Jim Hightower--On-call shifts: The latest corporate shame
Step right up, folks, and take your chances in the Amazing New American Workplace. Constantly high unemployment! Low wages always! No employee bargaining power! A corporate paradise!
This paradise has enriched the already-rich investor elite and rewarded top executives with multimillion-dollar pay packages. It also lets corporations treat the masses of people in today's workforce like Kleenexes: Just use 'em and toss 'em after all, they're cheap, plentiful... and disposable.
Indeed, taskmasters-in-suits have now redefined the term "hired" to mean that you're tethered to a corporation full-time, but you actually work and get paid for only the few hours a week when the boss calls. This nefarious practice, known as "on-call shifts," is all the rage among national retail chains. Such giants as Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, and Urban Outfitters require employees to work without set schedules and to be available to have their strings yanked at any time, day or night, even on weekends, with as little as two hours' notice. Likewise, if customer traffic in a store is slow, retail workers who got dressed up, battled the morning commute, and reported on time, can simply be sent away after an hour or so with no pay for their lost hours.
A recent survey of some 400 retail employees in New York City found that only 17 percent have a set schedule. Those with no set hours, also have no set income and no life. If you're at the beck and call of the boss, what do you do with your children, how do you make a doctor's appointment, what if you're taking a class or trying to work a second job?
More at http://www.jimhightower.com/node/8032 .
Skeeter Barnes
(994 posts)Before I had enough seniority for a bid start time, they might call me in anywhere between 3am and 3pm. "Operational needs" is their justification for shit like this. I call it "too incompetent to properly plan staffing levels".
I agree with Hightower that the reason for this is to make it clear to the worker that the employer owns him/her, not to provide better service to the customer.
Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)Lugnut
(9,791 posts)My husband's union has a call out pay. It he's called in to work on an off day and sent home after he gets there he gets paid for four hours. This is in addition to having a regular full time weekly schedule of 40 hours.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)That is so disruptive. It's the reason for unions, to not destroy health and families. These firms need to be boycotted.
Bette Noir
(3,581 posts)newfie11
(8,159 posts)But I have always been given on call pay. It can be a money make for the employee if the hospital pays.
Even so it is very tiring as you never sleep well expecting the phone to ring.
The way this is being done in non medical is horrible. In a good economy they would never get folks to work for what their paying.
Judi Lynn
(160,623 posts)This is exploitive, intrusive beyond anyone's wildest dream.
It most clearly is paradise for the oligarchs. It's soulless degradation of the very people they MUST have to operate in the first place.
Hope this will backfire on these idiots when they least expect it. As we remember, the public finally found ways of dealing with the hideous abuse of human beings after the industrial revolution, through reforms, and surely something can be done soon after enough people concentrate on this crime against the working class.
It shouldn't be allowed to happen. There must be satisfaction for those who give their life's energy to their employers, who are hell bent on making certain they never have to pay them what they actually should earn. The only way they profit is to actually STEAL from their employees, in the end by shortchanging them of their honest wages and conditions.
Employers as criminals, what a shame.