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IT’S NOT JUST WAGES. RETAILERS ARE MISTREATING WORKERS IN A MORE
INSIDIOUS WAY.  
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Adelle Waldman
February 19, 2024
New York Times
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_ Employers have come to prefer part time workers not only because
they're cheaper, but, because they aren't guaranteed a minimum number
of hours, employers can cut their hours if they don’t anticipate
having enough business to keep them busy. _

, Photo by Brian Ulrich

 

Back in 2018, with an eye to writing a novel about low-wage work in
America, I got a job at a big-box store near the Catskills in New
York, where I live. I was on the team that unloaded the truck of new
merchandise each day at 4 a.m.

We were supposed to empty the truck in under an hour. Given how little
we made — I was paid $12.25 an hour, which I was told was the
standard starting pay — I was surprised how much my co-workers cared
about making the unload time. They took a kind of bitter pride in
their efficiency, and it rubbed off on me. I dreaded making a mistake
that would slow us down as we worked together to get 1,500 to 2,500
boxes off the truck and sorted onto pallets each morning. When the
last box rolled out of the truck, we would spread out in groups of two
or three for the rest of our four-hour shift and shelve the items from
the boxes we just unloaded.

Most of my co-workers had been at the store for years, but almost all
of them were, like me, part time. This meant that the store had no
obligation to give us a stable number of hours or to adhere to a
weekly minimum. Some weeks we’d be scheduled for as little as a
single four-hour shift; other weeks we’d be asked to do overnights
and work as many as 39 hours (never 40, presumably because the company
didn’t want to come anywhere close to having to pay overtime).

The unpredictability of the hours made life difficult for my
co-workers — as much as if not more than the low pay did. On
receiving a paycheck for a good week’s work, when they’d worked 39
hours, should they use the money to pay down debt? Or should they hold
on to it in case the following week they were scheduled for only four
hours and didn’t have enough for food?

Many of my co-workers didn’t have cars; with such unstable pay, they
couldn’t secure auto loans. Nor could they count on holding on to
the health insurance that part-time workers could receive if they met
a minimum threshold of hours per week. While I was at the store, one
co-worker lost his health insurance because he didn’t meet the
threshold — but not because the store didn’t have the work. Even
as his requests for more hours were denied, the store continued to
hire additional part-time and seasonal workers.

Most frustrating of all, my co-workers struggled to supplement their
income elsewhere, because the unstable hours made it hard to work a
second job. If we wanted more hours, we were advised to increase our
availability. Problem is, it’s difficult to work a second job when
you’re trying to keep yourself as free as possible for your first
job.

No wonder my co-workers cared so much about the unload time: For those
60 minutes, they could set aside such worries and focus on a single
goal, one that may have been arbitrary but was largely within our
shared control and made life feel, briefly, like a game that was
winnable.

Many people choose to work part time for better work-life balance or
to attend school or to care for children or other family members. But
many don’t. In recent years, part-time work has become the default
at many large chain employers, an involuntary status imposed on large
numbers of their lowest-level employees. As of December, almost four
and a half million American workers reported working part time but
said they would prefer full-time jobs.

When I started working at the store, I assumed that the reason
part-time work was less desirable than full-time work was that by
definition, it meant less money and fewer or no benefits. What I
didn’t understand was that part-time work today also has a
particular predatory logic, shifting economic risk from employers to
employees. And because part-time work has become ubiquitous in certain
predominantly low-wage sectors of the economy, many workers are unable
to find full-time alternatives. They end up trapped in jobs that
don’t pay enough to live on and aren’t predictable enough to plan
a life around.

There are several reasons employers have come to prefer part-time
workers. For one thing, they’re cheaper: By employing two or more
employees to work shorter hours, an employer can avoid paying for the
benefits it would owe if it assigned all the hours to a single
employee.

But another, newer advantage for employers is flexibility. Technology
now enables businesses to track customer flow to the minute and
schedule just enough employees to handle the anticipated workload.
Because part-time workers aren’t guaranteed a minimum number of
hours, employers can cut their hours if they don’t anticipate having
enough business to keep them busy. If business picks up unexpectedly,
employers have a large reserve of part-time workers desperate for more
hours who can be called in on short notice.

Part-time work can also be a means of control. Because employers have
total discretion over hours, they can use reduced schedules to punish
employees who complain or seem likely to unionize — even though
workers can’t legally be fired for union-related activity — while
more pliant workers are rewarded with better schedules.

In 2005 a revealing memo written by M. Susan Chambers, then
Walmart’s executive vice president for benefits, who was working
with the consulting firm McKinsey, was obtained by The New York Times.
In it she articulated plans to hire more part-time workers as a way of
cutting costs. At the time, only around 20 percent of Walmart’s
employees were part time. The following year, The Times reported that
Walmart executives had told Wall Street analysts that they had a
specific target: to double the company’s share of part-time workers,
to 40 percent. Walmart denied that it had set such a goal, but in the
years since, it has exceeded that mark
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It’s not just Walmart. Target, TJX Companies, Kohl’s and Starbucks
all describe their median employee, based primarily on salary and
role, as a part-time worker. Many jobs that were once decent — they
didn’t make workers rich, but they were adequate — have quietly
morphed into something unsustainable.

One of the most surprising aspects of this movement toward part-time
work is how few white-collar people, including economists and policy
analysts, have seemed to notice or appreciate it. So entrenched is the
assumption that full-time work is on offer for most people who want it
that even some Bureau of Labor Statistics data calculate annual
earnings in various sectors by taking the hourly wage reported by
participating employers and multiplying it by 2,080, the number of
hours you’d work if you worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.
Never mind that in the real world few workers in certain sectors are
given the option of working full time.

The shift to part-time workers means that focusing exclusively on
hourly pay can be misleading. Walmart, for example, paid frontline
hourly employees an average of $17.50 as of last month and recently
announced plans to raise that to more than $18 an hour. Given that
just a few years ago, progressives were animated by the Fight for $15
movement, these numbers can seem encouraging. The Bloomberg columnist
Conor Sen wrote on social media last year that “Walmart’s probably
a better employer at this point than most child care providers and a
lot of the jobs in higher ed.”

The problem is that most Walmart employees don’t make $36,400, the
annualized equivalent of $17.50 an hour at 40 hours a week. Last year,
the median Walmart worker made 25 percent less than that, $27,326 —
equivalent to an average of 30 hours a week. And that’s the median;
many Walmart workers worked less than that.

Likewise, at Target, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median
employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but
$25,993. The median employee of TJX (owner of such stores as TJ Maxx,
Marshalls and HomeGoods) makes $13,884 a year; the median Kohl’s
employee makes $12,819.

Those numbers, though low, are nevertheless higher than median pay at
Starbucks, a company known for its generous benefits. To be eligible
for those benefits, however, an employee must work at least 20 hours a
week. At $15 an hour — the rate Starbucks said it was raising
barista pay to in 2022 — 20 hours a week would amount to $15,600 a
year. But in 2022 the median Starbucks worker made $12,254 a year,
which is lower than the federal poverty level for a single person.

And this is after_ _the post-Covid labor shortage, when pay for
low-wage workers rose faster than it did for people in higher income
brackets.

Since my stint at the big-box store, where I ended up working for six
months, I’ve come to think that every time we talk about hourly
wages without talking about hours, we’re giving employers a pass for
the subtler and more insidious way they’re mistreating their
employees.

From the perspective of employers, flexible scheduling remains
extremely efficient. But that efficiency means reneging on the bargain
on which modern capitalism long rested. Since the passage of the Fair
Labor Standards Act during the New Deal era, employers have had to pay
most of their workers for 40 hours of work even when business was
slow. That was just the cost of doing business, a risk capitalists
bore in exchange for the upside potential of profit. Now, however,
employers foist that risk onto their lowest-paid workers: Part-time
employees, not shareholders, have to pay the price when sale volumes
fluctuate.

To the extent that the shift to part-time work has been noticed by the
larger world, it has often undermined rather than increased sympathy
for workers. For decades, middle- and upper-class Americans have been
encouraged to believe that American workers are hopelessly unskilled
or lazy. (Remember when Elon Musk praised Chinese workers and said
American workers try to “avoid going to work at all”?) The rise in
part-time work seems on its face to support this belief, as
white-collar workers, unfamiliar with the realities of the low-wage
work environment, assume that workers are part time by choice.

It’s a bit rich. Policies undertaken to increase corporate profits
at the expense of workers’ well-being are then held up as evidence
of the workers’ poor character. There is poor character at play
here. It’s just not that of workers.

_Adelle Waldman (@adellewaldman [[link removed]])
is the author of two novels, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.”
and the forthcoming “Help Wanted.”_

 

* exploiting workers
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* part-time jobs
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* corporate profits
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