but the middle class whose own foundations were being attacked were so keen on repudiating their fathers' or grandfathers' struggles, they closed their eyes for fear of seeing the looming abyss.

If given a reasonable stipend, I could produce a researched study to prove all this, but all the research has already been done in many places , not least by those who created the problem of short hours and insecurity in the first place.

The odds are that any Republican with no personal insight into the origins of his or her good fortune, or with a hidden distaste for admitting that Dad was an Autoworker has his or her fingers in their ears by now going Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Hey, fine. My Dad's father was a Scots immigrant in the 1920's learned the grocery business and ended up managing a grocery store. My dad was therefore, able in the late 30's to attend College, and thus was an Officer Candidate when War came. He finished his degree on the GI Bill after the war, and his good fortune allowed me to go to University. But you only have to go back into the 19th Century Census for Scotland to find that his grandfather was a Cabinet Maker (a skilled trade) and his great grandfather was a fisherman. All the previous generations were fisher folk too, that's what you did if you lived on coastal Scotland, or you gathered kelp and seaweed and boiled it down and sold it to soap and food makers, and hoped to be taken on as a deck hand next year assuming you made it through the winter. I know where I came from, and I honour everyone who climbed each rung every day of my life, but I don't forget that if you weren't one of the landed gentry, you were part of the peasantry.

Rob Roy MacGregor was a strong independent man who hated the English and their toadying Scottish collaborators, and so to ensure a bit of a living for his family, he occasionally pinched cattle from the Scottish laird and sold them as his own. Fictional though the story is, it is the experience of the vast portion of humanity, and to forget it is to cut yourself off from humanity itself, just as the upper classes cut themselves off from humanity, particularly those who were junior impoverished members of the aristocracy. It's people on the borders of the social ranks who are most vociferous about their superiority to the rank below them.

Rob

successful? Most of it had/has to do with Unions trying to get into their business for over 30 years and Walmart's ability to keep them at bay.

>>>it is precisely that uncertainty which is part and parcel of the WalMart plan to keep wages low. If you can pit the various employees against one another based on an absence of secure hours, if you hire 100 "associates" to do the work of 75 full time workers, then you don't have to pay benefits to them because none of them are full time, you don't have to observe many of the regulations regarding work conditions because they never can attain full time status, and thus escape the safety net intended for workers.>>>

Between the Unions and the Federal Government trying to force companies to provide benefit packages to full time employees that companies, not just Walmart, figured out that if they keep their employees on a part-time status, those benefits cannot be forced. It isn't that companies weren't already offering benefits (both health care packages and pensions/retirement plans), it's that Unions and the Feds wanted to call the shots on those packages and control what liberals thought was 'fair'. Both of those organizations have broken more companies than anything else in history and literally put them out of business. For some reason, the adage of 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results' doesn't get through. Companies learn to push back in order to survive and unfortunately the employees are the ones that wind up on the short end of the stick of the push/pull game between companies and Unions/Feds.

When you have a government that keeps raising the rules, and Unions that believe that companies are evil entities that need to be broken, this pattern will never end.

Poverty levels for a family used to be $10K per year not all that long ago, and it was relatively easy for that family to move up the ladder to 'middle class' because middle class was a wide expanse between $15K-$50K. People who lived in poverty didn't own goodies that they couldn't 'afford' to purchase like $150 tennis shoes or a $350 Xbox....they were lucky to have a landline phone and a CRT tv. and barely met the requirements for Medicaid and foodstamps. Poverty levels now is $22K, and middle class is somewhere nearer to $50K-$75K......double what it used to be, and families in poverty today own $400 cell phones and expensive plans, flat screen $800 tv's, etc. and still qualify for Medicaid and foodstamps, heat/cooling assistance, educational training, babysitting, etc. The real people in poverty today are the ones living under bridges, and even some of those qualify to receive benefits if they can find a bank that will open an account for them without a mailing address so their checks can be direct deposited and they carry around their EBT card that gets credited with food stamps allowances each month.

A job at McD's used to be geared to high school kids who could make some extra spending money for dates and socializing. Now those jobs, because of the Feds increasing the minimum wage, are looked at seriously by adults as either a way to supplement another part time job or as their main job while they look for something more in line with what they are trained for........this puts kids out of work with nothing but time on their hands. What used to be a 'throw away job' for kids making $3.50 per hour and was acceptable to them, is now a $9 per hour minimum wage job, and adults grab them up first because employers feel that an adult with a family is more reliable, needs the job more than the kid, and the kids are ignored now.

The higher the hourly wage and the more benefits are forced upon the employer, the harder it is to move out of poverty to middle class because jobs will be changed from full time to part time, benefits disappear, companies close down because it's not profitable anymore, the circle of unemployment gets wider.

IF you have a McJob in Washington and only Washington

McJob? I wonder how/why that term was coined.

9$ is NOT Minimum Wage.

Federal Minimum wage is $7.25


People under the age of 20 may be paid $4.25 per hour during their first 90 days of employment.

Federal law requires payment of at least 85 percent of the minimum wage and limits working time for those students to eight hours a day and 20 hours a week.

Hire them, keep them 90 days and turf them...Sorry Kid, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

NEXT!!!

by hiring through temp agencies. They're temp and don't get benefits. I think the normal span is a year before the company can even offer the temp a full time job without paying the temp agency a headhunter fee.

So the temp agency rotates the temp workers as much as possible to keep anyone from having that year in at one site. Generally temp agencies don't offer benefits.

Temp agencies definately have a place, as do all temporary and part time jobs. It's just a crying shame the lenghts now often gone to deny full time pay and benefits to effectively pernament employees.

And people justifying all the practices are missing the point IMO.

Many businesses used to pay more to family workers than to single people, give more time off to parents than those with no children and so forth. Along comes unions and other groups to moan and complain about that being unfair, even though they aren't putting in the extra effort to care for a family, and so single people had to get the same pay as the married, the same "perks" et al. Now they do that, along come the next crowd to complain about families not getting a living wage. It's things like this which shows there's no common sense approach to the problem.

As for Walmart, even if there were no mandates on benefits provided, nor overtime pay involved, I suspect they'd do pretty much the same since that's what they've done since before those things existed anywhere as legal requirements.

Employers need to attract employees who will sign up and stay there. It costs plenty to hire and train new people. Some employers might think a married person is more stable and, ergo, more valuable than a single person who is more mobile. The employer may think that, in the long run, paying more to a married person is worth it. They own the business and take the risk of it succeeding or not. It's their party to invite their own choice of guests.

were considered more reliable. Women employees were not considered reliable at all, they might quit whenever they got married or had a kid. That was the attitude.

Nowadays I don't know married is any more reliable, I've not heard any statistics on that in years. I guess married still live longer, at least long married.

How can married indicate more reliablity now when more are married and divorced more than twice than are married once?

that two people do the exact same work. Unless the quantity and quality can be fixed by some outside influence, one person will always do more or better work in the same time period.

You could have an auto mechanic who can turn over work faster than anyone else but misses some details that result in premature failures. Some torque spec, tension adjustment, etc. that's not right can result in a customer return under warranty. The shop loses when this happens. I wonder just how well tracked quality is as compared to productivity.

A tech or mechanic won't know if their repairs held properly if history isn't tracked and names attached. That can be agonizing for an employee who cares about quality as so much depends on how the employer uses any collected data. It can be used as a weapon or a teaching tool. I have considerable experience working in such an environment.

different pay.

You want to explain the guidelines for those evaluations from HR?

Come on Steven, you know exactly the same job performance other than production piece work can't happen. Even then there is attitude, experience, and effort that may affect a job evaluation.

That guy who does best today may be the worse tomorrow too. Going to evaluate all the job performances every day and adjust pay daily?

I'm assuming while completely accurate, your post is a bit tongue in cheek.

electrical and instrumentation.

The equipment is so varied that no one knows it all. Different people are better at certain sets of controls than others. Some of course are better overall some are worse.

I'd put myself in the top half, I'm not sure if I make the top quarter or not as far as widespread knowledge and ability. However there is equipment I'm the only one currently with any real experience repairing.

So with such a varied circumstance, are you going to assign each area a different rating along with the rating for how well the person does? Then how do you justify when you move people temporarly or to help?

Sorry, while you can have a pay range and the annual evaluations you mention, unless someone doesn't want to move up or really screws up, factory/industry operators and maintenance are going to be extremely difficult to make such fine distinctions. It ends up eventually people move most of the way up the range if not all the way if they make a reasonable effort and don't screw up badly.

And too many distinctions and evaluations will always end up with charges of favorism and prejudice of some type, even when unjustified. Bosses end up doing "social promotions" just as schools do to avoid the hassle. Right? no, but I've seen it, and while in night classes at technical school I talked to people from a lot of different industry sites and it seemed pretty SOP.

Normally the most you see is an optional range above the normal "top out" point that is more difficult to get. Often it isn't even published. I was "topped out" at one job, but I found out one guy had moved on up. I asked my boss what were the qualifications for optional pay he named some not particularly specific guides, I and then he said he guess I pretty will did it all already. Now while you always gain experience, I had been doing all that for a couple of years. So because I didn't know they would pay that, was "topped out" according to the pay scale charts for my work, I worked for less than the work I was doing was being paid to another who the boss even told me I was better.

So what happened?

I know some will say you have to ask. I was given a range and agreed to take the job and work my way up. Basically as long as my immediate supervisor gave me a favorable review, every 6 months I got a small raise until I "topped out".

Guess what, I'm not the only one and that wasn't the only place I learned of from others that did similar tactics. People doing the same quality work don't get the same pay unless someone who knows behind the scenes watches out and helps.

Sorry, but that's the way it works if no one is advocating for the workers. I'll admit unions protect people sometimes that I question. But we have a whole list of things in the contract that gets you reprimands of 3 different levels, including possible immediate dismissal. They all have points and just like your drivers license, too many can get you time off or dismissal.

But at least you have the rules.