The
other day at work we were really busy and understaffed, which happens
a lot once summer arrives as I work in a resort area. I was covering
up front and while we're working a customer complains about how we're
so busy at the registers and the person in charge of running the
front end says that nobody wants to work. And I'm pretty sure that's
quite incorrect. I know we don't have many applications coming into
the grocery store I work at, but it's not because people don't want
to work. There are many factors that play into why we aren't getting
applications. One of the big stereotypes I'm going to take a run at
is one I've been told at classes my company sent me to when becoming
a manager, and that's that young people don't like working. Granted,
that personally drove me crazy as I've always been a hard worker and
am one of those young people, but even going outside of that personal
view I can tell it's not completely accurate.
My
store did recently increase the pay rate they are offering to help in
the summer which has made somebody decide to quit since the part
timers we're hiring would get paid more than him, but before that we
were offering essentially minimum wage which is below all the fast
food places in town. And as we are a tourist town in the summer all
the restuarants and golf courses are hiring which means you also get
tips as well as whatever their pay is. So the grocery store is
offering a lower wage than a lot of other places and you can't take
tips. Also once you start training we never have enough hours to
offer people so if you're hired before the summer you'll get like
fourteen hours after your training is done with the promise of a lot
once summer starts and the business shows up. If you don't get hired
until summer is here you get thrown right into the fire and have to
deal with everything being way too busy from the get go. That's the
kind of thing that makes retention hard to manage, and we always have
high turnover with new employees.
But
that's a symptom of the way businesses have been working for the past
couple of decades which is minimizing hours and maximizing the labor
they get out of each employee. The addition of Self Checkouts has
helped that and then the rest is made up for by expecting more out of
every employee for less. When I first started working in a grocery
store seventeen years ago I was a bagger and the store would have
three people working that role at a time. The store I work at now, is
bigger than the one I started at and we have one bagger and they only
work from three to eight so all the department managers handle their
tasks before they show up like bringing carts into the store.
The
people who complain about how nobody wants to work are from the older
generation and trying to complain about the young kids not wanting to
work, but what they are ignoring is that they had full time jobs, and
benefits were pretty prevalent when they were getting hired. Now
everybody wants to hire part time employees so they don't have to
give them benefits and every part time job requires you to be
available nights and weekends. Those requirements kind of suck for a
full time job, but are the kind of thing a person can make work, but
for a part time job you're not getting enough hours to support
yourself and that means you need two part time jobs, but they both
require the same kind of hours, and that means people have to choose
one job over the other. Right now the backup to my department and one
other is the same person and when I talked to her I found out she
only wanted to work part time and wanted to work weekends, which they
never told me when I'm making the schedule for her and of course
we're working her 40 hours a week, even though she's retired and just
wanted to keep herself busy. There's just no respect for what an
employee wants to do and it's all about what works best for the
company.
Now
I will admit that most people don't want to work, because working
sucks. I don't want to work, but I've had a job for almost 13
straight years with a couple of breaks in between and I work. We have
to work in the system we have so people have accepted that and make
the system work. With wages not increasing, but living costs raising
people find it hard to work the same jobs that don't allow them to
support themselves. So people can only take one of those jobs at a
time and have to choose which job best works for them. The reality is
that it's hard to make life work with one part time job and when you
don't get compensated well people aren't going to enjoy their job or
want to stay there. When companies don't look at what the reality is
for their work force they don't understand why people can't or won't
work for them.
