The myth of "part-time"

NYT: Part-Time Schedules, Full-Time Headaches

This NYT article, collecting readers' experiences of part-time work, is a perfect example of the corporate monopolization of employees' lives that I wrote about in my last post.

Courtney Moore, a cashier at a Walmart in Cincinnati, said in an interview that she had been assigned about 40 hours a week until she told store management in June that she would begin taking college classes most mornings and some afternoons. She said she asked her manager to put her on the late shift, but to her dismay, the store reduced her to 15 hours a week.

“They said they need someone they could call whenever they need help — and they said I’m not that person,” Ms. Moore said. She said she would prefer being a dedicated full-time employee at Walmart but had to take a second job at McDonald’s instead.

In my retail job, I remember being told by my employer that I had to be available on weekends, period. I couldn't ask for Saturday mornings off (for a martial arts class I was taking), even if I was available Saturday afternoon and evening, Sunday, and every other day of the week. Even though in any given week the odds were that I wouldn't be scheduled to work that shift. They might've said something like, it's only fair for everyone to have weekend shifts off sometimes, but I don't doubt there were other workers who would have gladly committed to working Saturday mornings if they could just be guaranteed some other time slot to themselves. Or simply guaranteed more hours per week, for that matter.

A middle-aged New Yorker who lost his teaching job of two decades because of a budget squeeze in his school district said he had applied for retail jobs and was shocked by what he found.

“You had to be available every minute of every day, knowing you would be scheduled for no more than 29 hours per week and knowing there would be no normalcy to your schedule,” he wrote. “I told the person I would like to be scheduled for the same days every week so I could try to get another job to try to make ends meet. She immediately said, ‘Well, that will end our conversation right here. You have to be available every day for us.’

Get an education! Get a second job if you need to! Here are workers trying to do just that, and employers actively blocking those efforts. And if you try to argue that Walmart--a company that generated net income of 17 billion dollars in 2013, owned by a small group of people with a combined worth of $152 billion--can't afford to pay Courtney Moore for 40 hours a week, with benefits, I will laugh in your face.

It's awfully hard to pull yourself out of poverty when your employer confiscates your bootstraps.

See also: Debra Harrell.

Corporations are people. People that own other people.

1. Consider this New York Times article on the extremely creepy practice of companies taking out life insurance policies on employees:

There is no real risk to the company when non-executive employees or former employees die, so there is no traditional or perhaps even legitimate reason to buy life insurance on them. This suggests that company-owned life insurance (COLI, in industry jargon) is mainly a tool to allow companies to speculate in financial markets.

[...]

What do the employees get? Banks and companies say the earnings from the policies are used to cover long term health care, pension obligations and deferred compensation. But in many cases they can use the tax free-gains however they want.

2. Consider the Hobby Lobby decision.

One thing that people always seem to forget when contraception comes into the picture is that health insurance is part of your compensation from your employer. It's not a gift, freebie, or bonus that your employer grants you out of the goodness of their heart. It's something you earn by working, same as your paycheck. The Supreme Court saying that Hobby Lobby or any other employer can choose not to provide certain benefits, for whatever reason, is tantamount to saying that your employer can dictate how you spend your paycheck. Just one of the problems with tying health insurance to employment in the first place.

We refuse to adequately fund a social safety net in this country. Meanwhile, pro-business lawmakers are hard at work bolstering corporate rights at the expense of workers' rights. The result? Workers who are increasingly dependent on employers, and employers with more and more control over workers' lives. It's not a big leap from control to ownership.

3. Personal anecdote time: I worked for a big-box retailer for several months when I was 18 years old. At the time, I was between high school and college, living with my parents at home.

As an aside, I applied for the job twice: the first time, before my 18th birthday, I never received a response. I applied again after I turned 18, and got an interview. When I told the interviewer I had applied before, she said, "Oh, I'm glad you came back!" and told me that they basically never hired anyone under 18, since the rules for how much and when minors could be made to work were more restrictive. Not that this was stated anywhere in the information for applicants, of course. So, yeah, one more data point against the idea that most people working minimum-wage jobs are high schoolers working on the side who don't really "need" a living wage. Companies won't hire high schoolers precisely because employees with priorities other than work are inconvenient for them. Not so long as they can find plenty of adults who need those same hourly wages, which in the current economy, they definitely can.

Anyway. It wasn't a bad job, but one thing I always disliked was the unspoken idea that to be a good employee meant being loyal, enthusiastic, flexible, going above and beyond. Never mind that many/most of the employees were working part-time for minimum wage and no benefits. Doing the work you were paid for wasn't enough; you were supposed to act as if the opportunity to do that work was the greatest privilege imaginable.

At the time, I couldn't have articulated it as such; maybe I did have a "bad attitude", I thought. But in retrospect, I see this kind of corporate propaganda as truly insidious. There is something insulting and coercive about it when your employer pays you less than a living wage and wants your utter loyalty in return. It's not empowering to talk about employees as "team members" when "teamwork" is only used as a cudgel to enforce compliance. It's one more way of obscuring the logical link between labor and compensation, and the fact that companies depend on workers for their existence, not the other way around.

(See also: In the Name of Love, by Miya Tokumitsu, which got my gears spinning on some of this.)

To repeat: Companies depend on workers. Employers owe their employees. As a culture, we need to remember that, and as a country, we need laws that reflect that.