An addendum to McD’s budget advice
An NPR article and a Marketplace piece, which feature Milwaukee fast-food workers, highlight a hidden issue among low-wage jobs — many have such random work schedules, they can’t even get a second job to supplement their income.
A new NELP report highlights “Taking the Low Road: How the Federal Government Promotes Poverty-Wage Jobs Through its Contracting Practices,” finds that three in four of low-wage federally contracted workers make less than $10 an hour, nearly 60 percent struggle to pay monthly bills and nearly 40 percent depend on public assistance to get by.
“…finds that three in four of low-wage federally contracted workers make less than $10 an hour, nearly 60 percent struggle to pay monthly bills and nearly 40 percent depend on public assistance to get by.”
If it isn’t clear enough to those reading the fine print, note that the 40% on public assistance represent an indirect government subsidy to the businesses that employ those people. The workers will be denegraded by the Mitts as being “takers” because their employers won a contract that depends on paying sub-standard wages that result in government welfare payments to their employees. The employers will only be seen as shrewed business people lowering the cost of government services
even though they’ve increased the cost of government wage assistance programs.
It’s not just fast food workers who don’t get a fixed schedule. Retail is the other one. Save the company from having to pay a shift differential. It also messes up peoples physiology and thus their personalities.
No, fast food is not the only industry that screws over its own work force. Up scale is apparently little different in some quarters. From today’s NY Times:
“At an Upscale Beverly Hills Restaurant, Claims of Underpaying Workers” here:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/us/at-an-upscale-beverly-hills-restaurant-claims-of-underpaying-workers.html?ref=dining&_r=0
Plus, the effective cost to the employees in wasted time is a criminal assault on American citizens. As excessive rent tends to steal money from food budgets, excessive fragmentation of jobs steals hours from our living or sleeping time.
A full time job requires maybe 90 minutes a day to get there, get home, and do the other things attached to employment (clothing shopping, training classes, buying tools, or whatever. So the 8 hour day has a rind of roughly 10-14% of unpaid time.
But 2-3 part time jobs can easily eat up double that time, especially when you include the time spent job hunting, a cost that can be treated as negligible for a full time salaried professional position. The “rind” can be 25-40% of paid time, plus the pay scale is always worse.
If time necessary to retain a job, rather than hours paid for, are taken into account, part time workers can receive $3 an hour for the privilege of doing nothing with their lives except dancing to Walmart’s piccolo.
I call this system “free-range slavery.”
noni and jack
in case it’s not clear from other remarks i have made, i agree with you entirely.
what’s not clear is whether we can do anything about it.
Coberly recently suggested how I might address the – ahem – local populace who insist on voting against their own self-interest. And since my mother always told me I tend toward preachiness, I’m trying to take a more useful tack.
This afternoon in the grocery store, a cashier was trying to get people to use the new self-check-out counters. An older woman ahead of me declined, then I did, as well. When the cashier tried to convince me, I told her I didn’t want to put her out of a job. As we walked on by, the older woman admitted that she’d never thought of that aspect of it. I told her that every time they sell us on some “self-serve” BS, they are cutting their employment costs. She agreed that the cashier probably had no clue she was promoting her own demise.
So my new tactic is to drop little bits into conversations in the check out line, rather than try to preach to the deluded. It’s a slow process that I won’t live to see rewarded, but it’s all I’ve got.
Sandi
just to be difficult, i have been thinking that they may not be voting against their self interest. from their point of view they like what they have better than the prospect of a higher paying job in a new factory, government “welfare,” and all of the “liberal” life-style changes on offer.
as for the self check out, i don’t use it because it annoys me. and it wastes my time. the human checker is faster and she doesn’t ask me stupid questions like the machine does. if they ever perfected the machine, i might use it because i really, really hate the idea of having to stand around doing unnecessary “work” so i can be paid for “working.” a more human use of human beings would be to adopt the labor saving technology (when it works) and find better things for people to do with their time. unfortunately i don’t expect bosses or politicians (of any stripe) to show that much imagination in my lifetime.
sandi
but oh yes hooray. don’t you feel better talking to that lady like she was a real human being and you were on her side (as you are) rather than complaining about “backward” folk who have such and such horrible traits and vote against their own interest?
i bet you are probably better at it than i am.