Flexibility as a zero-sum game

Wasn’t this ruled illegal in the UK in a case against McDonalds’ a few years ago?

Echidne, pinch-hitting this week at Eschaton, earlier echoed this from Tapped.

Her words:

Remember the idea of giving workers flexitime? Making it easier to cope with family obligations without necessarily reducing productivity at all?

I remember marketing folks at my company complaining when they got pagers, mourning their loss of independence. (I thought they’d asked for the damned things. Nobody else wanted them.)

So, is anyone still wondering why increases in productivity are benefiting management instead of labor?

The correct term here is “casualization”, not flexibility.

Giles, are you familiar with the relationship between wages and productivity which has been holding in the USA for the past six years?

But Walmart doesn’t exist in an environment without competitors for both customers and employees. If they make the working conditions worse, they’ll have to raise salaries to compensate or the quality of their workforce will decline (and as it is, Walmart is already a less pleasant place to shop than Target, for example).

It would be one thing if Walmart had unlimited power to dictate wages and working conditions, but it doesn’t (if it did, it would already be paying minimum wage with no benefits–and it isn’t doing that).

slocum – the opposite is the effect in practice. That is, because Wal-Mart is in a competitive market (for customers) other stores have to lower wages to match them. It’s happened here in Ontario in the grocery stores (Wal-Mart has been in a department store here for some time, but not a grocery store), where unions have accepted a weaker contract and worse conditions for new employees in anticipation of Wal-Mart’s entry into the market. So Wal-Mart’s conditions have actually set the new standard before it even enters the market.

I don’t think you can have it both ways when it comes to competition. You can’t say “competition for workers will force Wal-Mart to raise wages, and that’s good” and “competition for consumers keeps prices low, and that’s good”. In large-scale retail, as Sam Walton observed, wages are a big part of costs.

The thing is, if you want your hourly workers to be “on call”, then you have to compensate them for the time that they’re on call. If you don’t, then they’re not on call, they’re just not working. If the manager calls an employee and asks them to come in because things have gotten busy, the employee can decline to come in.

Not sure where you are, slocum, but in my home town in OR (where min. wage is something like $7.50; I haven’t earned min. wage in a long time so I may be wrong on that), walmart workers get min. wage. Only full-time (and they consider 80 hrs. per pay period full-time) get benefits and only then after being there a year and even then it’s worse coverage than the state health system. Mom’s partner worked there for a long time, and they did the whole “you’re not full time, you only worked 78 hours this pay period” BS every.single.pay period. He was having seizures at work and they refused to let him switch departments or to day shift (he was working with hazardous chemicals & up on ladders – not safe for someone with seizures!). More stores than I can think of have closed because of wm coming to my hometown, and all the BS that one store did was not even remotely frowned upon when mom’s partner complained about it. The quality of workers? Are you kidding? Every walmart I’ve ever been in has been staffed by a combination of high school students, high school drop-outs, and migrant workers (who of course aren’t checkers or greeters, but cleaning staff because heaven forbid we employ non-natives in any sort of non-menial position). The walmart effect (stores closing, other stores lowering prices, distributors lowering prices & having to outsource to even cheaper countries, etc.) is well-documented. Any attempt to deny that is foolish at best.

~jen, who hasn’t spent money at walmart in nearly three years~

Not sure where you are, slocum, but in my home town in OR (where min. wage is something like $7.50; I haven’t earned min. wage in a long time so I may be wrong on that), walmart workers get min. wage.

Obviously I don’t know about the specifics in your home town in OR, but in general, throughout the country, Walmart pays substantially above minimum wages and offers benefits. $8.50 for a full-time ‘associate’ is still a low wage, obviously, even with benefits, but it’s considerably more than $5.25. Even so, Walmart is running into ‘adverse selection’ problems where people take Walmart jobs just because they do offer benefits when other low-skill, low-pay jobs don’t:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/10/adverse_selecti.html

The quality of workers? Are you kidding? Every walmart I’ve ever been in has been staffed by a combination of high school students, high school drop-outs, and migrant workers

Yes, well you’re not going to get ivy league grads to work as discount-store cashiers, are you? But there’s a big difference between high-school dropouts who show up for work reliably and get along with co-workers and customers vs high-school dropouts who don’t. Or do you think all high-school students and high-school dropouts are necessarily low-quality workers?

There are winners and losers to the new system, but the winners tend to be professional-class people like JohnQ, who want to shop when they want to shop. Retailers are responding to customer demands, and I haven’t seen any move to limit the customer demands. (It would be as easy to set store hours by law as to set any other piece of working conditions, but for some reason that piece of the labor puzzle isn’t a popular choice for regulation.)

There’s nothing new about what Walmart is doing. Target does this, as do many other retailers. The same thing has been done on a smaller scale by restaurants for decades.

jen, Walmart’s average wage in Oregon is over $10 an hour. All Walmart employees–full and part time–are eligible for benefits. There is a waiting period for benefits, but it is 6 months, not one year. I won’t comment on whether you’re right that your mother’s partner is a low-quality worker.

nick, stuart, I don’t think it’s right to say the system prevents employees from having a second job. The “personal availability forms” described in the WSJ article make it clear that an employee can separate available and unavailable times. That’s as we’d expect, because Walmart has no reason to want to eliminate its appeal as an employer of students or other typical part-time workers. (Those who feel the brunt of the system are more likely to be full-time workers with open-availability, but even there the goal isn’t to make the job less appealing, but to schedule to meet customer demand. That means full-time workers aren’t likely to have a M-F 9-5 schedule, not that they should expect to have work mornings one week and evenings the next. Most retailers have sales patterns that are more consistent than that.)

In rural America, slocum, Walmart does exist in a highly non-competitive environment. Some towns now are practically company towns.

Fascinating. I wouldn’t have thought that it would be possible to have a company town centered around a retail outlet.

There are winners and losers to the new system, but the winners tend to be professional-class people like JohnQ, who want to shop when they want to shop.

Oh, and that’s pretty funny, given that ‘professionals’ who end up shopping at 10pm tend to do so because they’re working long hours themselves, and not because that’s their favourite leisure activity.

I find it maddening that anti-wagers appeal to the notion that the free-market naturally selects the best wage, yet exiting CEOs make hundreds of millions (and often the company reports comparable losses, e.g. red hat) while min. wage earners make 5.15/hr. Anti-wagers seem to not understand that the best wage need not ignore our notions of being humane to each other.

International Socialists used to run a cartoon strip in their paper back in the 1970’s featuring a shop steward–whose name may come to me in a year or so–who was constantly personifying the virtues of shopfloor militance, solidarity, skepticism and so forth. What brings this to mind is a strip in which he walked off the shop floor at 3 pm, only to run into his foreman who asked him where he was going. When he said “Home,” the foreman responded, “But the shift isn’t over for another two hours.” To which our hero said, “I know, I’m being flexible!”

Which goes to show–it is a fine old conflict.
(from a wretched professional who used to do his grocery shopping at 3 am and did enjoy having the store to myself and the night crew)

In relation to the ‘adverse selection’ link it seems that this reply to Tabarrok’s post by R.J. Lehmann is worth looking at. I don’t know much about the issue, and I don’t know Lehmann, so I couldn’t say who’s right.

I won’t comment on whether you’re right that your mother’s partner is a low-quality worker.

You stay classy.

Matt, what’s that supposed to mean? You didn’t find this juxtaposition odd? “Mom’s partner worked there for a long time” and “The quality of workers? Are you kidding? Every walmart I’ve ever been in has been staffed by a combination of high school students, high school drop-outs, and migrant workers…” I know that, mean as I am, if someone close to me (or even just close to my mother) worked someplace, I’d not go around suggesting that everyone who worked there was a low quality worker. Even if it were true, but especially if, as seems likely here, it weren’t.

“Why? I’m a geek with a short-supplied skill set.”
That’s that supply-and-demand thing there right? An economic principle of long standing.
The stockers and clerks at the big box stores are not in demand, they’re in abundant supply. And as business strips away the gloss of humanity from its efficiency, barring unforeseen reductions in the labor pool, they’ll be in even more abundant supply.
“I got ten other people asking for this job, you want it or not?”
Eventually you get back to those lovely days of so much labor over-supply there’s no work to be had at all, for many.
But that will resolve itself eventually, won’t it?
That’s that Sociable Darwinism thing, right?
Eventually it all works out for the best, just like my mom always used to say.
Meanwhile, potatoes are the most highly pesticide-bearing vegetables we eat, in the name of efficiency, yes? And there’s an epidemic of obesity? But that’s a symptom of something else – alienation is the number one health issue almost across the board, and that’s because all this efficiency has nothing to do with humanity, right?
Look at it. It has nothing to do with humanity. Keep looking, it’s still there.

gratuitously

just reaching for a stick in an argument.

Thomas, you never cease to astonish me.